I’m sure many of you were expecting this a little earlier. After all, it’s been five months since the last Big Life Update. Why the delay? Since the last one had all the details about our giant honeymoon in Hawaii, it would be tempting to say that I needed time to put together a worthy follow-up. Perhaps along the lines of Michael Jackson following up “Thriller”, Quentin Tarantino following up “Pulp Fiction”, or Milli Vanilli following up the “Girl You Know It’s True” album. But that would be just a wee bit inaccurate. For starters, I’m no Jacko, Q, or Vanilli. Although the last Big Life Update was time-consuming to write, I don’t think it qualifies as High Art by any stretch of the imagination. More importantly, I’ve just been content to rest on my laurels. For the last five months, whenever anybody asked what’s new with me, I’d answer that I got married and spent two weeks in Hawaii. Apparently, I can only milk that for five months. It’s back to reality for me…
It’s been a pleasant few months for Liz and me. Since we got the thank-you notes written, it’s really been business as usual for us. All the big things in our life are pretty much the same. Her condo is still on the market (10 months and counting), and all her furniture is still over there. The cats are still being cute and hitting each other in the head. I’m still at my little law firm, and Liz is still at the VA. Cars still working just fine. Nope, nothing big, just a few little things…
March – My cable modem service provider got gobbled up in some kind of corporate merger takeover thing. And so, my terrific RoadRunner service from Time-Warner morphed into the dreaded Comcast service. They raised my rates and restructured the fee structure, so that by signing up for basic cable TV, I actually reduced my bill by $1 every month. So we now have super clear reception on all our local channels, plus TBS (Yay! Atlanta Braves baseball and extra-crappy movies!) and CNN. Competition is good, but unfortunately for me, my suburb doesn’t have any.
February – I’d written before that my cell phone would occasionally get confused, with its main screen suddenly showing a left/right reversal. The reversal would disappear when I open and close the phone, as if nothing was wrong. Well, I finally got some pictures of it, including some with my phone next to Liz’s phone for comparison. Still don’t understand it, but I’m glad I got pictures of it because it hasn’t done it since.
March – I noticed that one of my headlights burnt out, so I had it replaced. Three (3) days later, the other one burnt out, so I had that one replaced as well. Toyota must have some really tight tolerances on their light bulbs!March – Some of you may know that I’m a member of OSA, the Optical Society of America. We have monthly meetings during the academic year, and there’s always a speaker at the meeting. Last year, one of our speakers talked about a project he was working on, which was an interferometer that was about the size of a beer can. Good talk.
Well, that must have struck a chord with me, because I had a dream about the optics of actual beer cans! It was all right there in the dream in amazing detail, and even included some math. I woke up laughing, and scribbled down as much as I could remember. I’ve written up a tiny portion of my absurd dream, which even includes some relevant math (!), and I tacked it on at the end of this Big Life Update as an Appendix. The proof is left to the reader.
Early April – Saw “Pan’s Labyrinth”, the best kid’s-movie-that’s-not-for-kids I think I’ve ever seen. Can’t say enough good things about it, except that it’s definitely not for kids.
Mid-April – Played plumber and repaired a few of the sinks in the house. The bathroom sink was dripping and the kitchen sink needed a new sprayer, so I got to work.
I learned that one should not buy a cheap Home Depot house brand bathroom faucet, as Margaret had done, because it will eventually drip. You can’t fix it, because it doesn’t contain any user serviceable parts inside. You have to replace it, which is what I did. Not a difficult job by any means, but one that could have been avoided if Margaret had spent more than $29 on the old faucet to begin with.
The sprayer was also pretty straightforward, but involved lying on my back under the kitchen sink for significant amounts of time. The cats thought that was very interesting. At one point, Liz came into the kitchen to find me on my back working under the sink, and Noodge lying next to me on the kitchen floor, also lying on HIS back with his front feet straight up, like HE was working. She said it was the cutest thing ever, but we didn’t get any pictures.
April – Liz’s glasses broke. The plastic frames were four or five years old, and they just broke in half at the nosepiece. She taped them back together at work and was able to finish the workday with them, but they looked mighty nerdy with tape holding them together.
