The triumphant return of the little prince

My son spent the week with his mom and step-dad in NC. I went down to pick him up Friday night. He told me about his week, and here is what he said:

He wrestled with the goats. There is one goat that likes to rear up and butt him. He was afraid before, but this time he said he reached up and grabbed the animal's horns and just held him there. The goat finally gave up. He said that the goat doesn't butt him anymore.

He got to play soccer with the animals too. Four goats, two pigs, and a duck that cannot swim. Animals against the boy.

He was bitten by a horse too. He said his mom told him that was the last straw, they were gonna move that horse to a new barn. He said that horse bit people, kicked people, and bucked people. Interesting horse.

He spent a good part of the week putting together his lego Viking kits and playing with his friends there.

It sounds like he had a great week!

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In other areas...my brother is bringing a cockatiel up for us. This is a bird that they have had for a while that does not get very much attention from them anymore. I think they are tired of the bird squawking all the time. I don't know why I said I would take it, other than I like the bird. My son is pretty excited about it though. Maybe it will be a good thing?

My brother recently put down their very old husky/malmut mix dog. Their three year old son misses the dog. He said, "I will catch an eagle. The eagle will carry me up to heaven. When I get there I will hold onto Zaney. The eagle will fly us both back down." I wish all of us could think that creatively. Children are amazing.

~{Mike}~

This year for Christmas....

My son is going to be with his mom for a week. He will get Christmas a little early with me on Christmas eve morning, then breakfast and presents with my parents, and then he will go with his mom for the rest of the week.

I have to work next week so not much to tell there {frown}. However, I want to go snowboarding. With anyone, anywhere. If you are interested, send me a note or leave a comment!

Someone that does have big plans for Christmas this year is Jeff. Jeff and his family are making a major trip for Christmas this year! You can read, and see their experiences at Beach Bum. It seems that they are having a great time and making great videos. They are trying to stay out of the blizzards too. You'll have to read it to see where they are going and how they are getting there!

Merry Christmas everyone. Have a safe and JOY filled time.
~~MIKE~~

Haikus Heaven

I had a conference with my son's teachers and school counselor today. {Heavy Sigh}Well, heavy sigh was what I was thinking. However, the conference was far more good than bad. {jubilant shout} Essentially Brandon is doing fantastic. He has a few quirks that need working on, but overall he is great. This is night and day from last year. I was used to having conferences with most of the staff, and none of it was good other than they all agreed that Brandon was bright. However, he used his powers for evil.

So, Brandon doesn't like homework. What child does? He either tries to get it all done before school ends (really. I was shocked too.) or he does it at his daycare (again, dumbfounded look from confused father). Usually it is worksheets and easy stuff. The hard stuff, writing, he never brings home. It has become a battle between him and his teacher over whether it even makes it into his backpack. I must say that Brandon wins more often than not, and he never tells me about it. So what is this assignment that vexes him so? He has to read a section of a story, write a few things about the section, and talk about it in a group on a specific day. Now, to do it in just one night is daunting. It is a lot of reading and writing, with some emphasis on actually thinking with the writing. Brandon is capable, but rarely willing in the evening. It is his time to play.

Our discussion tonight centered on the fact that he has three evenings to do it, not just one. We (more or less I told him) talked about some options for reading, writing, etc over three nights to ease the burden. He did the assignment very well tonight and with little complaining. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. :-)

I have an analogy to share. Brandon has a problem understanding his place in school. He wants to lead the activities. He wants to choose when he is ready to move on, etc, and usually believes he can talk his teacher into changing the plan. I told him he needs to change his perspective. I had Brandon look into a box and I asked him to envision a maze with high walls, a beginning, and and end. Brandon was then asked to pretend he was a tiny mouse in the maze. He runs back and forth, not knowing the way, not able to climb the walls, and cannot get to the end. His teacher looks over the maze and has the map. She directs him where to go and when so that he makes it through the maze every day. When he doesn't listen, he gets trapped and lost. He also holds up the class from getting to the end. I asked him to start thinking about listening to the directions and doing what he is told so that he is successful everyday. I told him the teacher is there to help him be successful, and she really wants him to be successful. I then explained to Brandon that as he gets older, he will then tower over the maze and begin to plot his own course. He will be able to see the thousands of destinations for his life and he can begin to make his own way to them, but right now he is not there and cannot know the way, so he better listen to his teacher.

I know it is probably way too abstract for a nine year old. My biggest problem is thinking and explaining at his level. But hopefully it will help in a small way.

So, what does all of this have to do with haikus? He had to either create or find a haiku. I love poetry, so I wanted him to write one. He digressed and said he would rather copy one. I told him I could make one, and he said he would take that.

Snowboarding
Huge white waves bursting
Exhilarating freedom
Rocketing Flying

It sparked him. Off he flew to write ten of his own...

Hurricanes
Hateful and Deadly
Very deadly storms of doom
Bringers of Sadness

Whirlpools
Whirlling pools of doom
Whirlling pools of no return
Vortexes of doom

Space
Endless doom and pain
Bringer of Monstrous evil
Timeless and Endless

Clouds
Big fluffy blankets
Very soft cuddly pillows
Fluffy cotton rows

~Good night to all~
{MIKE}

This week as a single parent....

My son had a few meltdowns in school this week. Nothing as dramatic as last year.

