Yesterday's Count

Sun, warmth, my bike, the smell of the earth, equal day and night - 7:15 am to 7:15 pm, and little gophers.  Deep breath and relax.

Quantum chess covers

New book time again.  Well, okay, it happens every week, but I have been away for some months in another city and living another life, so I am new back to the pleasures of this one.  New books.  And this time quantum mechanics.  Mrs. Google tells me that quantum mechanics is:  the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, incorporating the concepts of quantization of energy, wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the correspondence principle.  Or as I like to say, the interaction of tiny things.  So, as I process books and I come across two in my pile that both have chess pieces on their covers and the word 'quantum' in the title.  I look again. Because I love these tiny quinky dinks.  

I look closer and I find that in book number two, the bigger book, with red chess pieces, has four authors, all of whom have a first name starting with G: Giampiero, Giuseppe, Gennaro, and George.  But I am unimpressed.  I write stories for kids.  I know there is supposed to be three things. But this is only two matching things, chess pieces, quantum, and... what?  The four G's is suspicious though.  There must be more.  Then it hits me, one is published by MIT in Cambridge Mass and the other is published by Cambridge University Press.  Quinky dink mechanics: the interconnectedness of tiny things.

Quantum Algorithms via Linear Algebra

Advanced Concepts in Quantum Mechanics

Rejoice the Return of the Sun

It is First Longer Day.  

For me, the most important day of the year.  

Yesterday, winter began, the shortest day of the year.  

From here on out the days get longer.

Rejoice.

Heir to Carroll

So, not being wildly shy of that age, which I am told, in China is considered when a woman comes into her power - that lovely time when the movement of the moon is nothing but a beauty to be observed and not a calendar to be counted - and I am faced with the phrase perimenopausal.  I take pleasure in the sound of words and my pleasure in the sound of that is at the level of 'yuck'.  So I decided to make up my own word for the waning of my moon.  Chási̱ is Greek for waning.  So I am in menochási̱. (meno-kah-see)

Today's Count: little red dress

I biked today.  I biked yesterday, the first time this entire year.  That little flavour of normalcy. The sun wanders across a blue deep enough to drown in and turns the stones of the campus buildings honey gold and yellow.  After a cold snap we are enjoying fall.  A real fall, all warm and yellow and blue and breezy like a caress.  And red dresses.  I saw the first one as I rounded out from behind the construction site that has been made of the forest near Arts.  White and red, like a dress from the Wizard of Oz, colour come out of the black and white sequences.  Light on the wind, it swayed.  It was hanging from the tall elms of the avenue of elms that lead to the bowl.  Then I saw another, and another.  The first was the only one with white. All the others were red, bright, deep, black, silk, linen, rayon, cotton, smooth, rough, embroidered, beaded, long, short, wide skirted, slim, open backed, high necked.  All adorning hangers strung with fishing wire from the trees and swaying in the breeze.  What do they mean, asked a young co-worker.  What do you think they mean?  She wasn't sure.  We were at an art gallery last week which displayed and explained its display of paper glued together in blocks.  Left me cold.  But red dresses hanging in the daylight, every variation of women:  red, texture, passion, death, bleeding, restriction, beauty, strength, silent, loud, brilliant, flexible, tethered, but moving.  This has meaning.  And through this meaning walked students and profs, the small colourful people from the daycare, the green velveted university choir.  And me.

New Books

Fall brings in the new books again and this week I have a student perennial:  Microwave-Assisted Sample Preparation for Trace Element Determination (Science QD 139.T7M45 2014):  Pizza.

Today's count

Four tiny pink people, will little pink hats.  One tiny green person, with a little pink hat. On the big green lawn.  One big blue person, with no hat. Oh look they have been joined by a teeny tiny blue person with a green hat, and a very tall white and black person - with no hat.  For shame with our big examples.

Yesterday's count:  Waiting for the bus, four houses for sale - if you have 2 mil to loose you can buy all four, one dignified woman in her little go machine with her shirtless male companion standing on the running board and driving, and her little dog, Cleopatra style in the basket.