It is only noon on the first day of pandemic homeschooling of my three kids and the older two act like jittery prisoners. They took the dog out to the park and I am taking some time to breathe, but I told them to come back within a half hour and it has already been an hour and a half. The mutiny has already begun. “You are the stupidest teacher ever. Out of all of the people in the family, I have the least respect for you.” Their father has trained them well. I shouldn’t blame him for their bad behavior, but I’m in such a mood that I can’t help it.
I bought some bags of big, white rocks, dhalia roots, gladiola corms, and and crocosmia for the fall. Perhaps I already need to break into them. Digging is therapeutic, right? Does anyone have any suggestions for what to plant around the dahlias until they come in? I’m thinking of some salvia, rosemary, and echinachea. When steamed, they are (incidentally) good for respiratory distress.
Yes. Spring is the time for digging. It made the kids busy and my daughter spent the rest of the afternoon gossiping with the neighbor boys over the fence. I bet she didn’t even think about her cell phone once!
I wonder if I could get them to watch my YouTube videos. They seem to enjoy videos, even if they do not enjoy me lecturing them. We talked about what they would be willing to do for a history and English curriculum and I suggested that they could spend an hour of their alloted school time watching an Oliver Stone movie (Malcom X?) in English. Today was more stressful than expected and we might try that tomorrow.
Taken altogether, today was a failure, but tomorrow I will try again!
Addendum: All of the hand washing I’ve been doing is drying out my skin. I bought some hand lotion, but it isn’t really fixing the damage. The stores were perfectly normal today except for the mysteriously empty toilet paper aisles. It is a strange way for people to communicate their fears to politicians, but it is effective.
Kirsten Hacker 
Perhaps the family could watch “The King and I” and/or “To Sir, With Love” and/or “Stand and Deliver.”
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Parenting is such a challenge but it is much more so when parents do not get on the same page and present a unified front. I was in a similar situation with my first wife and it caused me great frustration. That’s one of the reasons she is now ‘the first wife.’
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I shouldn’t complain about my husband in public, but I know he’ll never read this and that he probably wouldn’t care that much. I’m just trying to paint a realistic picture. Real couples do have problems like this and they often do undermine one another in front of the kids. I wish my relationship was better than that, but my life isn’t that perfect. I’m not that perfect. In an imaginary, perfect future, I’m impervious to all irritations and generous to even the most flawed individuals.
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Concerning the video: Terrific scat singing! Enunciating all those melodic syllables must have taken lots of practice! Nicely done.
As to physics: The pillars of communicating physical ideas include words, mathematical analysis and PICTURES. I think your presentation would have benefitted from pictures.
“Squish” is a great word. A picture as it relates to gravity shows a water balloon “sitting” on a table, being squished and flattened only on its bottom side because of its upward acceleration due to Earth’s gravity. Whereas a falling (ideal) water balloon should be depicted as spherical and unsquished because it is not accelerating.
A fourth and most important pillar of communicating physical ideas is EXPERIMENT: Listening directly to Nature. By experiment we could determine whether or not the balloon’s flattened underside is caused by a physically real upward acceleration or because the balloon is being pulled downward by vaguely mystical gravitons (grabitons, yankons, velcrons, whateverons).
The experiment by which this unequivocal determination could be reached is one proposed by Galileo in 1632, but has not yet been performed by humans. The apparatus needed to do the experiment may be called a Small Low-Energy Non-Collider.
If the result of the experiment confirms that the balloon’s underside is flattened by upward acceleration, then we can build a string of words, analysis, and more pictures to show how Newton’s constant G is related to c, h, e, protons, electrons, alpha and the Cosmos.
By listening to the Universe (doing the experiment) we facilitate eradication of babel and reclamation of crisp, clear words.
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Thanks for the compliment. I was hoping to use the videos as a starting point that I could decorate with pictures that dance around my head as I speak, but having the kids home all day has slowed down those plans.
The scatting wasn’t too hard to learn. I tend to absorb songs if I listen to them enough and they stick around forever in my head.
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Parenting children is of course the highest priority.
Interspersed between the fun and games (and headaches?) that brings, I hope you find a few moments to reflect on the significance of one-sided squishing. (Stress: pull from “above” or push from “below.”) The ONLY way we know how to produce this effect is by acceleration.
I have recently written and submitted a brief essay about how an alien civilization of Rotonians apply this fact to their interpretation of gravity, when they experience it for the first time. (Gravity Research Foundation 2020 Essay: Galileo’s Experiment is Still Undone.)
https://vixra.org/abs/2003.0244
Rotonians have lots of pictures flying around their heads, too. But they are fully aware that equations, words, and pictures can easily mislead, and do not hold a candle to the “Ithuriel Spear of Experiment,” as Michael Faraday called it.
Health and happiness to you and yours.
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Don’t get discouraged, these times are going to put an initial strain on everybody, but it’ll get easier… perhaps it’ll be like what your plants are going to go through: a rocky start and then one day: beauty and strength
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