Category: Geeky Pursuits

A Seder Filled With Pandemic, Lost Teeth, And No Internet

Games, Geeky Pursuits, Holidays, Internet, Judaism, Parenting

Toothless_JSLFriday night was the first night of Passover.  As such, we had the first Seder.  It was nice and the boys enjoyed it.  They even stayed up until the very end – going to sleep at 12:30am!  (Their bed time is usually 8:30pm so this was quite the late night for them.)  The next day/night, though.  THAT’s when things got interesting.

As the second Seder neared, we decided to give the boys a snack.  After all, there’s a lot of stuff to get through in a Seder before we eat.  So, among other snacks, I cut up some apples for us to share.  Now, JSL had two very loose teeth for some time.  They were actually pointing outward a bit which was quite creepy to look at.  The first one came out after JSL bit into a slice of pizza at an Autism fair.  (I ran with him to the bathroom to extradite the tooth.)  As he bit into an apple slice, the second tooth began to bleed and got very wiggly.  As much as I shook it, though, it wouldn’t come out.  The bleeding stopped, though, so we made our way to the Seder.

Once we arrived, the boys and I played a few games with one of B’s relatives.  It turns out that he’s quite the gamer and brought along Pandemic.  He explained the game as he set up for the four of us. We didn’t get to play the whole game (as the Seder started), but what we did play was very different from other games I’ve played.   In other games, you are out for yourself (and, perhaps, a teammate) trying to beat the other players.  In Pandemic, all of the players are working together.  You don’t sabotage the people playing with you, but try to figure out ways to help them.  After all, you are all playing as medical professionals fighting a series of illnesses.  If you all lose, the illnesses spread out of control.  If you all win, the illnesses are eradicated.  I could definitely see playing this with B and the boys to help NHL understand how to work with people to achieve a goal.  I could also see this being used in an office environment as a team building exercise.  I’ve been eyeing the game ever since that night and it’s only a matter of time before I buy it.

The pre-meal portion of the Seder passed without anything unusual happening.  Which is saying something considering that B’s family’s Seder routinely involves people being whipped with scallions, her uncle talking like one of her aunts, and another relative of hers read her passage with liberal use of the Hebrew word shadayim (breasts).  (It’s quite a fun Seder.)  As we began eating the meal, JSL eagerly started eating the matzo ball in his soup… and then screamed out.  His tooth was bleeding again.  I was prepared and took him away from the table where this time the tooth came out.  I wrapped it up, helped him with his bleeding mouth, and comforted him (it was late already and a bit traumatic).

After dessert, the Seder started back up, but we had to leave.  It was already past midnight.  We got home and despite my suggestions, JSL insisted on writing a note to the Tooth Fairy that night.

We also discovered something else:  We had no Internet.  None at all.  It had been getting a bit flaky over the past month.  Honestly, we wondered whether this was intentional due to our cutting cable, but the person on the phone insisted (after trying many things) that it looked like a bad Ethernet port in our cable modem.  Since we own our own modem and don’t rent it from the cable company, we had to buy a new one.  (We figured out that – given how much this one cost us and how long it lasted – we paid about $2.80 a month for it.  So it was a very good deal.)   On Sunday, we decided to shop for modems.

Except there was one problem.

It was Easter Sunday.

Stores are closed on Easter Sunday.

In the end, we found a store that was open, had the cable modem we needed, and at a decent price as well.  We brought it home, got it set up, and… still nothing.  Another call to our cable company and some tests later and we still had no Internet.  Just when I thought we’d need to wait a few days until they could send a technician over, the guy on the phone said he’d try sending a refresh signal to our modem.  Sure enough, that did it.  Which leads me to wonder whether that was the problem all along and whether our old modem is still good.  (We might give it to B’s parents to try since they need to stop renting a modem.)  Either way, we have Internet again and it seems pretty reliable so far.

And that was our eventful Seder.  Instead of "Next Year In Jerusalem", perhaps I should close my Seders with "Next Year… a bit more boring please."

Was your holiday weekend eventful?

