Leibniz Clockwork

In what situation would eigenVolts be a valid unit?

Maybe Eigen Volts, eigen volts, Eigenvolts, or what have you. Unit-term capitalization plays fast and loose with rules. But whatever.

If you have a matrix of potentials, you might be able to address the matrix eigenvalues as eigenvolts, but you wouldn’t do that addressing the value itself. An eigenvalue of 2.3V would just be 2.3V. To meaningfully use a term eigenvolts, you’d have to….what? Be describing potential degeneracy?

There should be a situation wherein eigenvolts would be useful, but I can’t think of one.

When you meet kids you don’t know, the best form of contact seems to be the high five.

Some kids, especially the small ones, try to hug everyone, and that’s nice. But some get very shy. You can see their minds working. “Who is this stranger? Why is he grabbing me? Why are my parents allowing this?” They don’t like it.

A similar train of logic applies to handshakes.

High fives seem to be the better course because the kid does all the fiving. You just stand there with your hand up. Kid gets excited? Great. Kid barely touches your hand? Still great. Kid hides behind a parent’s leg? Not a problem.

In general, I’ve found most do get a little excited because they’re the ones with power. They have agency, mild as it is, but mild agency is just right for smaller kids. They don’t go mad with power at high fiving an adult.

Well, some do, but those are mad with power to begin with. Also, how mad with power can a six-year-old get giving a high five?

Don’t answer that.

I’ve been listening to a lot of early Greta Van Fleet recently. I haven’t gotten into The Battle at Garden’s Gate yet.

Mara ebook (Kindle) is free on Amazon for 5 days starting tomorrow. It’s really an adult book about children, but a kid-safe adult book. There should be another category for that.

The wrong movies get remakes. Good movies usually don’t need remakes. (Usually. Some movies were good when they came out and the remakes are good, like Jumanji. That was a technological update, which made sense) Bad movies don’t get them. Does anyone really want to see a Howard the Duck remake? But movies that could have been great but weren’t don’t get remakes, and they should. Someone should remake the Hobbit with a cogent script, pacing, and editing.

I need to go grocery shopping.

A CME hitting Earth today was supposed to cause effects visible as far south as Colorado. I went as far out as Kenosha Pass but couldn’t find clear sky.

I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights.

From talking to my friends, I think they aspire to improve their kids, teach the young, and make a better, wiser, kinder generation for the future.

Instead, they mostly try to teach their kids not to lick the wall sockets.

The kids hear ‘lick the wall sockets’ and run off to tell their mothers Dad said they can lick the wall sockets.

My friends who are Dads all look very tired.

If boy meets girl, boy and girl get along, they have a relationship, and everything ends well, that’s not a story.

Fiction is different from real life.

Someone is bailing out Evergrande.

I’ve got two things really cooking right now.

One I write exclusively on hard-copy, as in physical notebooks with nice paper, a mechanical pencil, and eraser. That’s fun, because top quality equipment (good notebook, pencil, eraser) collectively run about $20. Most of that is long term too. The pencil isn’t done when the story is, nor the eraser. The story will probably take a few notebooks, so maybe a few bucks more there.

Writing is interesting because the hard part, writing the damn story, is also the cheapest. Editing, more editing, layout, etc. are all reasonably expensive, but the really fun part isn’t.

In case you’re curious, Kuru Toga pencil, Pentel Hi-Polymer eraser, and Maruman notebook.

Those are all Japanese companies. Is notebook-writing big in Japan?

I like the Kuru Toga metal pencil bodies. Plastic ones are fine, but the metal ones have just the right amount of knurling so I can get a comfortable grip without it ripping up my fingers. The erasers on the pencils are terrible, so I use the Pentel ones. Those are about perfect.

The notebook is a N236ES with 70g/m^2 paper, which is perfect for pencil writing. I rarely use pens, so I don’t know how it is for that. They use a nice spiral binding. The other notebook I really like, Mnemosyne (also by Maruman, now that I look), uses a wire comb binding which keeps losing pages. Their wires are bent so each hole has two wires, but the wires stop to bend back. That leaves a little hole where pages can fall out. These ones have a normalish spiral binding.

The big problem with pencil writing, dragging your hand through a written line, is an issue, and the slick paper doesn’t help. I sometimes cock the notebook at an angle to avoid it. A rougher paper like newsprint might fix that, but I don’t like writing on newsprint.