Black Holes and Revelations

I’ve been helping out with child care on Thursday mornings at the church I attend.  A women’s bible study is meeting and involved mothers will drop their pre-kindergarten youngsters off for a morning of fun with the similar-aged anklebiters.  I signed up not knowing what exactly it would be like; I’ve worked with children of almost all ages from grade school to college (mostly in the capacity of instructor), but toddlers are somewhat of a new bag for me.  Somewhere along the path of aging I seem to have lost the capacity for “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and put-your-hands-in-your-lap-and-quiet-down rhymes.

At the most recent gathering, I found myself hesitating to perform along with my supervisor as she led the children in a Jesu-centric rhyme involving hugging oneself and waggling fingers:

“Jesus is kind and gentle and good.  I’ll be like Jesus and do as I should.” (more…)

Let’s play a game today.  Before clicking on the “More…” link below, please read the following excerpt and post a comment critiquing the writing style by any or all rubrics you deem appropriate.  Feel free to comment on the paragraph’s style, grammar, word choice, but whatever else you do please also include a thought on the paragraph’s “readability.”

Please prepare to supply a readout of your findings and recommendations to the officer of the Southwest Group at the completion of your study period.  As we discussed, the undertaking of this project implies no currently known incidences of impropriety in the Southwest Group, nor is it designed specifically to find any.  Rather, it is to assure ourselves of sufficient caution, control, and impartiality when dealing with an area laden with such potential vulnerability.  I am confident that we will be better served as a company as a result of this effort.

As soon as you’re done grading and posting, read on. (more…)

For the past two summers, I had an easy job.  That is, easy to talk about.  Every conversation went something like:

“So, what’s your job?”

“Oh, well I’m doing research up at Westmont.  I’m working with the new telescope.”

“Oh really!  How interesting.  What are you looking at?”

“Well, this summer I’m looking at asteroid orbits by performing astrometry on CCD images.  Since the asteroid is much closer to us than the stars, it moves relative to them in successive photos looking at the same coordinates in the sky.  We take three to five images like that each night for about a week, then use those points and essentially “regress” an orbit out of them, since each set of points only corresponds to one orbit.”

“Wow, that’s interesting.  What is the goal?”

“Well once we get an orbit, we can plot it, and see how close we are to the accepted literature.  If we determine that our telescope is accurate enough, we can submit data to the Harvard Minor Planet Center and potentially get published in their circulars.  We can also do some real nice asteroid research.  There are always critical-list objects whose orbits aren’t nicely defined and need to be observed more, or we could look at Near-Earth Objects, which have the potential to cross Earth’s path.”

“Wow, how interesting!  What an intelligent and attractive physicist-to-be you are!” (more…)

I found it extremely humorous that while washing dishes yesterday, the following limerick, on the subject of our dish towel, suddenly jumped into my head. I blame high school poetry.

There once was a towel in the kitchen.
Its blue and white pattern was bitchin’.
It dried all of the plates
From which we then ate;
All without busting the stitchin’.

Finishing up the series started here and continued here, here are the last of the poems that I found from my high school days. (more…)

A few more poems written in my high school creative writing class.  The premise of this series was explained here and today’s installment contains more “imitative poetry” including two somewhat less sarcastic poems I wrote on the subject of some of my friends who were taking the class. (more…)

I’m not usually a super big fan of poetry (there are typically not enough rules for my taste and I get yelled at if I make everything rhyme), but when I was a senior in high school I took a creative writing class.  Much fruit was borne of it, including a short video some friends and I made about two guys liking the same girl and getting their frustration out over a game of Primal Rage, a fifteen minute  musical about a man in search of the world’s perfect chair (SB Theatre: Produce Loveseat.  It’s a cash cow.), and indeed some poetry.  The caveat with the following is that almost every single poetry assignment turned into an opportunity to poke fun at the teacher and her insistence that we be serious about poetry (before you get mad at me for haranguing my teacher, please know that she was no pushover – anything we dished out she gave back).

Most of our poetry assignments were “imitative poetry” things, where we had to read a particular poem and write a poem in a similar style or about a similar subject.  For the next couple of days I will post here, reprinted faithfully to their original formatting, a few of the things I wrote then and still find much funnier than anything I could come up with today. (more…)