So we went to the mall that night, and hesitantly picked out a pair of frames at Lenscrafters. They weren’t exactly ugly, but she wasn’t thrilled about them. I think what sold her on them was a complete 100% satisfaction-guaranteed refund policy, where she could get all her money back, no questions asked, within 30 days if she didn’t like them.
That night, she tried wearing them but they gave her a headache. Plus, the sides of the frames block some of her peripheral vision, making her feel like she was wearing blinders. The next day, we brought them back. While we were returning them, I figured out that they used her contact lens prescription to make her glasses; you can’t do that. You need slightly different powers, depending on whether your eye correction is a contact lens in contact with your cornea, or is in the form of glasses, which are separated from your cornea by around 14 mm. Now you know. So we got our money back, which was part of their deal.
Then, we went to another vision place in the mall, and it turned out to be a keeper. The place was called “Visionary Optical”, and when we told the guy that Liz’s frames fell apart, he mentioned that he could probably fit the existing lenses to a new frame. In fact, he had a pair of frames right… here! And he popped Liz’s old lenses into a dark-red version of her old frames. For the new frames, he charged us a mere $50, which is WAY less than anything else we looked at. So we spent practically nothing to keep Liz’s good lenses, and Liz is walking around with glasses that look exactly like her old ones, which are very cute. And we’re spreading the word about “Visionary Optical” – there’s one in Southdale, one in Uptown and one in Plymouth. They are truly unlike any vision place I’ve ever seen, and I wholeheartedly recommend them.
Late April – As I was getting into the elevator at my office building, a guy in the elevator asked me if anyone had ever told me that I look just like Joe Satriani? Joe Satriani is the rockin’-est guitarist ever (and it’s hard to believe that the “Surfing With The Alien” album is 20 years old), and he, too, shaved his head a few years back. So I told the elevator guy that that was the coolest thing anybody had said to me all day. And if I could play half as well as Satch, then my life would be very good indeed!Early May – Got the ducts cleaned in my house. It was the first time I had that done since I moved in 10 years ago, and it had probably been 15 years or so since it had been done. I hired a little mom and pop outfit, and cleaning ducts is all they do. The whole company is just the two of them, which is pretty cool.
They backed their van up in our driveway near the side door, then attached one end of a gigantic flexible tube to the intake portion of the ductwork right next to our furnace. The other end of the tube was hooked up to a huge compressor in the van, and its job was to suck everything out of the ductwork. For each duct, the guy fed a high-pressure air hose down, and blew all the junk toward the furnace and the huge vacuum tube attached to the ducts.
It went fairly smoothly, and took about an hour. They showed me a small portion of the crud that they cleaned out, and there was plenty. They could tell that I had pets, which is no surprise. They could also tell that nobody had been smoking in the house, and it was nice to know the previous owners hadn’t smoked either.
Early May – Bought Liz a bike for her birthday, albeit two months early. She and I now have the same model bike, and she can retire the $99 Target bike that she’s been using for the last ten years. We christened it with a 26-mile ride all over town, which ended with a stop for ice cream. I don’t know what it is about bike rides, but they always involve ice cream.
May – Played paintball with a bunch of friends here in town. Learned that I’m a really bad shot. (I couldn’t hit the side of a barn if someone picked me up and threw me into the side of the barn.) Liz, on the other hand, was a wild woman on the course, and kept shooting people in the face. (Unintentionally, she says, but I’m not convinced.) We all wore masks, and the face shots just left big paint blotches on the screen – no severe injuries. Liz did manage to hit me in the left hand, and actually shot my wedding ring. Not sure what that means.
And also learned that I don’t like getting shot at. I guess that’s not surprising, but it adds just a little more to the mountain of respect that I have for police officers and soldiers. Not cool getting shot at. Glad that doesn’t happen much in my line of work…
Late May – Had a really brief trip out east to see family in New York and Washington, DC. We flew into and out of Newark, NJ, and drove the rental car all over. New York and DC are much farther apart than I remembered, and I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.