Mourning Leonard Nimoy

Geeky Pursuits, Life

Leonard_Nimoy_(5774458356)Unless you just beamed back to Earth you know that, last week, Leonard Nimoy passed away at the age of 83.  Nimoy played many roles during his life, but he will be best remembered as Mr. Spock – the half-human/half-Vulcan science officer and first officer serving under Captain Kirk on the USS Enterprise.  As Spock, Leonard played a character who was both apart from humanity and part of it.  Someone who observed human traits from afar and dealt them himself.

I was first introduced to Star Trek in middle school by a friend of mine.  (The same friend who would later help me overcome some severe bullying by talking to the bullies and getting them to stop.)  While I enjoyed both the original series and The Next Generation sequel series, I identified the most with two characters.  In Next Generation, it was Data – the android who couldn’t feel emotions himself but tried his best to understand them.  In the original series, though, I most identified with Spock.  As Scott Kurtz put it: "I was an introverted math obsessed child who felt completely out of place among my friends.  Mister Spock is my spirit animal."  He was having a character in his comic strip describe herself, but he might as well have been describing me.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about Asperger’s Syndrome.  I didn’t know why I was the way I was.  All I knew about Autism was gleaned from the movie Rain Man which meant I thought it meant you talked kind of funny and could count popsicle sticks when they were dropped on the floor.  Still, I knew there was something different about me.  I didn’t "get" social situations like other people seemed to.  I felt both apart from society and drawn to it.  I couldn’t stand the spotlight yet craved to be in it.  It was all too easy to imagine myself as Mister Spock observing the interactions of humans as they went about their daily business, trying to find a logical reason for it all.  Somehow, not being part of it all seemed slightly less painful when I was purposefully acting as an observer.

Yes, Kirk was the man in charge.  Scotty could rig anything to work in half the time he claimed it would take.  Bones was cantankerous but an excellent doctor.  However, it was Mister Spock whom I felt the closest to.  None of that would have been possible had it not been for Leonard Nimoy’s wonderful acting.  He brought lift to a beloved character and embraced it even after Star Trek left the air.

The original Star Trek was always supposed to be an optimistic view of the future.  A beacon of hope.  Leonard Nimoy’s acting certainly helped to give me hope during a dark time.

Farewell, Mr. Nimoy.  You lived long and prospered.  May your memory endure for generations to come via the characters you brought to life.

NOTE: The photo of Leonard Nimoy above is by Gage Skidmore and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

So Much Geeking Out So Little Time

Geeky Pursuits, Parenting

Anonymous-sandglassThere are so many geeky activities I want to engage in with my kids.  There are a half dozen TV shows ranging from Doctor Who to The Flash to Star Wars Rebels that I’d love to watch with them.  There are still so many perler bead projects to start or complete.  JSL has recently expressed interest in story writing so I’d love to have a "story writing time" with him where we sit down, write a story for a period of time, and then read each other our stories.  I want to play some more Munchkin and maybe even Settlers of Catan with NHL.  NHL and I also need to finish reading the last Harry Potter book so we can watch the movie together.  (JSL is reading book 2 with B.)  Then, there are the Minecraft worlds we can create and explore.

There’s only one problem:  Time.

There never seems to be enough time to do all the things I want to do with them.  Between my work, their school, and must-do chores/errands, our weeks seem to fly by with too few hours spent geeking out.  Even when we have an hour or two of downtime, the boys seem more interested in playing on their own or watching TV shows they like instead of engaging in activities with me.

I almost feel like we should schedule weekly Geek Nights where we all sit together and do one geeky activity together as a family.  More and more I want to seize the day and enjoy every moment with them.  It won’t be long before they are grown up and spending time geeking out with dad won’t be on the agenda at all.

How do you find time to geek out with your kids?

NOTE: The "Sandglass" image above is by Anonymous and is available via OpenClipArt.org.

Extreme Geekery: Give Me A Lever Long Enough…

Extreme Geekery, Geeky Pursuits, Math

LeverArchimedes once said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."  He was waxing poetic about the power of the lever.  The lever is one of several simple machines along with the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the wedge, and the screw.  These machines can help to perform feats that a man acting alone using only his own strength couldn’t hope to achieve.  They can also be combined to increase the machines’ abilities.  Of course, I don’t think Archimedes really meant that one could set up a lever and move the entire Earth.

But could you do this?  How long would the lever need to be?

