St. George's Day

Ok, so it was yesterday (right?), who cares. It's a miracle I'm updating this dusty old blog even if it is a day late. Sadly, a combination of online RPG obsessions and a creative writing class that eats up all the prose floating around in my head has...um...slightly decreased the frequency of my posting. But that's not what St. George' day is about; it's about some guy who road around slaying dragons and founding England or some such. But that's what this post is about; it's about how I'm a total geek.

I'm that guy who actually gets excited by discussions about light cones (true story, it made my day) and reads "Science News" with breakfast. So when my physics teacher explained the phenomenon of gravity with cheerios, I got excited. He said "it's like when you've almost finished a bowl of cheerios, and the last few always end up together in the middle". Initialy, I thought he meant that the cheerio's gravity pulled them together through low friction milk and, while that was very cool, I was skeptical. So I went to my father (who's also a physics teacher: nerd is apparently genetic) who assured me it was ridiculous. I let it go, figuring that my teacher isn't terribly bright and often hungry. But as it turns out, a cheerio in milk causes a slight depression in the surface of the liquid, which pulls other floating cheerios towards it, just like Einsteinian gravity curves 4th-dimensional space-time so that objects moving in a straight line in the 4th dimension appear to be curved in 3 dimentions (or something like that). How cool is that? Big words and advanced physics contained in a bowl of cereal (kinda like how I ate captain crunch while reading about phosphonium borate this morning, there's a poem in there somewhere).

(bftsob)