Right after we flew into Newark, we drove into Manhattan. New York has apparently replaced all the coin-operated parking meters with a centralized system that takes credit cards, which was surprising, but was pretty easy to use. We decided to be all artsy this visit and went to the Museum of Modern Art. Liz hadn’t been there since they remodeled the building and I don’t think I’d even been there, so it was a fine choice. 
Plus, Liz just happened to have a credit card from some particular bank that allowed us to get in free! Woo-hoo! Free art! I enjoyed the MOMA; I got to feel much more cultured than I do at home. Liz took my picture standing next to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” filling my cubist quota for the whole year. And I got Liz’s picture with Elvis, making my “El-Vis with Elvis” picture worthy of inclusion in the museum itself. Maybe if I call it “Two Elvi”…Did you know the MOMA has an actual exhibit for the Helvetica font? It’s 50+ years old and still going strong. Arial, in contrast, was commissioned by Microsoft to be a knock-off of Helvetica, so that Microsoft wouldn’t have to pay to license Helvetica. Ugly, ugly Arial…
In Manhattan, the only things we ate were from vendors on the street. Pieces of fruit, including the best peach Liz ever tasted, pretzels, a hot dog, a meat-kebab or two, and an ice cream sundae. I think I might have had a slice of pizza and an éclair, too, but I don’t think those were from street vendors.
While in Manhattan, we wanted to do something you can only do in New York – go to a Broadway show. I didn’t want to see anything based on the music of Abba. Or Billy Joel. Or Monty Python. Or Winger. (I don’t think that one exists, actually.) Or anything based on a movie, like Legally Blonde, or even worse, on a Disney movie, like the Lion King. Which ruled out most of the shows playing at the time. I chose to see “Rent”, because it began life as a play before being turned into a movie. Not sure that was my smartest choice ever. “Rent” had an excellent production value, uniformly great singers and a few good songs, but lacked any substantive narrative thread. Enjoyable, but I don’t think we’d see it again or recommend it to anyone.
Times Square is pretty disappointing, actually. I don’t know what it was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but nowadays it’s clean but commercial. Chain restaurants and so forth. Worth seeing once, but not really worth returning to.
To head out of Manhattan to mom’s house, I drove up Broadway so Liz could see something north of the Met. We drove past Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th Street, which was made famous by “Seinfeld”. Didn’t get to eat there, though, because it was after midnight and they were closed. The drive home was marred by a sobriety check on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County, which dropped traffic down to one lane and added a full hour to our drive. And yes, it turns out that I was indeed sober.Got to see family in Rockland County, which was nice. My brother has a condo in Suffern, which is at the westernmost corner of Rockland County and looks nothing at all like its portrayal in “Sex In The City”. (No, it’s not Sufferin’.)
Then drove down to DC to see my aunt & uncle, my cousin, and Grandma (the same Grandma with the house in Florida that got damaged by Hurricane Wilma.) What a great city to visit! My cousin lives literally one block from a Metro stop, so once we parked the car in front of her house, we didn’t drive again until we left town.
We spent one day just seeing museums. We spent almost four hours in the Holocaust Museum, and I made it a point to read every single caption while we were there. Then off to the Museum of Natural History, because them dinosaur bones never get old. Got a great picture of Liz with the Hope Diamond. It’s good to hope…
Next day, we spent the whole day seeing monuments. Initially, we wanted to get a tour of the Capitol Building, so we followed the instructions to go to the office of one of our representatives (hello, staff of Keith Ellison!) to get a pass. But there were way too many people in line to actually get the tour, so we hung on to our passes, and we’ll use them next time we’re in town.We walked from the Capitol to the White House, about two miles even though it seems really short on the map, then to the Washington Monument. This is my illustration of the Washington Monument:
It’s very tall.We didn’t have tickets to go inside, so initially, when we walked up to the base of the monument, we sat down on the benches and took a few pictures. After a minute or two, a guard came around and asked if everyone there had tickets. When we said no, he told us “Shh! Don’t say anything and go with those people.” And in short order, we were on the tour!
The Washington Monument is very tall. Very extremely tall. I’ve been in taller buildings, but this one is the tallest in the DC area and you can see for miles in all directions. The observation room is 500 ft up, and the tippy top of the peak is 555 ft and 5.5 inches. Nice! This is probably the reason that the US never embraced the metric system, because 169.294 meters doesn’t have the same ring.