Obviously, there are some stumbling blocks to our plan.  First of all, there’s no ground in space to position the lever’s fulcrum.  Even if we made a giant lever and somehow put it against the Earth , pushing down on one side would cause the entire contraption to drift through space.  There’s also the problems that gravity would cause – the gravity on the lever close to the Earth would be more than the gravity further away.  What’s more, unlike a lever on Earth, we’ll be battling against the gravity of the Earth orbiting the Sun, not an object resting on the Earth.

Houston-Problem

All of this could, at least, seriously mess up the calculations for how long our lever would need to be or, at worst, make the whole affair pointless.  Since there’s no such thing as "pointless" when it comes to Extreme Geekery, .  Let’s simplify things, by making two assumptions.  First will be some "ground" and Earthlike gravity.  Our fulcrum will rest on the "ground" and will push up against the Earth attempting to lift it as if it were just an extremely large rock.  The second assumption is that there isn’t any other source of gravity to mess things up.  We’re ignoring the Sun, other planets, the Moon.  Everything.

So, how long would a lever need to be to move the world?  The formula for this is quite simple:

F1 * D1 = F2 * D2

In other words, the force applied down (F1) times the length (distance) of the "pushed down" portion of the lever (D1) is equal to the force upward on the other side of the lever (F2) times the length of that side of the lever (D2).  We’ll position the lever and fulcrum so that the "Earth side" is under half of the planet.  Initially, you might think that this means that the Earth side of the lever is the radius of the Earth.  Don’t worry.  I did too.  I figured out all of my calculations before realizing the truth.  (The good news is that I had to do more math.  This is always good news to a math geek.)

Yay-Math

The radius of the Earth at the equator is 6,378 km.  The radius from center to pole is 6,360 km.  The rest depends on how inclined the lever is, but let’s say it’s raised so that the it is up 25% of the center-to-pole radius.  We need to figure out what side C is.  Easy enough.  Using the formula A2 + B2 = C2 gives us a result of about 6,573 km.

The weight of the Earth is easily Googled: 5.972 x 1024 kg.  This only leaves us the force pushing down on the other side.  Given that Archimedes said he could do it, I’m going to say that only one person should attempt it.  No cheating and gathering an army or pushing on it with rocket thrusters.  We’ll do this see-saw style and sit the person on the other end of the lever.  We’ll have the person be 100kg – perhaps slightly overweight but not unrealistically so.

Now how long is the "pushed down" side of the lever?  Well, we have:

D1 * 100 kg * 9.8 m/s2 = 5.972 * 1024 * 9.8 m/s2 * 6,573 km

(Side note: In case you’re wondering where those 9.8s came from, force equals mass times acceleration.  F = ma.  This means that the forces we need for each side of our lever equation are really the weight of our objects times the acceleration – our faked Earth gravity down.  Also, yes I know they cancel each other out, but I’m including them in there for completeness.)

Simplified, this gives us a lever distance of 3.93 * 1026 km.  That seems pretty long, but how long is it really?

Light is the fastest substance known.  The speed it travels at can’t be matched by anything we know of.  That’s why we measure distances in light years – or the distance that light travels in a year.  One light year is 9.46 * 1012 km.  This means our side of the lever would need to be about 4.15 * 1013 (or 41.5 trillion) light years long.  How long is this?  Well, it’s certainly longer than the Milky Way.  That’s 100,000 light years across.  It’s even bigger than the diameter of our local supercluster of galaxies.  That’s 110 million light years.  In fact, our observable Universe is only 45.7 billion light years so our lever would need to be over 908 times the length of the known Universe.

That’s one big lever.

Ok, so one person probably couldn’t do it alone – even by Extreme Geekery standards.  But what about the power of teamwork?  If every human on Earth got together and sat down on the lever, how long would it need to be to move the Earth?

All humans together weigh 632 billion pounds or 286.67 billion kg.  Plugging this into our formula above means that our lever would need to be 1.37 * 1017 km or about 14,474 light years.  This distance is much more reasonable.  Yay teamwork!  Still, maybe we could improve the results.

All of the biomass on Earth (except bacteria – those guys claim to have lost their invitations) hopped onto our galactic see-saw now.

Bacteria

Totaled up, Earth’s biomass weighs 560 billion tonnes or 560 trillion kg.  This translates into a lever of 7 * 1015 km or about 741 light years.  Even better still.

