Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Saturday, May 27, 2006

The last couple of days have been hard. I think that for the first time in a long time, I feel my age. It's my own fault really but it still isn't much fun. You, of course, know about the rib. This week the pain has returned with a greater intensity. I'm not exactly sure why but it's definitely more uncomfortable. In addition, I wrenched my lower back a little bit a few days back carrying too much weight in my messenger bag. Normally, it wouldn't have been a problem but I'm pretty sure I've been overcompensating with my left side and the imbalance has finally shown up. In addition, I just came off what I call a "Superset" of workouts where I try to do 500 miles in ten days. I was successful (yay!) but I'm now pretty worn down as a result. This hasn't been helped by the heat that's settled in the last several days. I took a day off but yesterday I put in another 55 miles and by the end of the ride I was basically beat. I crashed and took a two hour nap and still felt groggy.

I managed to get awake enough to go see the world premier of a wonderful play at the Horizon Theatre in Atlanta titled, "A Perfect Prayer." Our good friend Master Jeff was the lighting designer on the show and scored us some comp tickets to opening night. The play is a coming of age story for a young Muslim woman growing up in Mississippi. The play was wonderfully written and the acting was suberb; especially the actor who played the lead character's father. It was one of those cases where I truly believed they had gone out and found an Islamic scholar from Egypt to play the part. I had to keep reminding myself that the guy who played the charater, Tom Thon, was an actor. I hope this play "makes it" to a bigger venue so that it can show a lot of people not only what Islam is about but also how hard growing up is in any culture, in any situation and at any time.

By the time I got home though I was completely worn out. I was stiff and had a hard time moving around with both my rib and my back giving me trouble. I remember when my dad was this age and I remember him moving like this sometimes. It's a strange place to be and serves to remind me that I don't have endless energy nor will my body stand up to relentless pounding without some downtime. I usually don't envy those with wealth but right now I truly wish I had the disposable income to see a message therapist twice a week and a sports chiropractor about once a week to work the kinks out of my body and help me clear the lactic acid I've built up.

I'm going to go pretty easy for the next week I think but I would like to put in one long ride this weekend as a testament to the end of my vacation. Maybe I'll get up really early Monday morning and spin a good, long century ride as a way of remembering and honoring the sacrifices so many made so that I could have the freedom to do that.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Oh my goodness!

The FedEx Caveman commercial. Incredibly hilarious! Totally, absolutely hilarious! The end was completely unexpected. Wow. Total Dilbert in a neanderthilic sort of way.

Now back to your regularly scheduled life.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

So, this is the first week of my "real" vacation. I've been spending some time doing a lit bit in a lot of different areas. I've managed to ride 50 miles on the road each day and even managed to keep up with the fast group through the most of the Pain Train ride last night. I got gapped again due to some poor placement and once again time trialed my way back to the leading three riders. The extra cool thing is that I dropped all the riders who where trying to hang on to my wheel. It was most excellent. The ribs hurt but not as badly as I expected and the endorphins keep everything managable. People wonder why I ride and I think a little of it has to do with the fact that no government can ban endorphins.

Another thing I've been doing is listening to a series of recorded lectures by the Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary, Father Hopko. SVS is the preeminent seminary for the Orthodox Church of America. The lectures are sort of a series of talks Fr. Hopko gave on the Apocalypse, or as we tend to call it here in the States, Revelations. It's been really interesting. I don't agree with some of it but the sereis has explained a lot of practices still done in the churches dating back to earliest times of Christianity (i.e-Orthodoxy and Catholicism). The subject matter has been excellent food for thought.


I've also been working on my classes for this summer. I'm trying to get things more uniformly structured so that the courses are better integrated wtihin themselves. IT also helps me to stay on track when I'm working through the material. As a academic, I have a tendancy to digress (they give you a license to do that when you get your Ph.D. so that it's not a crime) from time to time and I find having a schedule helps to curb the excesses. Also, planning ahead helps me to explicitly establish links throughout the course i'm working on. The class that's farthest along is my Solar System Astronomy course for the June minimester. On a related note, I'm about two-thirds of the way though a great book titled Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. The book is a history of modern cosmologyfrom the time of Hubble and Shapley through to about 2000. The story centers around the work and career of Alan Sandage but really does a nice job of bringing most of the major contributors work into the light. I recommend the book to all physics and astronomy geeks. One interesting note is that if I trace my "Academic lineage" back through my dissertation committee I find that I'm four generations removed from Einstein and about the same from Hubble. My work in galactic dynamics is a synthesis from both the physical and astronomical lines of cosmology with a hefty dose of numerical analysis thrown in.