We took pictures from the top, facing the east, north, west and south. It’s very cool, and I heartily recommend the Washington Monument to anyone who visits DC.
Then walked to the Lincoln Memorial. A park ranger gives a short talk at the Memorial a few times a day, and we caught the last one of the day. The crowd listening to him was very small, and I tried to think of unusual questions to ask him. Does the sculpture go all the way around to the back? His hair does indeed go all the way around to the back, but the rest of the sculpture is pretty much featureless on the back side.
We did a bunch more walking and saw more monuments, but you can read about those in books. (That's Ron with his arms spread at the Jefferson Memorial.)We stayed a few days with my cousin, Heidi, in her house in Arlington. She moved in a few years ago and I hadn’t seen the place until now. Great old house, plenty of charm, cool location, and easily-identifiable by its super-bright-red door. We came back home, thinking, “Why can’t our house be that cool?”
In DC, we also saw my aunt Amy and uncle Arthur. Arthur has worked for years for the insurance industry in DC, and has quite a respectable reputation there. When Bob Dole ran for president, I think uncle Arthur was his health advisor. Extremely knowledgeable about health care and the health insurance industry, probably more so than anyone else I’ve encountered. So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw a TV ad for Michael Moore’s film about the health insurance industry, “Sicko”, with a quickie clip of uncle Arthur walking out of a building. I believe Liz and I said to each other, “That’s uncle Arthur!” It certainly looked like him, and it would make sense that he’d be somewhere in the movie. But the TV ad? We kept watching until they showed the ad again. Yup – unmistakable. We haven’t seen the movie yet, but I understand that Arthur is not a big fan of Michael Moore…
We also saw Grandma’s apartment in DC. She’d been there for a year and a half, but I hadn’t seen her or her new place since I cleaned out the old one in Florida. Nice little apartment in an assisted-living complex. Two meals a day, doctor on premises, bankers and hair stylists that come by regularly – a really nice place. And Grandma seems to really like it. She’s surrounded by people to interact with, which is a welcome change from the last few years she was down in Florida. I hope I end up in a place like that when the time comes.
Early June – DJed a wedding for my friend Jill’s sister. Very nice party. They rented out the Wabasha Street Caves, which was originally an underground nightclub in the ‘30s. It was built inside a series of caves, and it was very cool. Kinda clammy, too, even though they have dehumidifiers cranked up non-stop. The food was from Cosetta’s, a terrific Italian restaurant here in town.
Musically, the wedding started off like all my other parties. But once the older folks left, the young folks, including the bride and groom, wanted some recent dance music. And I started to sweat just a little bit; I don’t have a very high opinion of recent dance music, even though I have all of it. I did a 45-minute set of stuff I used to play in my mid-‘90s club days, and it totally killed! Who’da thought that “Rump Shaker” and “Jump Around” would make a comeback? And someone actually requested “Ice Ice Baby”. After I burned through everything I could remember from the mid-‘90s, I crossed my fingers and hauled out the recent stuff. Turns out that I shouldn’t have worried; drunk 20-somethings will dance to pretty much anything they’ve heard on the radio, so I gave them a buncha hits and a good time was had by all. Really good party, actually.
Mid-June – Found out that Liz got into grad school! YAY! She’ll be starting in May, 2008 at St. Mary’s here in Minneapolis, and she’ll be getting a master’s in Nurse Anesthesia. When she’ll be finished in about two years, she’ll be a Nurse Anesthetist. When they have to knock you out, she’ll be the one administering the anesthesia, telling you to breathe deeply and count backwards from 100 by sevens. Note that an Anesthesiologist does essentially the same job but has an MD. She doesn’t need to go to medical school to be a Nurse Anesthetist, which is a relief.
Mid-June – Liz got an aquarium for her betta fish. It’s a rectangular 11-gallon tank, and we put it in our TV room underneath the TV. The TV is on the top of the stand, and the tank is within the stand, so it’s not as electrically dangerous as the picture you have in your head right now.The tank has a filter and a light on a timer, and it looks really nice. She planted some plants on the bottom of the tank and a put a little thermometer on the side, but the fish seemed intent on bustin’ the place up and knocked loose the thermometer and a few plants. So the thermometer and a few plants just float around on the top of the tank, and that’s that. The cats show surprisingly little interest in the fish, which I guess is good.
