Skip to main content

Astronomer's Daughter

Funny story from Florida trip (better told in Chinese, but I type like a turtle crawls):

There once was a brilliant astronomer. He knew every star in the sky. He liked to take daily evening strolls to gaze upon the sky, and would often plead with his beautiful young daughter to join him. But she was just not interested. Little girl grows up and heads off to college, and one November day, father receives a letter from his little girl.
"Dear Papi, Early this evening on my way home with just an ordinary friend, I finally gazed up and saw Orion and the Big Dipper! What a beautiful sight...could you please tell me what's the names of each star?" To which the father replies "Dear Daughter, I went for a stroll with your mother this early evening too, and though I could see Orion, the Big Dipper doesn't appear in the night sky until around 2 am. Thus, I am very curious to know who this "ordinary friend" is!"

Somehow it's a lot more funny when told in Chinese, and for any who knows the sky, it's immediately obvious where the story is going!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This weekend sucks!

So the Yankees are facing an uphill battle against the Angels. Hope they pull out of this one. The game today was pretty intense. Down 5-0 then went up 6-5 only to be beaten 11-7. Ugh! I don't know, they just lacked the stamina to pull things through today. Then again, I don't fault them. NY has a pretty tense weekend with the bomb alert, and I pray that all will be well. After all, in my heart NYC is still my home. This weekend is Fall Break. Unfortunately for me, the weather is bad so I probably can't go hiking, and then my boss told me Thursday that we have work to do over the weekend. Right now I am busy testing the microwave/rf generators for our quantum dot gate pulsing. We need to make sure that we can maintain the pulse form sent down to the sample with minimal distortion, reflection, attenuation and loss. This is made particularly difficult due to the size of our metal gates (which I made), on the order of 100 nm or less in width and less than 20 nm in thickness. S...

M's first art installation

My son and I went exercising at the gym this morning (Feb. 2, 2019). We had physical and mental workouts, and I was full of pride to see him put together this exhibit. He called it, "Train." The work is abstract, with the cone symbolizing the engine and the ball can be pictured as "balls of steam" that roll out of the chimney or exhaust system! Train

Of Mice and Men

Here's an interesting story, mice sing ! Check out the sound clip at the bottom of the page. Apparently during courtship male mice sing. This was discovered when researchers let male mice sniff on female or male mice urine, and though the original intention was to see how the male brain differentiates the pheromones, they noticed a rather complex ultrasound pattern erupted when hetero (whether there are homo mice is a question) male mice smelled female pheromones. This places mice in the same league as some other complex singing beings such as birds and dolphins! This is interesting for many reasons, but one I can think of is since mice are relatively easy to manipulate genetically, and the fact that they utilize complicated vocal patterns to court mates means perhaps mice have some simple language abilities. So we may be able to understand how language and vocal abilities develop and play such a crucial role (obviously as in birds better singers get to procreate!) in animals. We a...