Thursday, May 04, 2006

latin: for a change

'everybody knows
it hurts to grow up'

i'm tasting more of the responsibilities of grown-up life- yesterday i transferred the lease on our townhouse to my name, meaning i now have to come up with the hefty sum for the pool key and the cleaning deposit. i also applied for health insurance on tuesday and need to be looking into getting off my dad's car insurance and onto my own [can geico really save me 15% or more? we'll find out].
but the cruelest rub comes from the demon of the cable situation [i call him 'cablor']: in an effort to save costs, our homeowners association has opted to move from comcast to mstar. they have worked out some nice rates, except for those of us who have come to love our dvr--currently mstar doesn't offer dvr or hd, but when they do in a few months, for me to get the equivilent of what i get now for $20/month, i will have to pay roughly $80/month. the company skimmed over this at the town meeting last night, but rest assured, my voice will be raised now.

and i need to start looking for a new roommate, and my rent costs will go up anyway.

on the up side, i may actually get a decent deal on getting internet in my house.
dang....that sounds like a fantasy after not having it here for the last few weeks.


so much for those pumas i was going to get.

last night i was thinking about how an electron is attracted to a proton though an electromagnetic charge. yet when a proton overcomes the electromagnetic repulsion to another proton, the strong nuclear forces take control and the two are held together by a bond much strong than that between the opposing particles.
interesting.

'i rarely understand what you're talking about' -strong sad

3 comments:

Em said...

That reminds me of my husband's physics-related interjections. We were getting our pseudo-reverent fix of soft sunday sounds on the radio last week, and some song came up with the lyrics "stronger than gravity.." in the chorus. Oh how Mr. Renn went off about how gravity is actually a relatively weak force... you've got electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, etc.....
And suddenly sappy sunday radio is turned on its head by physics - love it!

Anonymous said...

To be fair, gravity is actually the weakest force known.
There's the strong force (that nice little thing that holds protons together), the weak for (does something, not really sure what off the top of my head), the electromagnetic (does pretty much everything you can imagine), and gravity (keeps us on earth and makes galaxies interact).
If you do the math, the electromagnetic force is actually on the order of about 10^20 time stronger than gravity, or 100000000000000000000x that of gravity. The reason gravity is so prevalent in our universe is because not many things have electric charges strong enough to interact electromagnetically at cosmic distances, whereas things like black holes are so headache-inducingly massive that they can interact across galaxies.
Furthermore, the electromagnetic, weak and stron force have actually been found to have the same origin, known as the "electroweak" force (named for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, the strong force was found to be included later and physicists hate remaning things... it's why electricity flows backwards) whilst gravity is still in a field of its own. To date, there's still not explanation for it that I know of (yes, gravitons, but they're nothing more than theory at this point)
So, yeah...
Any more physics questions?

Anonymous said...

Ugh, that was a lot of typos...