~flashback-aside~
For those that do not know, the magnitude of my son's issues last year prompted me to move from Maryland to Virginia Beach so that I could have the help of my family. It also seems that professional help is a bit easier to come by in Va Beach than in Maryland. Sure, Kennedy Krieger in Baltimore is the best in the country. It was only 30 minutes away. The wait list to get in for a psychological evaluation is about a year. Children's National Medical Center in DC was much faster and they were fantastic. It was fun to get to as well. Seriously. Park at the metro in Greenbelt, ride the train, one transfer, and a shuttle picks you up at the metro. :-) Lots of fun for a nine year old.
~return to blog~

Fortunately, the meltdowns were mild and once all of the information was in and analyzed it seems that the events were not so bad after all. I am very proud of the way my son tried to cope and recover from his situations. It was not ideal, but it was a giant step from where he was before.

He has been working so hard that I decided to give him a treat Friday. Kind of big. It was a great surprise. You see, he read 'Eragon' and 'Eldest' recently. I read them too and enjoyed them very much. Eragon was opening on Friday. I had already planned to get off of work early, so I checked with his teacher to see if there was anything important going on the last two hours of the day. There was not. So I bought two tickets to the 2pm show. To say that he was excited, happy, and surprised would be an understatement. The theater was not crowded, we had great seats, and we had a grand time enjoying the movie. He went to his grandparents for the weekend and he talked about it all the way there.

~{MIKE}~

My life is a lot insane

Seems like when part of my life is going well, the rest just does not. I am once again re-arranging my life, and here is where I will talk about some of it! The ups, the downs, the craziness.

Checkout my picasa webpage for some snapshots what goes on here!

Crazy Computer Dad

Mike

Insane thought about Gravity and our Universe...

In the summer of 1996 I had a lot of time to think about things. I was a Unix engineer in Charlotte, NC and I sometimes had to drive as much as three hours to get to a customer site. I am fascinated by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, but one thing I had always wondered about was how a person traveling near the speed of light would age very little, while a person on Earth would age a lot. I started breaking the problem down into it's pieces and looked at how they fit together, the conclusion was one I had not expected.

What is time? Really, what is it? It is nothing more than a unit of measure for the decay of a cesium atom. We know that the rate of decay of a particular cesium isotope is so stable and dependable that we use that decay as our standard for the unit of measure of time. What are we measuring? We measure age. The age of the Universe, our own age, the age of the earth. We measure the total rate of all physical and chemical interactions since the beginning of the Universe. We know that this interaction or this chemical reaction occurred before this other one. We measure the difference between those interactions in space. In reality, there is no such thing as time. It is not something tangible, just like an inch is not tangible. An inch of something is something, but it is not an inch, it is a measurement of something. Time is not tangible, it is a measure of the rate of decay and chemical reactions that occur throughout the universe. Mostly, we think of time in terms of the chemical reactions that cause us to age. To humans, the desire to go back and undo something is so strong, that we have created an idea that time is tangible and can be manipulated. You can not manipulate something that does not exist. Can you reverse the order of all chemical reactions in the universe to "go back in time?" No. Can you just cool off a cake and turn it back into eggs, flour, milk, and sugar? No.

How does this relate to Relativity? The person traveling near the speed of light AGES very little compared to someone not traveling at the speed of light. Do they travel through time? No. Time does not exist. So what happens? The chemical reactions that we call AGING appear to happen slower to people traveling near the speed of light from the frame of reference of Earth. Conversely, AGING appears to happen more rapidly to people on earth from the frame of reference of the people traveling near the speed of light. To each group AGING appears to happen at the normal rate within their frame of reference. So, the person traveling near the speed of light thinks a year has gone by. The person on earth thinks ten years have gone by. Why does traveling near the speed of light appear to slow down aging when viewed from the frame of reference of earth?

Time does not exist, it is only a measure of what we call aging. Aging is essentially the sequential series of organic chemical reactions that take us from conception to death. Why would these CHEMICAL reactions appear to slow down near the speed of light from the perspective of someone standing on earth?

What slows these things down? Removing thermal energy will certainly slow these chemical reactions down. When we reach zero degrees Kelvin, that is pretty much an all stop except for external kinetic interactions and quantum effects. More than likely, this is not what happens.

So what changes when we travel faster and faster? Well, Mass changes. Mass is a measure of an object's resistance to a change in velocity or direction. As an object moves faster, it's mass increases because it then takes more energy to make it go faster, or it takes a more energy to make it change direction than when it is just sitting still.

If nothing else changes, then why would a increase in mass cause chemical reactions to slow down? We don't necessarily see that on earth. As the speed of an object increases to the speed of light, mass increases exponentially to infinity. What changes as mass increases? Gravity for one. The gravitational field increases as mass increases. Could gravity cause chemical reactions to slow down? Not in conventional physics. Gravity is the weakest force in conventional physics. It's influence at the molecular or quantum level could be considered negligible compared to the strong and weak nuclear forces. Or can it? As the gravitational field increases exponentially in intensity as mass increases, and if gravity has a much stronger effect at the quantum level than previously known, then it is possible that the strengthening gravitational field could actually have a slowing down effect on all quantum motion and interaction. Essentially, gravity could put everything into slow motion, from the perspective of someone on earth. But from the point of view of the person traveling at the speed of light, they see everything occurring as normal around them, but everything happening much faster on earth.

This would mean that even light would change speed when passing through intense gravitational fields, from the perspective of someone looking at it from earth. It also means that gravity can affect quantum motions and interactions.