Some of my students found out about this blog, and since then the traffic to the site has gone up 5-10 fold. The biggest hits seem to be the pictures on the front page... I guess it's surprising for my students to see their physics teacher hanging out with friends drinking beers or dressed up like a punk rocker for Halloween. Anyway, I've neglected this blog for a while because I've been busy but, maybe even more than that, I haven't felt like writing anything. We've had a pretty exciting Democratic nomination campaign, and while I was and am a Barack Obama supporter, I really didn't have opinions much different than you could have read regularly, and more eloquently spoken, on sites like
Talking Points Memo or
The Plank. I've been going through the Jane Austen canon at the suggestion of one of my students, but I don't know that I have much to say about them. I've read
Jane Eyre, which, since it was written by Charlotte Brontë, does not fit well into the Jane Austen oeuvre, but is very Jane Austen-like. I also read
Sense and Sensibility and
Pride and Prejudice, both bona-fide Jane Austen books, and pretty soon I'm going to start on
Emma. They're all good books, but I don't have much to say about them. What I have been planning on writing about, since I found out my students have been reading this site, is why I got into science and what I think is great about science.... And maybe I'll get to that sooner or later, but my own personal journey into science isn't really a conversion tale so much as a gradual drift dictated more by inertia than passion. Which is for the best, I think. Passions go out as quickly as they are inflamed. But finding something you're good at and sticking to it is not something that's easy to come by, and it's worked out well for me. Anyway, anything I wrote about science could not come close to Carl Sagan's
The Demon-Haunted World, so any students who want to know why I or anyone else would want to go into science, or why the Academy insists on all students knowing all sciences, would do well to read that book. Now that I've spent 10 or more sentences talking about what I'm not going to write about, it's probably about time to talk about what I am going to write about, or even better, maybe I should write about what I am going to write about. Well, what I'm going to write about is what I'm doing this weekend. A few weeks ago, one of my students was telling me how she went and played basketball. Actually, it was the same student who recommended Jane Austen. And it got me to thinking about when I was growing up, and I stunk at basketball. Actually, I didn't stink at basketball so much as I never really played, so whenever I did try to play, I had no idea what I was doing. But one summer I decided I would get good at basketball, so every day I would go to 2nd Street Park and shoot layups and shoot jump shots and shoot foul shots. I'd run back and forth up and down the court and dodge pretend defenders, twisting at the last moment and ending up on the wrong side of the hoop and making a backwards layup. I'd pick a time to practice when nobody else was there, so that I could get good before playing with other people. Finally, after doing that for a while, I started playing pickup games with my friend Bob BeHanna and some other guys. I wasn't the best player, by far, that was Bob, but I was good enough to where I had to be captain of the team that Bob wasn't on or the game would be a blowout because having me and Bob on the same team was too uneven. On my best days, I was the best player on the court, but because I never played real basketball but learned all on my own, my fundamentals were terrible and I did things so awkwardly that I could be really bad as easily as I could be really good. Anyway, I quit playing basketball when I went to college, and the last few times I tried to place it was ridiculous. I was embarassing. So, what I'm going to do tomorrow is go out early in the morning and shoot some baskets in a park down the street from my apartment. I don't know if I'll ever get really good again, but I miss shooting baskets and pretending to dodge defenders, and it'd be a nice way to blow off steam, so I want to give it another try. I have tomorrow off because it's Memorial Day, so it's as good a time to start as any.
