I'm participating in a blog meme!! Woo internets
this is from Heather. Here are the instructions: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
Here are the things Heather associates with me:
-The Crusades
-tea
-hard science (non-fuzzy)
-drinking with one's parents
-Israeli dance
The Crusades are awesome. In the sense that they inspire awe. It's fascinating to contemplate that a bunch of smelly knights to got off of their butts and marched to some far off lands to fight some "infidel" in the name of some lofty "God" idea. What was it that compelled them? Was it money? If so, how much, and where was it coming from? Was it boredom? Was it too crowded in Western Europe? Did they actually believe in their Catholic God enough to sincerely believe they were fighting for him? And, given that these people were somehow motivated enough to get off their land and go fight, how do you explain things like the Fourth Crusade, which nearly ended in excommunication, a sack of the fellow Christian city of Zara, followed by Constantinople, all to avenge the Venetial doge's personal (or economic, I don't remember) vendetta with the ruler of some other town (or his son). The Crusades were also a political tool for lots of European Monarchs like King Louis IX. In fact, the Crusades were a great many things and learning about them shows me the crazy and wacky deeds that human nature can be stirred to do.
An important point about the Crusades (as well as the inquisition and >100 year old history in general), for me personally is that I don't care about them. I think if I were to study, say, the Holocaust, or World War II, or Vietnam, I would be personally affected. It would just be "those sucker infidels that got slaughtered" that I'd be learning about, it might actually be someone in my family, or someone I know. Learning about relatively recent historical events affects me personally in a way that older history does not, so I can appreciate the drama of history without getting personally involved in it.
Also, history got boring after the French revolution. I think that's because a lot of mindsets we see in post-french revolution western thought are much more similar to our own than
Tea
I guess I drink a lot of tea. My family never really ate dinner together when I was in high school, and for a while I thought of this as a sign that we were kind of dysfunctional (and I do think it would have been nice to eat together, thought I don't think that not doing so makes us dysfunctional) but I remembered recently that we actually drank tea together quite often, or at least my dad and I did. So when people come over I guess the most obvious thing to offer them is tea.
Before I started dating Robert, I never really cared that much about how tasty the tea I was making/drinking was. It was more of a social thing and warm beverage, and I drank tea from tea bags without giving it much thought. Robert cares a lot more than I do about tea actually being tasty, so now I've come to appreciate many finer details of how to brew tea. And now I have opinions about how tea should be made too--Jasmine tea shouldn't be steeped for too long, or at too hight a temperature, otherwise it's disgusting! And my favorite tea is orchid oolong tea.
hard science (non-fuzzy)
mmmm...science. Heather is giving me liscence to be pretentious, because I think saying the word science is just pretentious in itself. I inadvertently capitalized Science, but then realized that Heather didn't, so I shouldn't. (She did, however, capitalize the Crusades). I like science. I like learning about how and why things work. I've always wanted to be a scientist (although now that I know some real scientists I'm having my doubts, but that's a whine for another time). But I don' have anything specific to say about science as a whole,so I think I will just talk about lasers here.
Lasers are the most interesting things ever. I dare you (yes, you, fair reader, if you did not expire in the 19th century) to suggest something that is more interesting than a laser. LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. If you can understand each of those words and how they fit together, then you can understand a laser. The hardest part for me to understand is stimulated emission. That is because we never see it (except in lasers). When we see light being emitted from things like the sun and fireflies and incandescent lights, we see spontaneous emission. Spontaneous emission is when you have an atom/molecule/semiconductor/metal filament/whatever in an excited electronic state, which means that an electron isn't in its lowest energy configuration but in some higher orbital. This excited state can occur beccause the system was heated up (and thermal energy gives the electron enough energy to be in an excited state) or it was pumped electrically, or the atom absorbed some light in the first place. Then, after hanging around in an excited state, the electron relaxes back down to the ground state and emits light, spontaneously, into nothing. The probability of this happening at a given time is more or less constant.
