Happy 2024! A bit of resolve, and a meatier shower

A way we can help 2024 be better, and a bit of insight into what makes physics dorks laugh

January 01, 2024

January 1, 2024   Issue #663

Personal Stuff

Because I’m a person

Happy New Year!

So 2023 kinda sucked in a lot of ways, what with politics and Nazis and global warming setting records and an ongoing pandemic being ignored and and and. But there were good things, too, at least for me personally like finally selling our Colorado house and moving to Virginia, and my ongoing freelancing with Scientific American. This newsletter is still doing great, though of course there will be changes coming soon (I’ll likely be pondering these this week, in fact).

I chose my favorite images of 2023 for SciAm (though I somehow forgot about those weird clouds near the Andromeda Galaxy; I need to follow up on that), and I’ll have a calendar of fun things to be on the lookout for in the sky for this Friday’s column there.

I don’t usually do a lot of mulling over the past year and planning for the new this time of year; I’m not all that invested in calendar dates in that way. But this year is A Big One politically, with a Presidential election in November as well as lots of Congressional seats up for grabs. So I will do something I don’t usually do: I’m making a New Year’s Resolution.

During the 2022 midterms my wife signed up with Vote Forward, which helps volunteers draft and send letters to people who might not otherwise vote. My handwriting is crap, so she did the lion’s share of the work, but in the end we sent out 250 letters. It was a lot of work, but so very important.

I want to do this again this year, and even write many myself (I’ll write slowly and carefully so readers might actually be able to decipher it). So, to wit:

I resolve to write 1,000 letters to potential voters this summer and fall, urging them to register (if needed) and to vote blue if they can.

I know this is somwhat aspirational, but within the realm of reason given how many we did two years ago.

I really, really don’t want to start off 2025 writing about fascism and how our government is about to become a dictatorship — as some candidates have made absolutely clear it will be if they win. So I will do what I can to prevent that.

I announce it here for two reasons: One is that makes it sorta official, and I’ll be beholden to y’all to make sure it gets done. And also to let you know that this is something you might consider doing as well. I know it’s not for everyone, and some folks would struggle with it, but if this is the sort of thing you can handle, it’s not all that hard — Vote Forward does a lot of the lifting for you in terms of word usagement and so on — and studies have shown it has a lot of impact. And it’s a great feeling knowing you’ve done what you can to, well, help save America.

So. Onward! To 2024: Bring it. I’m ready to deal with you as best I can.

Funnily enough

Just a touch of humor

So let’s start off this year with a good science joke. I saw this comic on Instagram and immediately felt seen.

A single-panel comic showing a balding, older astronomer looking out the window at several lumpy spherical cows trailing fire as they blaze through the atmosphere, with a blackboard in the room that has several slogans crossed out, such as “meateor”, “beef impact”, and “armoogeddon”, and the caption reads, “It was at the moment Professor Puniewicz wished he had spent more time alerting the authorities, and less on coming up with what to call his discovery.”

Besides being funny, it also references a classic physics joke. There are a zillion variations, but the basic joke goes:

A farmer was having a hard time getting his cows to produce milk. He tried everything — changing their diet, making their pens more livable, letting them sleep later, and more — but was so distraught after weeks of making no progress that he was willing to try anything, and suddenly remembered a physicist friend of his who was really smart. He calls her, tells her his woes, and she says she’ll work on it right away.

Three weeks later she calls him back and says she has a solution! Eagerly, he asks how she figured it out after he kept striking out, and she says, “Oh, it wasn’t that hard. First, assume a spherical cow…”

This slays scientists the first time they hear it. The joke is that we always have incredibly difficult problems to solve because they’re so complicated with so many factors involved, so you have to simplify. If you’re dealing with a weirdly shaped object, the first thing to do is assume it’s a sphere, which is a super simple geometry (all you need to know is the radius), do the math, then add complexity to it once you understand the process.

Variations include a spherical cow in a vacuum, a spherical cow in the absence of magnetic fields, a spherical cow with homogeneous density throughout, etc.

Anyway, my thanks to Drawerofdrawings, aka D.C. Stuelpner, for letting me use it. Follow them on Instagram because the comics are bizarre and funny. This is the one I saw first and it still makes me laugh.

Et alia

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