Anyways, I've got about 17 days until classes start again and a lot I'd like to do so I'd better get to it.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, May 12, 2006

So I am healing at a surprising rate from my crash. Much of this is due to the fact that I haven't stopped riding this week. I've done recovery level rides on the rollers each day with the exception of Monday. The last three days have been rides of 46 miles, 53 miles and 37 miles with heart rates in the 120's. The great thing is that my body is stimulated to release human growth hormone but since I haven't torn it up too badly, most of the repair work has been on the muscles damaged in the crash. The only (not inconsiderable) pain now is from the rib itself and that's pretty managable. I even managed to get a good night's sleep last night. Very nice.

I can tell my body is knitting itself back together by looking at what heart rate my body runs at while I'm training at a certain level. All week long it has been slowly trailing downward to a point consistent to where I was prior to the crash and in a good training. Now it should be noted that this is all on the rollers and performance on the road might well be very different. I plan to do a couple more days indoors and then I'll move back onto the road next week. It may be another week or so before I even think about doing in trail work. Normally I wouldn't want to rush back but I've got a race on June 18th up in Helen and a second race on the dirt a week after that. So, I need to get back on the dirt before too long to keep honing skills (please note the lack of a z) and I need to learn the course in Macon as it's fairly new. Macon is blessed to have three courses that are race worthy. This one is supposed to be the hardest in terms of climbing but I don't know how technical it is.

I've got two months to get ready for Nationals. Right now I don't know if I'm anywhere near where I need to be to go but a guy can make a lot of progress in 8 weeks. Of course, if my training is held back by my rib that may determine whether I go right there. I'm hoping to start doing two TT bike rides each week along with some hill work. I guess my world class sprinting skills will remain undeveloped for yet another season.

Until then, it's more roller rides and more X-Files episodes. I've been rewatching the Season 3 mythology episodes where we conclude the human-alien hybrid storyline and begin the black oil thread. What I don't understand is why someone didn't just off Krychek or at least shoot him in the knee and "convince" him to turn over the DAT or that he'll be left in a dark room with Cancer Man and a rusty straight razor. Of course, that little mystery is dwarfed by the continually reoccuring amnesia displayed by A.D. Skinner in terms of how bad Cancer Man's minions are and Scully's consistent ability to believe whatever one of the members of the consortium tells her no matter how venal they admit to being. Since we've just gotten Season 4, maybe we'll see some behavior modification. Of course, I don't think so since I've seen the end of the season episode for that season and it has Scully denying all of Mulder's work. Oh well.

Anyways, thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, May 11, 2006

David Wilcox is coming out with a new album in June but you can here it right now. Go out to www.davidwilcox.com and once you get to the main page, click on listen. You'll get a cool Java jukebox that'll play songs from the soon to be released album, Vista. The album is really pretty good. There are a couple of tunes I'm not totally fond of but for the most part the songs are great musically and have some great stories. Anyone who has every been in a close romantic relationship and all the difficulties that can arise from having to risk the innermost parts of one's heart will understand "Hard Part" and "Good Man" so perfectly describes the frustration I sometimes feel as an "emergent" Christian. There's a definite bluesy/gospel feel to several of the songs including "Same Shaker" and "Wilford Branford Hayes". I can't wait to buy the album but I'll probably have to wait until June 13th when it comes out over at iTunes.

Wilcox will be in concert at the Variety Playhouse on June 9th and I'm really hoping to catch him. The last couple of times I've missed his visits there and have been pretty bummed. Hopefully, nothing will come up this time.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

OK...so I'm watching TV tonight after the training ride I did. After the opening segment for CSI:NY there's this Olay commercial for a product that promises to take "skin resurfacing" to a new level. What's the deal here? Are women's faces like highways now? Is taking care of their skin like a weekend resurfacing project? Sorry Olay...this is a stupid ad campaign. In trying to sound all scientific Olay only sounds stupid.

And then the Zyrtek ad with the woman who looks like a Stepford wife trying to do her laundry.

But the PC/MAC commercial with the PC dude having a virus...absolutely fabulous. The entire series is just perfect.

And the Kia Optima-Mime commercial is good not because the of the car but the mime is great with the facial expression.

And does anyone actually still want a Hummer with gas prices the way they are now? I mean, honestly. All I want is sharks with fricken' laser beams on their heads.

Anyways, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, May 07, 2006

In mammals, play is an interesting thing. I think all animals higher up on the food chain that insects engage in some form of play (a biologist will have to let me know for sure). Mammals seem to take their play pretty seriously. I think play is a way of expressing our creativity as human beings. The question is when does play become something more than just expressing creativity?

When our dogs were puppies (actually they still do this) there was a lot of play fighting and wrestling where they seemed to be working out what the real thing might be like. I think we humans do this a lot in our play. For me, cycling is a play activity a lot of the time, especially mountian biking. Something about carving perfect lines on a well kept trail is just so much fun. IT's one of the few times when I can turn my brain off and just exist within the moment.