Now, lets get back to the issue of how the atom got to the excited state in the first place. In order for an atom in the ground state to transition to an excited state, it has to absorb energy, as I already said. One way for it to absorb energy is to absorb light that has the right amount of energy to raise an electron to an excited state. This is called "absorption". This is what any colored object does. Furthermore, this absorption is called "stimulated" because it is stimulated by the interaction of light with the atom/molecule/semiconductor. Now, imagine you have the reverse process going on--An atom is in an excited state, and some light comes by that has the energy equal to the difference between the ground state and the excited state. Then there is some probability that this light will stimulate "emission" from the excited state to the ground state. The mechanism is the same as for absorption (this just means that the math is the same, except you have a minus sign instead of a plus in a few places), but in the end you have light coming out of the system. In other words, in "stimulated absorption", you have energy transferred from the light to the atom. In "stimulated emission" you have energy transferred from the atom to the light. So if you start out with 1 photon, you can end up with 2 if the photon crosses an excited atom. That is stimulated emission. It is different from spontaneous emission because it requires light; in spontaenous emission, there's no photon causing the second photon to come out; the first photon just comes out on its own. The special thing about stimulated emission is that the second photon is identical to the first photon, so you get two photons that are the same coming out. This is why people say that laser light is "coherent". And then if you were to repeat this process, and you had lots of excited atoms in your "lasing medium" (which you can achieve by "pumping", i.e. putting energy into the atom electrically, or by absorption of another laser beam, or by heating, or by getting lots of little leprechauns named Sisyphus to move electrons to the excited state) Then those 2 photons could make 4, to 16, to 32, to lots and lots of photons that are ALL THE SAME. And since the number of photons increases, we call this Light Amplification, which, as I said already, occurs by stimulated emission. Of Radiation, which is just a more general term for light. Lasers could realy be called Lasels, but that sounds lame.
Disclaimer:Laser light isn't actually as perfectly identical as this, because those damned atoms and mirros and everything have finite physical size, but that's the general idea.
drinking with one's parents
My first glass, and fifth, and tenth, was from the hands of my parents. (Первая рюмка из рук родителей was a saying hammered into me throughout my teenage years, after many many many рюмки).
So yes, I like drinking with my parents. I associate drinking with parties. And parties are one of the things that my parents excel at. And drunkennes usually coincides with dancing, which is the most fun way to spend a family party. Or really any party, for that matter.
I like to tell this story to everyone, and I've narrated on my livejournal before: When I was 11, my mom decided to teach me a lesson by coming home friday night from a party hung over. She was miserable all saturday. It was gross. I never ever want to be hung over like that, ever. And so far, I haven't been. I suppose my children will have to learn that hangovers are bad from Daniel, or something.
-Israeli dance
I started doing Israeli Dance in college, the summer after my freshman year. Becca and I went with some other college people to this Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto. It was fun. I've always like dancing in circles holding hands, and I really liked the Israeli Dance music. Also, I didn't suck at picking up the dance moves, and no one told me that "maybe your'e just one of those people who just can't move" like some revered person said when I was 13 (and before he was a real fake-reverend).* So Israeli dance was also a pretty key thing in terms of gaining some confidence that I could be an normal person. Being Jewish was more important to me back then than it is now, and I thought about it more, so I think I felt that there was some cultural significance to it as well. But mostly I liked the music, I liked the dancing, and I came to like the people at Stanford that were involved with Israeli dance, and it was nice to be accepted by them.
Apparently I associated Israeli dance quite a bit with facing and occasionally overcoming various social phobias.
I did Israeli dance for a semester last year at Berkeley with the Hillel. They're a lot more serious about it here because there are more Jews from LA who grew up doing Israeli dance. But the atmosphere is not really super-friendly there (at least not to me--it seems like all the people know each other from Hillel things, plus I'm a grad student, and attempts to make conversation with people tend to not go well--maybe because I'm so surrounded by socially awkward people that I'm actually more socially awkward than I usually feel). Plus, I have other things to do on Tuesdays now, so I don't do Israeli dance on a regular basis any more. But I still listen to the music, and I really like the dances. They make me feel all sorts of feelings that I don't usually get to feel.
