Hidden Van Gogh

Learning Spanish

Summer Flowers

Blue Monday

It's a blue Monday for me. L. is off again, she's been picking fruit and making money for herself. It's a sweet deal, but after an initial period of squandering with her baby-sitting money: movies, unlimited pizza outings with friends, tops in the two colours she liked rather than choosing one, she's totally miserly with her fruit-picking money, hoards every penny. I know she wants a new bike, of full adult proportions, but the fashion is to sturdy mountain bikes and she wouldn't be able to lift such a monster. I'm bikeless myself these days, for much the same reasons. We'll see.

I really feel like going shopping but the problem is I really feel like shopping in Paris. I click on Le Monde, and check out the traffic map. It is afternoon in Europe and the flood of feelings of how it was like to live there overwhelms me. It is a totally false idea that I could go to a boutique here and buy a French luxury good that would make me feel good: I want to walk in Paris and feel bad, poor, daring, in love, whatever. Paris is a garden of emotion, with a surprise at every turn. I am smarter there, musical, romantic. And the city empties out in the summer, with the serious Parisians gone seaside on vacation; it feels like an empty theater set, but for historical events.

Maybe it is because it is a grey day that I yearn to be in Paris so much. Because living there I used to miss North America. But not here, oh no. On sunny days I feel like being in California, riding the Pacific Coast highway, with glistening luxury cars zooming by. I don't even mind that they were faster: the fast life is all around me and I can totally enjoy the high without wasting my time on it. Because smart as I am from having lived in Paris...

So I'll change the beds and go shopping at the same old same old stores. I should do more on L.'s school supply list, which is taking on gargantuan proportions. They specify a 1 1/2 inch binder for a given course, and by the end of the year she's dragging home an overstuffed maimed graffiti victim. The school teaches a methodology course but it is concerned with research findings on memory rather than how to rotate between binders and files, a tricky piece of work for someone who, at school, doesn't have a home desk but a locker stuffed with books and clothes, and gym clothes, and lunch, and a mirror and comb and toothbrush, stuck close to the wall, with a lot of other girls and guys near by. The Martha Stewart magazine crowd isn't much help on such issues either: they are either showing me how to make brownies or telling me to eat carrots. Maybe I'm just jaded.

So the sun is starting to show. I'll walk and maybe take a few pictures. I really feel like snapping all the wonderful summer flowers on the lawns of the various houses near the shopping center but I'm afraid to get into trouble. Summer flowers are dark-coloured, from all that chlorophyll but the grass often seems dried out although it rains all the time. Maybe it is the effect of shorter days - although not that much at this time of year- or a soil nutrient problem.

Who am I kidding. I'll go clothes shopping and get something romantic for L. and a Wal-Mart California t-shirt for myself. Rock on!

Paris, 1966.

Ducks on the Richelieu

for Randy Pausch, Internet family.

Lost

When it rains...

www.spiegel.de/video/video-33386.html

GREAT Web-site

This is an award-winning site on a little-researched subject. It is available in many languages. One has to realize that the Inuit who developed kayaking didn't necessarily know how to swim: it was a fishing vessel. Today, kayaking is practiced as a sport.

http://www.le-kayak.net/?go

Rummm!

Smithsonian

Hip Hop Classic

Bastille Day

Oil Well

Carla Bruni

Teen Camping

The Accelerator

Older

Spin

THE DIRT ON SPIN

Le Monde just announced that the European Community Large Hadron Collider, on the frontier between France and Switzerland, will come into service this summer although plans for an even bigger machine, at a cost of 5 billion euros, are underway for 2025. And, as physicists like to point out, the research to be carried out has no immediate practical application but is pure research: they are in effect looking for the mysterious Higgs boson, with a spin of 0.

Spin is a property of elementary particles, in effect their magnetic orientation if they have one. An electron has a spin of 1/2 ( h/2pi, h being Planck's constant describing the minute scale). An ordinary proton has a spin of 1. All particles with which we describe matter are fermions and possess spin although not all molecules have it because spin of opposite direction cancels out. Bosons are particles that transmit effect between particles, for example gluons.

In ordinary physics, one cannot keep track of individual particles so that descriptions are statistical.

In chemistry, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance identifies molecules by the magnetic resonance(i.e. amplification) produced when the test matter is put into a known magnetic field.

http://www.cis.rit.edu/htbooks/nmr/preface.htm

The above e-book is a very accessible treatment of spin, although one needs to be quick with math concepts. As for Higgs boson, it would seem to carry the secret to how forces are transmitted between particles. More to come...

Wax Figure

www.spiegel.de/video/video-32522.html

Happy Holiday