So why do I take my play here further; why do I race? What is it about the competition that drives me to pin on a number and test myself against others with the same bizarre notions about competition I do? More importnatly, what drives me to do it on a day like today?

It wasn't as bad at Dauset as it could have been. The storms that were dropping tornadoes 80 miles to our west fizzled some and only dropped rain on us on the starting line. The course was pretty slippery and I was worried that I would get hurt. My goal was to finish since I don't ride well in mud. There was lots of mud and a lot of it ended up on my bike, in my gears, in my brakes, in my clothes and, most importantly, in my clipless pedals.


The first lap went ok after a rocky start and I seemed to move up through the field after hitting the trails dead last after the start. We rode a 10 mile loop that included a tough section known as "Huff 'n Puff" twice. My goal up there was merely to stay on the bike once the rain started and I managed to do that on eth efirst lap. However, as the condition of the trail deteriorated and the mud took it's toll on my equipment that was a lot harder to do on the second lap. The biggest problem was that I couldn't clip in because there was mud and other stuff in my pedals which meant that I had to do the difficult bits not well connected to the bike. Because of this I crashed hard twice. I got off easy the first time with only scrapes to my knees. The second time I wasn't so lucky. I went over the bar and landed on my leg side with my elbow under my ribs. I heard something crack and felt something give and now breathing is an adventure.

The amazing thing is how powerful the endorphins your body released are. After catching my breath I got back ont he back and finished the last 4 miles of the course which included three hard climbs. The rib was uncomfortable but I rode through the pain which wasn't all that bad given the fact that my brain was pumping out huge quatities of feel good morphine like chemicals. After I finished, things got a lot worse until I could get some ibprofen into me. I expect tomorrow will be a big adventure as the bruises will really make themselves know. I had planned to do a recovery ride so I think I'll spin on the trainer and avoid any big bumps. Depending on how things feel, I'll likely do the ride on the TT bike as it was a lot more comfortable to ride in the aerobars with cracked ribs last time I did this.

So, can someone tell me why I play like this?

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

As we've moved into Daylight Savings Time, the weeknight group rides have started around the area. In years past, I've tried to ride when I can with the Griffin ride group which has a number of strong riders and good folks all around. The problem has been that they meet on Thursdays which is in conflict with some of my other activities. So this year I've decided to go down to Macon and ride with the group there.

In the past I've avoided this because it's farther away from me and the group has been smaller and dominated by triathletes. I don't mind tri guys but they tend to be a little sketchy in their bike handling skills and they all seem to want to ride in thei aero bars, even when in a group. Well, Rick at Bike Tech told me the group has gotten bigger and that the pace was definitely higher. He called it "The Pain Train" and so last week I decided to head down and check it out.

The group was definitely bigger at about 40 riders and there were a couple of Cat 2's and 3's in attendance. That makes the Cat 4 guys like me have to ride harder which is good for training. The ride starts with a short warm-up that almost immediately turns into a series of big rollers. The middle roller is the selector where the group splits and the strong guys ride away from the guys who are less fit or who are taking the day easy. After the rollers there's a bit of descending and then a turn onto a "shake-n-bake" section of torn up asphalt with a couple of long 4% climbs that sap the legs. Then it's a couple of more turns and some flat that leads to the long time trial section of low rollers and long flats. Finally there's a couple of longish climbs ended with a medium long really hard climb. All in all, it's a great course to practice intervals, either uphill or in sprinting away from the fast group.

Last week I was really on form and rode super hard. At one point, one of the guys who didn't know me sort of glared at me after I had finished taking a monster pull on the front. He asked me my name and then asked, "Where the hell did you come from?" That's always a good sign in a group when the strong guys look like you've made 'em suffer. Instant respect, especially if you spend a lot of time on the front like I do. This week I wasn't as strong since it's a recovery week and I didn't ride Saturday or Monday. The one awesome thing was that I got caught behind a split in the lead group after I had taken a big pull. The six guys on the front weren't really interested in waiting up and tried to see if they could get away. I wasn't interested in getting dropped less than halfway into the ride. So I put my head down and went into time trial mode. I hooked up with a couple of other guys that had tailed off and I started to peg the break back. The entire time I was totally on the rivet and felt like I was going to add a bit of color to the countryside for a time. After stablizing the gap I let the other guys pull for a bit until I caught me breath (i.e.-got back down to my lactate threshold) and then I went tot he front again. I halved the distance to the break and then let the others pull for a bit again. Finally, I went to the front and put in one more big effort and I was back on and integrated in to a double paceline just as we hit the low roller/TT section. We flew over the next ten miles at an average of about 28 mph sharing the workload between us. I paid for my efforts later in the last section of hills but it was an excellent ride never-the-less. I'm looking forward to riding with the group thoughout the summer.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Well, as things are winding down for this academic year I've started taking stock of what my summer holds in store for me. There are several projects I'm looking forward to working on and a few new responsibilities.

