Month: March 2002

The following was sent to me by fellow capper and all-around nice guy Erik Wilson. It sounds unbelievably apocryphal, but the best stories often are:

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:

“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”

One student replied:

“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

“Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.”

“Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.”

“But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T=2 pi sqr root (l /g).”

“Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.” “If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.”

“But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him ‘If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this kyscraper’.”

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

This, and what I read about Copenhagen last week, have convinced me that I need to learn more about Niels Bohr. Any recommendations on where to start? Is there anybody else out there?

Every winter, for the last three or four years, I’ve pined for somewhere else to live — somewhere warmer, somewhere different, somewhere where I could feel more comfortable and certain about my decision to stay. I’ve never felt certain about State College, Pennsylvania, and for all its familiarity (and for all that I genuinely like about this town) it has never truly felt like home. And yet every spring, as windows slide open and heavy coats are swapped for shortsleeved shirts, I start looking for reasons to stay. I start to think that maybe it’s just the cold and the snow that I dislike, and just sunlight and warm weather that I crave. Driving around with the sunroof open in sixty-to-seventy degree, bright sunshine weather can make just about anywhere seem like paradise, even if only temporarily.

And, frankly, I don’t know where else I might be tempted to go. Friends who have left, and even some of those who have stayed behind, wonder what I see in this town and suggest that I go somewhere else, that I can go anywhere my heart desires. But that’s just the thing: I don’t want unlimited options. I want clear choices, a reason for choosing here or somewhere else, even if in hindsight that reason proves to be wrong and I regret the decision. My job, for reasons I won’t get into here — I assume that those who care already know — isn’t enough to keep me here, but the pay is decent, and I am in a good position from which to apply for other jobs. And while I don’t have large circle of friends, more than a few of them are still here. Maybe it’s just the newly spring-like weather, maybe it’s just fear of leaving the familiar, but I’m seriously thinking about not moving after all.

Thanks to the all-consuming Matt, I now find myself playing this far more than is probably healthy for me. It’s like a really goofy, cartoon Lego version of Myst — which I guess is what I really want to be playing. Apparently, there’s a collection of all three Myst games due some time at the end of the month. I do have a birthday in a couple of weeks…and it is only forty dollars…but probably the last thing I need right now is an excuse to spend more time in front of my computer. In the three weeks since I first started The Talisman, I’ve read a pitiful total of about sixty pages. I need to start rectifying that. And I need to start writing more on my own.

Tom Tomorrow writes:

So, let’s talk about evil for a second. The president has used the term so often and so clumsily that it has begun to lose meaning, become part of the background noise of the culture, easily tuned out. And that’s unfortunate, because it was an act of evil. This is what the patriotically correct crowd doesn’t understand: you can try to understand how such a thing could have happened, what factors could drive men to such extremes–and still consider their acts evil, beyond redemption. No rational person would be so foolish as to pretend that the Holocaust was not evil, and yet no one would argue that the Nazi party simply sprang into being fully formed, unaffected by historical context.

Caitlin R. Kiernan writes:

I’d be willing to suppose that at least 50% of good writing is just knowing when the hell to shut up.

And me? I write…well, nothing really. Maybe it’s that I’m too tired, or too hungry, or too cold — or maybe it’s because I think that everything I write has to be perfect, exactly the right words in exactly the right order, and I worry about what I’m going to say, or how I’m going to say it, when really I should just be getting words on paper or screen and worrying about revising them later. I agonize over words and phrases, struggle with beginnings…and so I rarely get past them. Even when there are ideas in my head — and there are many — stories seem to stall somewhere in their first few sentences because I’m unwilling to accept them as works in progress. I’m unwilling to accept the initial problems in my prose. I never want to leave in something and move on if it isn’t quite as good as I think it could be. But I need to allow myself the freedom to fail, the freedom to fall flat on my face, to write something that isn’t perfect, to just write.

We’ll see how I feel after lunch.