Initially, Liz bought a few gallons of water that was specially prepared by the fish store, with proper pH and all that. The next time she went in, she talked to the guy about water, and he asked her what part of town she lives in. She answered, Richfield, our little first-ring suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. The guy then told her that Richfield tap water is just perfect for the kind of fresh water tank she was putting together. No extra filtering, no pH adjustment, nothing. Just out of the tap and it’s perfect. The guy told Liz that that’s why virtually all the fish stores in town are located in Richfield, which we had noticed before but hadn’t fully understood. Until now.
Late June – A friend of mine gave us tickets to see a production of “Barbarella” as done by a local tongue-in-cheek dance troupe, “Ballet Of The Dolls”. That’s the very same “Barbarella” as the Jane Fonda movie from 1968, a science fiction classic that came out the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Except that the movie “Barbarella” is laughably awful.
And wouldn’t you know, the ballet production of it was terrific! WAY more enjoyable than “Rent”…
Late June – I’m on the program committee of my radio station, KFAI, and we’ve been working on some changes to the schedule. The last time anyone tried changing the schedule was, like, 13 years ago, and there are some station members that still grumble about it, so we knew we would have to makes these changes carefully.
We solicited proposals for about 13 slots, and received about 60 submissions. So over the course of June, the other program committee members and I all listened to all 60 submissions. For me, it took up nearly every weekend in June. The new schedule is great, but I can’t bring myself to listen to any more KFAI shows yet…
Late June – We saw the movie “Waitress”, then sneaked into an adjacent theater to see “Knocked Up”. Two excellent movies, both of which I heartily recommend. The last time we did this, we saw “Sideways”, then sneaked into “The Incredibles”, which may very well stand as the greatest double feature in movie history.
Actually, both “Waitress” and “Knocked Up” are remarkably similar. Both show how getting pregnant unexpectedly can really screw up your existing life. Both feature casts that are made up almost entirely of TV people rather than movie people. “Knocked Up” has a bunch of people from “The Office” and nearly the entire cast of “Freaks And Geeks”; “Waitress” has that girl from “Felicity”, that woman from “Curb Your Enthusiam” and that guy from “The Andy Griffith Show”(!) And, surprisingly, both come to the same moral conclusion, which I won’t give away because you should really see these films.
Late June – Liz and I took our annual camping trip. We met on this camping trip three years ago, so this was our fourth trip together. This year, we went to a campsite south of Rochester, MN, which was MUCH closer than the Wisconsin trip we’d done in years past. The weather cooperated spectacularly, and we had a great weekend.
The campsite was pretty nice, and they had a list of rules to make sure that it stayed nice. A printed list of rules. 18 rules, to be precise, several of which included fines if they were broken. So that became the running joke for the weekend – a $25 fine for whatever little thing we were talking about.
On the drive down, we were behind the same car for about 100 miles, and this car had the license plate “MOLISSA”. Molissa? What kind of name is Molissa? Actually, it’s fun to say: Mo-Lissa. Try it! It just flows off the tongue, especially if you stretch out the MO to a few seconds. Moooooooooo-lissa.
The day before we got there, there was some heavy rain upstream from us, and the river was too high for canoeing. It wasn’t just us – they also wouldn’t let a particular group’s 26th annual canoe trip on the river. So we drove into town and all rented bikes. Liz and I got a side-by-side tandem bike, which was two independent bikes that were latched together to ensure that we steered in the same direction. It was a fun ride, but the bike weighed easily over 100 pounds, and any uphill pedaling was brutality for us. We rode down a paved trail into the next town for pie. Mmm pie. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who do that; the business cards of the “Aroma Pie Shop” give their address as “on the bike trail, Whalan, Minnesota”. Then we rode back. The next day, we were able to go tubing down the river, which is more my speed than actual canoeing anyway, then showered and drove home. There is a spectacular barbeque place in Rochester, MN called John Hardee’s, and Liz and I stopped there twice to eat, once on the way there and once on the way home. Mmm meat.