Of course, even a "mere" 741 light years is a long distance for a lever.  As much of a genius that Archimedes was, he might have overestimated himself when it came to levers.  Unless…

Super-Archimedes

NOTE: The Earth image I used is by stevepetmonkey and is available via OpenClipArt.org.

Guardians of the Galaxy Deleted Scenes And The Upcoming Marvel Movies

Comics, Geeky Pursuits, Holidays, JSL, Movies, NHL

This past weekend, we found some deleted scenes from this summer’s hit Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Here is Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, spending some downtime between beating up bad guys trying to solve a Search-A-Word puzzle.  I’m unsure if his mask is helping him find the words.  No cheating!

Star-Lord_Word_Search

This is the scene where Star-Lord falls through a dimensional rift and winds up in the Angry Birds Star Wars universe.  He has to battle Lard Vader before making his way back to his own realm.

Star-Lord_And_Lard_Vader

Ok, so these were scenes from a weekend Halloween activity and not Guardians deleted scenes.  Still the boys had fun and are looking forward to Halloween.

Speaking of looking forward, I just read the “Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 3” plan and neither I nor my boys can wait.  In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the rundown.

  • Avengers: Age of Ultron (5/1/2015) – This one already has a great teaser trailer out. (Update: Right when I posted this, a “Special Look” went live also showing some of the heroes trying to lift Thor’s hammer.)
  • Ant-Man (7/17/2015) – It will be interesting to see what big adventure this little hero will have.
  • Captain America: Civil War (5/6/2016) – In the comics, the Civil War story arc started when Iron Man advocated for a law requiring all superheroes to register with the government (and have their secret identities exposed).  Captain America, meanwhile, was against this and the two (as well as the superheroes on both sides) clashed.  Sure enough, I’ve heard Iron Man/Tony Stark will be in this movie.
  • Doctor Strange (11/4/2016) – According to rumors, Benedict Cumberbatch (aka Sherlock Holmes from the BBC’s Sherlock) is being asked to become the Sorcerer Supreme.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (5/5/2017) – JSL is already asking about trailers for this and was disappointed that he’ll likely have to wait two years for one.
  • Thor: Ragnarok (7/28/2017) – Ragnarok is the Norse concept of the end of days, but in the comics (according to my Wikipedia search) it dealt with a cybernetic clone of Thor being made when the original was thought dead.  Will we see Thor and Evil-Cyborg-Thor duke it out on-screen?  And what will this mean for the state we left Asgard in at the end of Thor 2?
  • Black Panther (11/3/2017) – Another favorite superhero of ours.  He will be played by Chadwick Boseman (whose previous works I haven’t seen).  Interestingly enough, Chadwick’s IMDB page says he will also appear in the Captain America: Civil War movie.
  • Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1 (5/4/2018) – Finally, the Infinity Saga comes to a head.  We’ve been seeing the Infinity stones here and there and I’m sure we’ll see more before this movie comes out.  What really struck me is that this is Part 1.  They are going to do this right and take their time with the story.  My best is that Part 1 will conclude with Thanos getting the final Infinity Stone and the heroes looking like they’re beaten against his tremendous might.
  • Captain Marvel (7/6/2018) – There are many incarnations of Captain Marvel.  I’m hoping they opt for the Carol Danvers one.  It will be nice to see a powerful woman kicking some bad guy keister.
  • Inhumans (11/2/2018) – The Inhumans are a society of individuals with fantastic powers that keep hidden away from “normal” society.  They aren’t really fully human but aren’t mutants either.  Their leader, Black Bolt can’t speak.  Well, he can, but his voice is so powerful that a mere whisper of his could bring buildings crashing down.  He’s definitely the strong, silent type.
  • Avengers: Infinity War, Part 2 (5/3/2019) – This is the conclusion to the Infinity Saga.  Expect heroes from many movies, not just Avengers, taking part in the final showdown against Thanos.  Just picture Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther fighting alongside Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora, Rocket, and Groot.  It will be quite the team up.

Where the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes from here, I don’t know.  On one hand, I can’t wait to see it all.  On the other hand, by the time Avengers: Infinity War, Part 2 rolls its final credits, NHL will be almost 16 and JSL will be almost 12.  Maybe I can wait after all.

What upcoming Marvel movie are you most excited about?  What superhero would you love to see made into a movie?

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