Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

I can remember being 15, 16 years old, and my mother being distinctly unimpressed with my taste in music - her reaction to my first Frank Zappa records ("We're Only In It for the Money", "Hot Rats", "Weasels Ripped My Flesh", etc.) standing out in memory.

I have MLK Day off, so I'm here at home this morning at my leisure, having a cuppa coffee and listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (a recent library-sale find, the London Sinfonietta on London)...

...and my 15-year-old wakes up and comes down stairs.

And as the circle turns, now it's my daughter's turn to be distinctly unimpressed with my choice of music.

I hate that car, Part XXIII

The last tail light bulb I changed was on the Civic, a year or so ago.

I stopped at the store on my way to work, bought a replacement - I'm pretty sure it was 59¢ - reached into the hatch, and changed it in the parking lot, and was on my way. Five minutes, 59¢.

But the MPV uses "European-style" (#7443) bulbs: $2.99, sold only in 2-packs,
and not in a drug store: so, not 59¢, no, a dead tail light now costs me $5.98 and a trip to an auto-supply store. (As I told the guy at the counter: "I hate cars." He agreed.)

And then I had to find a Phillips-head and figure out how to take off the lens. (Today's MPV tip: it's held by two screws, and then by two pins, so the lens pulls off perpendicular to the side, it doesn't pull off to the back.) And now I have to store the second bulb against the day the right-side brake light fails. (I hung the blister-pack on a hook in the shed with the 'car' stuff, maybe I'll actually be able to find in next year.)

Ok, it's literally ten times as expensive, no surprise there.
But it's not just more expensive, it also that they've taken a "nothing" job (take five minutes to jump out and fix it on the way to work) into an actual "get out the toolbox and spend fifteen minutes on it" job.

On the other hand, the Youngest Member got to work the pedal for me, so it was a Teaching Moment, too.

"We are stardust..."

This is one of my all-time favorite Fun Facts:


Harlow Shapely's quote has entered the larger culture - that "We are stardust, we are golden" as Joni Mitchell / CSN paraphrased it -- that every single heavy atom in us had to have been cooked up in the heart of an earlier generation of star.

Well, I've run across a factoid that's even neater. From Energies by Vaclav Smil, MIT Press 1999:

"High intensities of heterotrophic metabolism mean that living organisms surpass the Sun in power output per unit of mass.

Given the star's enormous mass (1.99 x 10 to the 33 g), its immense luminosity (3.9 x 10 to the 26 W) prorates to just about 200 nW/g of the stellar matter. In contrast, the daily metabolism of children (averaging about 3 mW/g of body weight) proceeds at a rate about 15,000 times higher, and respiring bacteria reach up to 100W/g, or 500 million times the Sun's rate. Stars astonish with their total energy fluxes, but ATP-driven energy conversions in heterotrophic organisms have unrivaled intensities of energy conversions per unit mass." (p.39)

In other words, not only are we made of stardust, but we burn brighter, too. I find that fact to be inexpressibly poignant.

"Ahhh! My hand!"

Earlier today (well, yesterday, now), the eldest kid and I made a nerd road trip up to the new digital-tv transmitter shack up in the hills.

All afternoon, I had been brooding about standing at the foot of the broadcast tower while it was radiating a few megawatts of radio energy into space.

So, come sunset, I went down to the basement and dug out a couple of 48" fluorescent bulbs, and threw them and the family into the car. We drove over to the nearest high-voltage power line, and we watched the fireflies while we waited for full dark, and then we played light sabers in the gloaming.



ADDENDUM: Here's a guy who did an artistic installation of hundreds of fluorescent tubes under his local power line:

http://www.boxyit.com/r/index.htm

Better pictures here:

http://stopgeek.com/richard-boxs-light-field.html


.



.