Thank you heather for inspiring this post. It has taken several days to write.
Here are the things Heather associates with me:
-The Crusades
-tea
-hard science (non-fuzzy)
-drinking with one's parents
-Israeli dance
The Crusades are awesome. In the sense that they inspire awe. It's fascinating to contemplate that a bunch of smelly knights to got off of their butts and marched to some far off lands to fight some "infidel" in the name of some lofty "God" idea. What was it that compelled them? Was it money? If so, how much, and where was it coming from? Was it boredom? Was it too crowded in Western Europe? Did they actually believe in their Catholic God enough to sincerely believe they were fighting for him? And, given that these people were somehow motivated enough to get off their land and go fight, how do you explain things like the Fourth Crusade, which nearly ended in excommunication, a sack of the fellow Christian city of Zara, followed by Constantinople, all to avenge the Venetial doge's personal (or economic, I don't remember) vendetta with the ruler of some other town (or his son). The Crusades were also a political tool for lots of European Monarchs like King Louis IX. In fact, the Crusades were a great many things and learning about them shows me the crazy and wacky deeds that human nature can be stirred to do.
An important point about the Crusades (as well as the inquisition and >100 year old history in general), for me personally is that I don't care about them. I think if I were to study, say, the Holocaust, or World War II, or Vietnam, I would be personally affected. It would just be "those sucker infidels that got slaughtered" that I'd be learning about, it might actually be someone in my family, or someone I know. Learning about relatively recent historical events affects me personally in a way that older history does not, so I can appreciate the drama of history without getting personally involved in it.
Also, history got boring after the French revolution. I think that's because a lot of mindsets we see in post-french revolution western thought are much more similar to our own than
Tea
I guess I drink a lot of tea. My family never really ate dinner together when I was in high school, and for a while I thought of this as a sign that we were kind of dysfunctional (and I do think it would have been nice to eat together, thought I don't think that not doing so makes us dysfunctional) but I remembered recently that we actually drank tea together quite often, or at least my dad and I did. So when people come over I guess the most obvious thing to offer them is tea.
Before I started dating Robert, I never really cared that much about how tasty the tea I was making/drinking was. It was more of a social thing and warm beverage, and I drank tea from tea bags without giving it much thought. Robert cares a lot more than I do about tea actually being tasty, so now I've come to appreciate many finer details of how to brew tea. And now I have opinions about how tea should be made too--Jasmine tea shouldn't be steeped for too long, or at too hight a temperature, otherwise it's disgusting! And my favorite tea is orchid oolong tea.
hard science (non-fuzzy)
mmmm...science. Heather is giving me liscence to be pretentious, because I think saying the word science is just pretentious in itself. I inadvertently capitalized Science, but then realized that Heather didn't, so I shouldn't. (She did, however, capitalize the Crusades). I like science. I like learning about how and why things work. I've always wanted to be a scientist (although now that I know some real scientists I'm having my doubts, but that's a whine for another time). But I don' have anything specific to say about science as a whole,so I think I will just talk about lasers here.
Lasers are the most interesting things ever. I dare you (yes, you, fair reader, if you did not expire in the 19th century) to suggest something that is more interesting than a laser. LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. If you can understand each of those words and how they fit together, then you can understand a laser. The hardest part for me to understand is stimulated emission. That is because we never see it (except in lasers). When we see light being emitted from things like the sun and fireflies and incandescent lights, we see spontaneous emission. Spontaneous emission is when you have an atom/molecule/semiconductor/metal filament/whatever in an excited electronic state, which means that an electron isn't in its lowest energy configuration but in some higher orbital. This excited state can occur beccause the system was heated up (and thermal energy gives the electron enough energy to be in an excited state) or it was pumped electrically, or the atom absorbed some light in the first place. Then, after hanging around in an excited state, the electron relaxes back down to the ground state and emits light, spontaneously, into nothing. The probability of this happening at a given time is more or less constant.