Early July – In a moment of weakness at Sam’s Club, I bought a 3-pack of some sugary Kellogg’s cereals. One bag each of Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix. The box was boasting that Trix had an exciting new shape: “round”. Since when does “round” qualify as a “new shape”? I would think that “round” would have been around since the invention of cereal itself, but apparently, “round” is the hip new shape that all the young kids dig nowadays. Those wacky kids with their “round”…
Mid-July – Arranged a low-key surprise party for Liz’s birthday. After she was done with work, I told her to get dressed so we could go out. She figured out that we were going out to dinner, and she even figured out where (oooh! El Meson!), but boy was she surprised to find people she knows in the restaurant! Hey! What are you guys doing here? So we had a table for eight, rather than just us two, and a good time was had by all.
Late July – Saw “The Simpsons Movie”. Along with the rest of America. For opening night (July 27th), which was a Friday, I did 90 minutes of Simpsons-related stuff on “Crap From The Past”.
Hope your summer is going well!
Ron & Liz Gerber
- -
Appendix – Ron’s Crazy Dream: The Optics Of Actual Beer Cans
Actual beer cans make rather terrible optical elements, as best as I can tell.
For instance, let’s consider a beer can used as a laser cavity.
We can apply the mathematics of laser resonators to top and bottom surfaces of the beer can. We’ll assume that the top of the can is flat (R1 = infinity), the bottom of the can is convex with a radius of about 30 mm (R2 = 30 mm), and that the on-axis separation between the top and bottom is about 100 mm (L = 100 mm). We can calculate the g parameters (= 1 – L/R) of each surface (g1 = 1, g2 = -7/3), note that their product does not fall between 0 and 1, and conclude that the inside of a beer can would be an unstable resonator.
We can do similar analysis of a beer can used as a waveguide. It’s a pretty terrible waveguide.
We’ll consider the waveguide to be cylindrical with a diameter of 3.25 inches, with a refractive index of about 1.33 (beer is mostly water, Bud Light especially so) if full and 1 if empty, with aluminum walls with a refractive index of 2 – 7i. There’s a bunch of math involved, which says basically that because the diameter (3.25 inches) is so much larger than the wavelength (550 nm for green light), there would be an awful lot of high-order transverse modes. Not really a good thing.
We can analyze a beer can used as a pinhole camera. It’s not a very good pinhole camera.
Pinhole cameras have a film plane a particular distance back from a pinhole, and the theory is that every ray leaving the object and reaching the film plane passes through the same (x,y,z) location of the hole. Exposure times can be really long, because there’s not a lot of light getting through a pinhole. For a pinhole camera to work well, the hole should be small and round, two things that the beer can tabs are not. A rule of thumb for the size of the pinhole diameter is 1.9 times sqrt (hole-to-film distance length times wavelength). For a green wavelength of 550 nm and a top-to-bottom distance of 120 mm (assuming the bottom is flat, even thought it’s really not), the pinhole diameter should be about 0.5 mm. Based on my casual measurements on a Sierra Mist can that I found in the fridge at work, the can tab is roughly elliptical with major and minor axes of about 24 mm and 16 mm. I don’t remember if beer cans have the extra-wide drinking tabs that sodey pop cans have, but I’m fairly certain that they’re larger than 0.5 mm. Bad news for the pinhole camera!
If you were to put a lens on the top surface of the can, with a 5-inch focal length and a 2-inch diameter, and attach a detector to the bottom of the can, you’d have an odd detection system, which would have an effective numerical aperture of 0.1 along one direction and about 0.07 along the other. Plus, there would be a constant phase shift across the detector, caused because the drinking tab is located off-center (or else it would be hard to drink from!)
We can analyze a beer can used as an integrating sphere, if we attach a detector to the bottom of the can and allow light to enter the top of the can through the drinking tab. Basically, a terrible integrating sphere because the inside of the can is smooth, and you’d want a roughened surface on the inside of the integrating sphere for scattering light.
And so forth! I think that for virtually any optics application you can think of, a beer can does it badly. Mind you, this all came to me in a dream! And I don’t even like beer!