The first set of things I'll be working on are course revisions in several areas for several schools. Here at Gordon I'll be updating my physics courses to take advantage of some new software we've acquired over the last year and to bring them in line with the slow shift in my pedagogy that's taken place over the last five years in knowing what does and doesn't work for my courses. I've decided that the trend I've followed of late in slowing some things down will be reversed as it hasn't helped the students who seem to do poorly and it seems to irritate the students who actually are willing to work. I'll also be taking a course on Chaos I've been teaching for some time fully on-line this summer with the intent of developing it into a more reading and conference with lots of writing and moderated dialogue. I've done a little of this and I think the course is well suited to the methodology. We use Gleick's book, Chaos for the course and it can be tough sleeding for a lot of students so I hope to add additional resources to that that will help clear things up. The Gleick book is an excellent treatment of a lot of things including the history of the study of non-linear systems, the way science works in the real world and the culture of science in academia. The problem is getting freshmen and sophomores to appreciate that. I'm hoping that having a strong writing component to the course will help them see both the richness of the subject and the additional information.

I'll also be working with the National Teacher's Enhancement Network to update a course I've been teaching to in-service high school educators for several years now. The plan is to include the data archives from the Spitzer IR telescope in the course as well as update the activities that allow the students to access and analyze simple Hubble image and spectrometer data. The course is an interesting mix of process issues (How do you teach this stuff in a relevant way?), content (What is a H-R diagram and why is it important?) and discovery (How is it that astronomers know this stuff anyways?) Finding the right balance is tricky and I'm hoping to get some input from some colleagues at the University of Arizona on how to do it. The great side benefit is that it should help me do some really exciting stuff with my Stellar and Galactic astronomy courses that I teach here including the attempt to do it on-line for the first time.

Thirdly, I'll be creating a hybrid physics course for a local technical college. They've had me teach the fully in-class version but I can't continue to do that and they can't find an adjunct to replace me that has 18 graduate hours in physics. So we decided to do the course as a part on-line course and part in-class course. Hopefully that'll help me deal with the issues of time and still teach the class.

On the student services side I'm going to put together a set of four seminar type things on student skills to be taught in the dorms the first month of so of classes here at Gordon. The Geek has helped me out by getting some sweet materials sent to me from publishers that should give me lots to work with. I'd like the seminars to be about two hours long and to include lots and lots of activities and only a minimum of lecture material. I'm thinking of sessions on note-taking/concept mapping, test preparation/test taking, time/life management and goal setting/principle centered living. I'll look at offering the first two in weeks one and three and then the other two in weeks two and four. The key idea is to actually hold the seminars in the dorms in the evenings to make it really easy for the students to come if they want to. I may offer a short one hour session the very first week of class called "Intro to College: The Real Scoop Inside the Classroom" or something like that to help students adjust their attitudes and settle in more quickly.

I'd also like to do some planning with the student organization I'm involved with for an event we'd like to do in the fall semester. We see it as a sort of "Poverty Day" kind of thing where we'll challenge the student body here to think about poverty from beyond their narrow Americanized window. We'll ask the campus communiy to join us in living on $3 for a day. We'll show the movie, "Invisible Children". We'll bring Compassion International on campus and maybe see if some performers or artists want to help us out by providing a compelling artistic take on what it's like to live in the third world. We'll focus the campus' attention on homelessness by asking students to join us in sleeping outdoors for one night someplace like the green in the central quad. There's a lot of work to be done to pull this off but I think we can do it. One night at our Bible study this Spring I challenged our small Christian group to become relevant and to make Jesus relevant on this campus of postmodern, relativistic, wounded by religion students and this is what they came up with after reading a portion of Blue like Jazz.

Looking it over, there's a lot of work to be done but that's the great thing about summer; there's a lot of time to do stuff. Right now I need just a bit of downtime to recharge a bit but I can get that while setting some of this in motion by sending out emails and setting up meetings. Once that is done, I can get to work on these things. The plan is to treat this summer like grad school: very flexible schedule, lots of work to do, fairly informal structure on most of it. I'd like to be able to get into a rhythm but I doubt that will be very easy. I also have to decide how to schedule my time. Do I work on one project intensely for a while and then move to the next or do I work a little bit on each one each day. I'm leaning towrds the first with some of the second sprinkled in. If I do that then I'll probably have to prioritize my work in terms of due dates and the like. Maybe I'll devote three days to intensive work on one project and leave Monday and Friday a little more flexible to take care of things that come up in terms of the other projects like meetings and such.

Anyways, thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |