Tag Archives: periodic table

fourteen ~ quasar

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In recent years, I have been learning math concepts and obscure number facts for each birthday Quinn reaches, in keeping with his own fascination with math. It helps me grapple with things like the slippery acceleration of time, and learning how to accept that my baby is growing up. It brought comfort to me that 10 was an order of magnitude, 11 was indivisible, and 12 was sublime.

I wasn’t sure numbers would be consoling this year. On the day before Quinn’s fourteenth birthday, the United States surpassed 500,000 Covid19 deaths, so the flag today outside my work was flying at half-staff. Quinn has been living solely at his dad’s house since March 14, pi day, so we have now been separated for 346 days with only a few in-person social distance masked hikes infrequently taken. These are numbers from which I can derive no comfort on this birthing day.

That 14 is part of pi, however, is a pleasing aspect of Quinn turning 14. He was born at 3:14 PM, pi o’clock, a time that catches my eye on a digital clock occasionally and makes me smile. So I thought I’d find out if there was anything fun about 14 that might help me create some joyful meaning on a day when I am painfully aware of some numbers whose meanings are devoid of joy.

I asked Quinn during our video call last night whether he thinks 13 and 14 feel different and he said a definitive yes, though he did not articulate the difference. I wrote last year that, “Thirteen is cleaning his room independently, having a passport, opening a checking account, getting a debit card, taking ownership of his google account, having an A in Algebra, reminding me not to buy anything “too dorky” when I went to buy some paper party plates at the dollar store. It’s sitting here writing this blog post while some new teenagers sing Take on Me and fling themselves around the trampoline, then carry out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, emptying bowls of snacks while one of them strums my guitar. Imagine thinking 13 is unlucky. In Italy, where Quinn is heading soon, fare tredici (translated literally, to do 13) is to hit the jackpot! Any way you calculate it, 13 feels incredibly lucky to this mama!”

At least, that’s what it seemed like thirteen was going to be. Instead, we found ourselves in a global pandemic, and so much of what we anticipated about lucky 13 was irrevocably changed. No trip to Italy, nor even to the bank to obtain the debit card, no more friends on the trampoline, not even emptying any bowls of snacks on my kitchen table.

So I hesitate to say what I think fourteen will bring, unsure if the trip to Italy or other much hoped-for events such as reunion with each other and with beloved family members will be occurring during the year he is fourteen.

But I’ll give it a shot anyway. I think fourteen is: taking charge of his own schooling in unprecedented ways. Being informed and opinionated about the wider world. Humor that grows deeper, darker, richer, funnier all the time. Empathy that grows long tendrils reaching ever outward. The first taste of cynicism, of disappointment in his fellow humans. Realism, but also relentless hope. A fervent belief in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice if we push on it right.

I’m going to forgive myself if my assessment of fourteen doesn’t sound as perky as some years. It’s taking courage to show up and write today at all, and I am cutting myself some huge slack if the light of my metaphors does not escape the event horizon of the black hole that has been sucking my motherly soul for nearly a year. I also took myself to the beach briefly, as the sun came out after days of rain on this day of celebrating my son. The first thing I saw in the sand was a fossil, of course.

Then I met Quinn in the lab parking lot and delivered him his “birthday garbage,” a big trash bag full of presents, and I took this one photo of him. Tonight I will watch him open presents over zoom, where they will be piled at the foot of his bed just like in Harry Potter.

And now for some other fun facts about fourteen…

Silicon has atomic number 14. Quinn is a big fan of the periodic table, especially as written by Theodore Gray in his book, Elements:

“Silicon based life forms have been the subject of speculation in science fiction ever since chemists pointed out that silicon, of all the elements, is most like its neighbor, carbon (6), in its ability to form complex molecular chains, in some ways not unlike the long-chain carbon molecules that are reading this text. (That means you.)

“About the only thing that doesn’t have a lot of silicon in it is you: while some sea sponges grow bones of silica glass, your bones, assuming you are not a sea sponge, are calcium phosphate, in the form of rigid hydroxyapatite foam with almost no silicon.”

An honorable mention goes to nitrogen, with its atomic weight of 14.0067 g/mol. As an indispensable component of fertilizer, we depend on it for food. In its liquid form, it cryo-preserves specimens to -196 degrees C, useful for, say, ensuring the integrity of a coronavirus vaccine, or preserving elephant cell lines into which you might want to splice woolly mammoth genes, or putting Han Solo into cryogenic stasis. (Oh wait, that was carbonite).

Quinn has been making an elaborate D and D scenario (character, map, script) for his dad to play, and said that on the province-level maps he makes, the side of one graph paper square is one mile. “Or, square root of two, going diagonally.” Just showing off his knowledge of right isosceles triangle geometry.

Speaking of Diagon Alley, we are closing in on the ending of the final book of Harry Potter, and Quinn was delighted to hear that I had spied someone wearing the sign of the deathly hallows printed on their face mask. I made Quinn some math equations to graph that turn into a message for him that I think will remind him of that symbol. But the message really says I cardioid U Q.

 

In other comfortingly familiar pop culture, 14 appears in Star Wars when Rey, in The Force Awakens, realizes she’s on the Millennium Falcon. “This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in 14 parsecs?” Han of course barks, “Twelve!”

But back to the square root of 2. Last year we were thrilled for Quinn to celebrate a Fibonacci birthday, but 14 also belongs to an infinite sequence of numbers called companion Pell numbers or Pell-Lucas numbers. The closest rational approximations of the square root of 2 in fractions follow a sequence

1/1, 3/2, 7/5, 17/12, 41/29…

The denominators of said fractions are the Pell numbers 1, 2, 5, 12, 29…

And if you double the numerators you get the companion Pell numbers 2, 6, 14, 34, 82…

14 is in that group!

Like the Fibonacci sequence, the Pell companion sequence grows exponentially, like other things that shall not be named, but in this case to powers of the silver ratio 1 + √2. Quinn would happily embrace this ratio, irrational though it may be. Like the golden ratio of Fibonacci, the silver ratio can be represented visually as a spiral. My forever favorite symbol for the passage of time as a mother.

Spiraling outward, we can look at the universe at large for more instances of 14, like Messier object M14, a globular cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus. Better yet, NGC 14, an irregular galaxy in the constellation Pegasus! Not as far away as GNZ11, maybe, but located in a winged horse from some of Quinn’s favorite mythology is good!

His birth story aside (let’s just say maybe his mother was a bit misunderstood), it is said that when Pegasus was born, he flew to where thunder and lightning are released. Everywhere he stepped on earth, springs of water sprouted (naturally, as his dad was Poseiden). My favorite detail: when Zeus rewarded him by transforming him into a constellation, a single feather fell to the earth.

He earned that reward for helping Perseus rescue Andromeda from the sea monster who was going to eat her as punishment for her mom bragging her beauty exceeded that of the sea nymphs. Perseus turned the monster to stone by showing it the decapitated head of Pegasus’s dear old mom Medusa, and they lived happily ever after. So Pegasus will forever shine in the night sky, as will Delphinus, the dolphin who comforted Andromeda while she was chained to a rock at sea.

Anyway, NGC 14 galaxy is irregular because it appears like it is separating apart. I feel that. Separation can feel pretty irregular. It’s not the only galaxy inside Pegasus – there’s a whole cluster. There’s a spiral galaxy in there, some 40 million light-years from Earth. A supernova exploded there in 2014 while astronomers watched. One of the stars in the Pegasus constellation is also the first star known to have a planet orbiting around it, also known as an exoplanet, about fifty light-years from Earth.

Then there’s the Einstein Cross, also located in Pegasus. It’s a quasar, which starts with Q, and is therefore awesome. This quasar is 8 billion light-years from Earth and does a nifty thing called gravitational lensing. Because it sits behind a galaxy from us, one that is 400 million light-years away, and because quasars are intensely luminous, the gravity of the galaxy bends this intense light to project four images of the quasar around the galaxy. And that is just rad.

just a beach picture that reminds me of galaxies

So this Q thing, with its extreme luminosity, gets its powerful energy from matter being sucked into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. It took a while to work this out. Around the time of the flu pandemic just over a century ago, astronomers were figuring out that some of the objects they were looking at in space were galaxies like our own. In the 1950s, some of the objects being detected out among the galaxies had properties that defied explanation. They were thought to have very small sizes, but to put out the amount of light they did, they either had to be enormously powerful for their size, or be traveling at a velocity beyond the speed of any known star. These astronomical puzzles were named quasars. In the 1960s, measurements and observations were made and their implications debated. Were unknown laws of nature invoked?

Though no mechanism could explain the enormous luminous power of quasars, some astronomers held this as the most likely scenario – that they were very small and very far away but packed a lot of punch – more than the energy conversion of nuclear fusion. In 1964 the currently accepted explanation was put forth but was rejected by many because black holes were still theoretical. Now we know that many galaxies, ours included, do have supermassive black holes at their center, but at the time this was unconfirmed.

Quasars played a big part in drawing together the fields of physics and astronomy. In this time of separation, I like to think of things that are instead drawing closer. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the gravitational lensing of quasars, and in 1979 this was confirmed by astronomical observation.

In summary, quasars are found at the heart of galaxies; they are some of the most luminous Q-named objects in the universe, with an energy output greater than the hundreds of billions of stars of our Milky Way. The light from some of the most quasar-y quasars had to have left its source only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang in order to be reaching our eyes, that is how profoundly distant, and bright, quasars can be. And if light from such a corner of the universe can meet our eyes, there are far shorter distances we can hope to traverse in far shorter periods of time, even if the times are unknown for right now, and that is a nice thought. Distances larger than the distance light could travel in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe have been traveled by quasars, because space itself has also been expanding. Wrap your head around that.

And even those distances are smaller than the size of my love for another luminous being with a Q name: fourteen quintillion light-years traveled by the light of a quasar. To me, Quinn is out of this world. Happy Birthday Mighty Q!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ not so little drummer boy

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~11-23 to 12-23-19~

Quinn spent a ton of time playing with his Turing Tumble set the weekend he got home for Thanksgiving. He told me his math teacher has posters up in her room and one of them is a quote by Albert Einstein that says, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” And he said he really could relate to that. He had me sit with him a lot while he worked on the puzzles he is working on – they are getting insanely complicated, and I am almost no help at all, except I am also willing to sit with it longer, with him. So he has gotten a lot of the algorithms solved (such an amazing game/toy/puzzle/brain stretcher/birthday present) and he feels really great when he achieves one, (I think he is about halfway through the 65 activities) but often there is a period of “I’ll never get this one” just before he cracks the code. He is starting to see that pattern, too, so it makes it easier to trust he will be able to solve it if he stays with it. I love how it is encouraging him to persevere.

While he was sitting with one of the algorithms, he was telling me how it was “just a variation” on the puzzle before, because it was based on registers and counting in binary. You know, like (and he started counting on his fingers… in binary.) My jaw dropped, and he said, “I learned that from Vi.” Of course! (I was not sure how to do justice in words to the amazingness I was witnessing, so I made him do it again on video!)

 

 

We had W pancake among family members who came for Thanksgiving, and I just love how she appointed Quinn as her agent. She would need someone to transport something from her hand over to her mom, and she would just glance at Quinn and gesture, and he would jump to do her silent bidding. She crawls over to sit on his lap, completely assured he is one of her people. It reminds me of the way Quinn was sure about Rich’s daughter wanting to color dinosaurs with him when he was five and she was in college.

He was telling someone that all the 7th graders are drinking coffee “these days” and they say it’s what they need to wake up in the morning. He said he thinks because his mom and dad both like it so much, he may like it one day, too, but for now he doesn’t want to drink any. It came up again when we were at home, and it spawned a great conversation about different wiring. He said “caffeine makes people all wired and hyper,” at one point, and I said well, that’s mostly true, but one way you can tell if a person has ADHD is if you feed them caffeine and they calm down – it has the opposite effect on them, because of their brain wiring. So he thought that was fascinating, and it launched a whole other conversation about misunderstandings or misconceptions of what peoples’ learning differences are, and how people think “talented and gifted” means a person should easily have all A grades, and how they don’t realize that there are some things that are really a struggle for him even though he is talented and gifted. I thought it was interesting to hear him identify that way!

We did a lot of logic puzzles this week. We do them a lot while we eat. Sometimes the clues are roundabout and you have to go over them a bunch of times as you accumulate new information in order to make sense of them. And other times a clue will just say “the person who ate toast is not Janet” and you can rule something out directly. Quinn said of one of these clues, “well that was explict” pronounced like I just typed it: “explikt” and I knew he meant explicit so I said explicit, and he said, “it’s not explict?” And I wrote it down so he could see the second i, and he said, “oh, well, in plants vs. zombies, they left out the second i. (Note to self, he learns words from video games! Not just books.)

He is SO LARGE. He needed hugs and snuggles this week, and I do my best but it is hard to actually let him on my lap… I still do, but I basically give him a very short countdown from ten. We invented a “snug” which is a cross between hug and snuggle, it’s not standing, it’s sitting on me, but it’s very, very brief. When we have time, we do longer snuggles on the couch with either his legs or torso draped over me, but not both.

I am reading the self-driven child, a good book recommended on the tilt parenting podcast. This week I was getting to the chapter on radical down time, and how important it is for learning and general well-being, and how we need to stop jam packing our children’s schedules and managing their downtime like, “shouldn’t you be doing SAT test prep if you don’t have something to do right now?” Instead we should say, “let’s snug.”

I just love watching his biweekly swim lesson. He is the absolute most awkward swimmer the world has ever seen and is so earnest and so into working on improving! This was the first time she attempted to teach him backstroke! He has been working on front crawl for a few lessons now, and he is impressively gangly at it so far, but she figured she’d try backstroke. The first attempt on his back, his arms were still going forward so he just folded in half and sank to the bottom. The next attempts were comically awkward too, but he improved each time. He would get his arms kind of going, but then lean his head too far back and reverse somersault and go under. He would get his arms kind of going but get stuck and you could see his arm pause mid stroke so he could think what his other arm needed to do… long pauses. He’d sometimes roll onto his side or go under again, because of whatever he ended up doing with whichever arm. He was working on the hands so his elbow would be bent at a 90 degree angle, or he’d work on the arms but just get stuck in the middle. His teacher is so good with him. And he just kept going back and starting again.

When he woke up Friday to do his math review he made it out of bed over to the couch and laid back down. He needed extra rest more than math review. Radical down time. So I encouraged him to not stress the math if he felt he could handle doing it over the weekend and he said he could. It crossed my mind he had seemed extra emotional and hungry all week, so I had him get up to the measuring station and put a new mark on the wall – sure enough, he is growing.

Friday was going to be committed cubs day, the second one of the year, and he missed the first one and sorely wanted to be included in it this time. He had a few assignments he needed to have teachers sign off on, and he did a lot to chip away at it over the course of the week, but got home Thursday night and was down because he had forgotten his one last signature, which he could have gotten during class because the assignment was finished. I let him problem solve, and he decided there was still a chance he could do it in the morning, and while that did not guarantee he could do CC day, he wanted to still try. He told me Mrs. F had said they would be free reading in class Friday so people could finish up assignments, and so his plan was to ask her right away to go see Mr B to get his last signature. He even put a post-it note in his book (Ender – speaker for the dead) right with the bookmark, so he would remember to do it even if he went to start doing his free reading. When he came out of school on Friday, he was so pleased because, “I made it in!”

Speaking of Ender, Quinn loved the concept of paired beings from the books. In the story, piggies are paired with trees as an adaptation to protect them from a planet-wide plague. Quinn stretched the concept to a human-star pairing.

I had encouraged him to speak his idea into a google doc so he could harness the way his brain is able to articulate ideas verbally much more quickly than he can get those ideas to come out of his typing fingers. I had been talking to him about the speech-to-text options on numerous occasions, but had not gotten him to try it yet, and this was the perfect opportunity. Here is my transcript of an audio recording I took as a backup while he was speaking into a doc:

“…And then once the star gets even stronger it would start smashing carbon into oxygen and once it gets to its strongest point which is usually right before it supernovas, it starts smashing oxygen into iron and I was thinking, well, if you created some sort of, like, could a man, could human beings create a man made star that could smash together stuff to create like an atom with a whole bunch of stuff like a whole bunch of protons and electrons and neutrons and then harness that… and this would be a star that’s the size of like a chrome book, it would be a really small star… like you could fit it in a fish tank… or in a drum. But then the star would create something like fermium atoms or something like that and the fermium atoms would then be used in like a nuclear laboratory or something like that and you would split the fermium atom into like a whole bunch of neutrons and protons and electrons, and you would use those neutrons and protons and electrons to basically make a whole bunch of atoms out of those separated piles of neutrons and protons and electrons. And then if the theory went right then it would become like speaker for the dead where all the animals on Lusitania are paired with a plant and they basically just coexist so it would be something like each human would create like their own star, their own personal little star the size of their chromebook, or their drum, if they have one, and then use their star to like get some fermium atoms, which they would split up, and then use those atom pieces to make more atoms to get the star bigger, and then like once the human dies of old age, the star should then be approximately the size of a human, and at that point the star would then use its power of making atoms to create another human, like create a new human child, at which point it would supernova and then that human child would grow up with its own personal star and so on and you could pair humans and stars… with like a weird biological bond but yeah… and then… yeah….”

“So that’s what you wanted to get out of your brain onto the page! Isn’t that awesome, look…”

“And I typed several paragraphs!”

“And so adams are going to have to change spelling so do this cool trick ready? Go up to edit on the bar, and go to the find and replace, find all “adam” and replace with “atom”. So if you said a word 50 times and it did them all the wrong way you can just replace.”

“You can replace all adams. And ‘madams’ haha.”

“’When sister gets even stronger’… I think it’s supposed to be ‘when the star’…..”

I wanted to capture a raw version of what it’s like trying to hang in there with this kid who is mashing up Ender’s game and the periodic table, contemplating the synthetic elements of the actinides series and seeing what he can do with them to advance the genre of science fiction! I’m trying to provide him some tools, fitting those in edgewise, trying to keep my head above the current as the absolutely torrential flood of imagination comes pouring out. This is a pretty great example of what it’s like.

This month had some sadness; Quinn’s friend Pippin is moving away.

His voice has lowered dramatically the past month or two. I am not hearing a lot of cracking, but what I have noticed is that his laugh remains a few octaves above his speaking voice. I do not know if he will keep that long term, but hearing him reminds me so much of my older brother’s voice and laugh right now, the way he speaks in a mellow tenor but his laugh reaches up to tickle the rafters. My brother’s laugh is one of my very favorite laughs in the world, and one of my very favorite things about him, and it would not be a disappointment if Quinn inherited this trait. Even if it is for a temporary period, I’m thoroughly enjoying the way his laughs ring in the air, jingling like the bells at the upper reach of his mallets, perhaps because they contrast so with his new low speaking register in the timpani section.

At his band concert, his teacher made a brief intro of the first song, little drummer boy, saying they did have one of those (M is very small), and also a not-so-little drummer boy, and a drummer girl. Mine is the not-so-little one! He was on the snare drum for all three songs! And he was absolutely wonderful! He played both with and without the snares engaged (the beginning of little drummer boy starts out with it disengaged and sounding like a tom). He played some pretty complicated parts! Triplets, rolls, lots of variations. He did so well! He was holding so still for the first song I wasn’t convinced he was drumming, but then on the several measures he was not playing but counting, he bopped around just like he used to when he was playing sleigh bells last year. I think the rhythms he was playing were seriously challenging, enough to really keep him on his toes!

Last weekend was Turing tumble, this weekend was Rubik’s cube!

 

He worked on his cube for the entire day Saturday while I was at farmer’s market, and solved it. By the time I got home, he was a pro. If you watch that very long video, you can see him solve it again, and if you notice he is not pleased, it is because he “figured out” that there are “multiple solves” to the cube, based on the orientation of the Rubik’s emblem on the white face of the cube; there is a solution where it is right side up, and if you have it in the stand you can see red, yellow, blue. Apparently, he spent a good part of the day after solving it his first time, trying to get it solved to that solution, and it was thwarting him. Because perfectionism. But also because of staying with the problem longer.

After farmer’s market we went to get a Christmas tree. After we chose our tree and the helper had set it into our truck, Rich went to pay, but Quinn noticed the tree wasn’t all the way tucked in so the tailgate would close. Quinn jumped up and angled the trunk where it needed to go in the one corner so the top would go in the opposite corner and not stick out the back. I love it when I see him take initiative to fix something or do a job that needs doing, without being asked or having it pointed out at all.

When we got home I asked him to work on cleaning up his room a little bit so that his Turing tumble could move from the living room back to his room to make room for the tree. He just jumped right to it, no complaints, and organized some of his Jurassic park legos that he had out on the floor into a lego box, and put the instruction booklets into the right section of the accordion file, etc., again without me having to point out or assist with these steps.

In his video production elective, he learned about a fun music making module in chrome. For science he had to make a poster about an element in the periodic table, so he picked boron. He really liked the boron entry in his elements book.

He worked on cubing quite a bit more, and he also sent me a bunch of texts about wanting to collect all the different ones. He has the standard 3×3 one, but wants to get 2×2 next, then 4×4, 5×5 etc up to 11×11. Then and only then does he want to get the triangle and other shape ones.

Handmade solstice present for his dad.

I feel grateful for having gone through what we did when Quinn was little, and approaching learning in a self-driven way from the start, because he ended up knowing the difference between school and learning, and still knows it. Otherwise I doubt he would spend weekends doing hard puzzles, or light up like a Christmas tree this morning when I said “I’ve heard you can program robots to solve Rubik’s cubes” as we drove to school. The boy has a lego robotics kit coming to him for Christmas, so I know future weekends will be occupied with such things.

Finally, for the grand finale this month, Quinn rocked his Half green belt test!