Now, lets get back to the issue of how the atom got to the excited state in the first place. In order for an atom in the ground state to transition to an excited state, it has to absorb energy, as I already said. One way for it to absorb energy is to absorb light that has the right amount of energy to raise an electron to an excited state. This is called "absorption". This is what any colored object does. Furthermore, this absorption is called "stimulated" because it is stimulated by the interaction of light with the atom/molecule/semiconductor. Now, imagine you have the reverse process going on--An atom is in an excited state, and some light comes by that has the energy equal to the difference between the ground state and the excited state. Then there is some probability that this light will stimulate "emission" from the excited state to the ground state. The mechanism is the same as for absorption (this just means that the math is the same, except you have a minus sign instead of a plus in a few places), but in the end you have light coming out of the system. In other words, in "stimulated absorption", you have energy transferred from the light to the atom. In "stimulated emission" you have energy transferred from the atom to the light. So if you start out with 1 photon, you can end up with 2 if the photon crosses an excited atom. That is stimulated emission. It is different from spontaneous emission because it requires light; in spontaenous emission, there's no photon causing the second photon to come out; the first photon just comes out on its own. The special thing about stimulated emission is that the second photon is identical to the first photon, so you get two photons that are the same coming out. This is why people say that laser light is "coherent". And then if you were to repeat this process, and you had lots of excited atoms in your "lasing medium" (which you can achieve by "pumping", i.e. putting energy into the atom electrically, or by absorption of another laser beam, or by heating, or by getting lots of little leprechauns named Sisyphus to move electrons to the excited state) Then those 2 photons could make 4, to 16, to 32, to lots and lots of photons that are ALL THE SAME. And since the number of photons increases, we call this Light Amplification, which, as I said already, occurs by stimulated emission. Of Radiation, which is just a more general term for light. Lasers could realy be called Lasels, but that sounds lame.
Disclaimer:Laser light isn't actually as perfectly identical as this, because those damned atoms and mirros and everything have finite physical size, but that's the general idea.
drinking with one's parents
My first glass, and fifth, and tenth, was from the hands of my parents. (Первая рюмка из рук родителей was a saying hammered into me throughout my teenage years, after many many many рюмки).
So yes, I like drinking with my parents. I associate drinking with parties. And parties are one of the things that my parents excel at. And drunkennes usually coincides with dancing, which is the most fun way to spend a family party. Or really any party, for that matter.
I like to tell this story to everyone, and I've narrated on my livejournal before: When I was 11, my mom decided to teach me a lesson by coming home friday night from a party hung over. She was miserable all saturday. It was gross. I never ever want to be hung over like that, ever. And so far, I haven't been. I suppose my children will have to learn that hangovers are bad from Daniel, or something.
-Israeli dance
I started doing Israeli Dance in college, the summer after my freshman year. Becca and I went with some other college people to this Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto. It was fun. I've always like dancing in circles holding hands, and I really liked the Israeli Dance music. Also, I didn't suck at picking up the dance moves, and no one told me that "maybe your'e just one of those people who just can't move" like some revered person said when I was 13 (and before he was a real fake-reverend).* So Israeli dance was also a pretty key thing in terms of gaining some confidence that I could be an normal person. Being Jewish was more important to me back then than it is now, and I thought about it more, so I think I felt that there was some cultural significance to it as well. But mostly I liked the music, I liked the dancing, and I came to like the people at Stanford that were involved with Israeli dance, and it was nice to be accepted by them.
Apparently I associated Israeli dance quite a bit with facing and occasionally overcoming various social phobias.
I did Israeli dance for a semester last year at Berkeley with the Hillel. They're a lot more serious about it here because there are more Jews from LA who grew up doing Israeli dance. But the atmosphere is not really super-friendly there (at least not to me--it seems like all the people know each other from Hillel things, plus I'm a grad student, and attempts to make conversation with people tend to not go well--maybe because I'm so surrounded by socially awkward people that I'm actually more socially awkward than I usually feel). Plus, I have other things to do on Tuesdays now, so I don't do Israeli dance on a regular basis any more. But I still listen to the music, and I really like the dances. They make me feel all sorts of feelings that I don't usually get to feel.
Thank you heather for inspiring this post. It has taken several days to write.