Stories

Six Words: Fixture, Crosswalk, Other, Arrange, Asset, Example

A common fixture at crosswalks in big cities are pedestrian warning lights, telling people when to walk, and when to wait. Sometimes they display timers when walking is permitted, showing how much time is left before it will change back to displaying Don’t Walk. There are a few different arrangements as to what these warning lights can display. In some other countries, parts of France, for example, the walk sign is a little, animated green man. Parents tell their children, and tour guides tell visitors, to wait for the green man before crossing a street. These walk, don’t walk lights, are a real asset in saving lives.

Six Words: Cassette, Positive, Notorious, Density, Uncertainty, Interest

This week five of the Nobel Prize awards were announced. The prize in Physics is always the second one announced, and is usually the one that interests me the most, although they are often notoriously difficult to understand. This year’s Physics Prize was awarded to three people whose work in quantum mechanical tunneling seems to challenge the density of matter.

The Nobel Peace Prize was announced on Friday. While there was uncertainty about who the recipient would be, I was positive that a certain someone who has been campaigning for it would not be the recipient.

The three winners will split about $1.2M, but they’ll each get their own medal. Each medal will come in a nice cassette. Some will simply leave the cassette open to display it, but others will choose to frame it so they can hang it on a wall. I was surprised that the medals are made of green gold. I’d never heard of green gold until I researched what they are made of. The green gold medal is then gold plated, maybe so no one is green with envy?

Six Words: Trustee, Calorie, Exemption, Survey, Cater, Lemon

The trustee of estate sent an annual survey to each of the beneficiaries of the trust, inquiring about their projected needs in the coming year. They were also reminded to watch their calories, because the trust encouraged them to take care of themselves and to watch their diets.

A couple of the beneficiaries discussed the reminder during a catered birthday party and decided that eating the lemon meringue pie should be an exemption to their usual dessert-free diets.

Six Words: Center, Particle, Constellation, Cinema, Requirement, Regret

I don’t know what you’re going to regret more this afternoon: this list of words or that you let a geek like me participate. You’ll probably think you’d rather be at the cinema, because I’m going to tell you a little bit about the God particle.

For most of us it was a requirement to learn some science in school. You probably learned something about atoms and that atoms are like a constellation with protons and neutrons in the center, and electrons spinning around them. That description of an atom was described in 1913 by Niels Bohr, so it is called the Bohr atom (NOT the bored atom, and I won’t bore you much longer).

When some students – surely not you – learned about the Bohr atom, they wondered why they needed to know that at all and hoped they could remember it long enough to pass a test. But not physicists. Physicists want to know what protons and neutrons and electrons are made of, and what makes them stick together. Today we know that the things that make them stick together are called bosons. There are also officers on ships called bosons, but they’re boss men, not sub-atomic particles. The bosons in atoms get their name because a man named Bose first identified them.

Of course physicists want to know what bosons are and the answer to that was proposed by a group of people, including a man named Peter Higgs. Because the Higgs boson was so hard to find, when Leon Lederman wrote a book about it, he was going to title the book, The God Damn Particle, but the publisher wouldn’t let him, so the title was shortened to The God Particle.

Class dismissed.

Six Words: Musical, Cattle, Kidney, Forget, Bottle, Aquarium

A lot of the fish that we eat is farm raised, and of course we can’t forget that all of the meat that we eat is farm raised. Fish and fish farms have some things in common with cattle and cattle farms. Cattle are kept from wandering away by fences. Fish are kept from wandering away by the edges of their container. Cattle farms are kind of musical because of the mooing and burping. If you’ve ever had an aquarium, you may have seen bubbles from fish burping, but you’ve never heard the sound of a fish’s burp.

Fish and cattle are both dependent on water for life. Cattle often have access to a stock pond where they drink, and wade, in water. Fish do everything in water. Fish and cattle both have kidneys and digestive tracts, and you know what that means. It means be careful where you fill your water bottle.

Six Words: Opponent, Factor, Ostracize, Shadow, Letter, Infect

The Health and Human Services Secretary is an opponent of vaccines! He has issued letters and policies to that effect. He doesn’t factor in how many people will get sick or how many children will be infected with preventable diseases. Some will suffer lifelong disabilities. Some will die. It is no wonder that he is ostracized by scientists and the medical community and even by his own family. Many members of his family cast a long shadow because of what they have contributed to this country. This man doesn’t cast a shadow at all. Neither do vampires.

(referring to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)

Six Words: Radiation, Determine, Dribble, Unlawful, Clinic, Governor

Radiation was never supposed to escape from the reactor. But as people started showing up at the clinic with their eyes glowing and an aura of light around their heads, the medical staff became suspicious that radiation probably was escaping, and not just a dribble of radiation. The head of the clinic contacted the head of the reactor and was surprised at her reaction. She said that they knew about the leak, that it had been going on for months, and they were working to determine the site of the leak and to fix the problem. She also said the governor was aware of the problem but didn’t want the public to know because it would cause panic and because the finances of the entire state would be impacted. She even said it would be considered unlawful to tell the press. What would you do if you were the clinic manager?

Six Words: Cooperation, Product, Ancestor, Cottage, Variety, Landowner

We’ve all seen cottage cheese. It’s sometimes served on the salad bar during brunch, so even if you’ve never bought it yourself, you’ve at least seen it. Most of us have eaten it. But have you ever wondered where it comes from?

The product looks a bit like cotton balls. One legend is that some clever landowner, living in a small cottage in a remote area, discovered a plant growing in his field, cultivated it, selected the variety that produced the whitest, roundest, largest balls of the stuff, and with refinement they became the ancestor of today’s cottage cheese. Then, with cooperation among landowners in neighboring cottages, the volume of cheese balls they were harvesting and storing in their cottages grew and grew and they realized there was a marketing opportunity for the stuff, even a way to get rich.

Speaking of ways to get rich, it turns out that the sap of the cottage cheese plants is also marketable. The first name they thought of for this sap was cotton juice, but people would probably think that is what you make cotton candy from. Many other names were considered as well, as they tried to settle on a way to become rich. As they brainstormed, they began writing down their ideas on a white board. At the top of the white board, they wrote a title line that said: “Way to get rich”.

Suddenly, one of them yelled: “That’s it, right there in front of our eyes.”

“What is?” asked the others.

We should call the sap “way”, but we need a catchy way to spell “way”. And that is how the whey, “w-h-e-y” sap from the plant and the ball part of the plant came to be products in our grocery stores today.

They even created a catchy jingle to help sell their product. You all know it:

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her cheese balls and whey.

Six Words: Intervention, Category, Combine, Voyage, Identity, Realism

The pictures I took on the voyage combine several categories of living things and inanimate objects. In trying to capture nature, I hoped to show both realism and places where people had intervened. When a photograph is of a bird, it is a personal challenge to try to determine its identity. The software on my phone makes that much easier than it used to be, but is that cheating?

Six Words: Explain, Aware, Eavesdrop, Colleague, Venus, Picture

The Florida Congressman was not aware that people were eavesdropping when the Congressman was telling one of his colleagues that he had a picture of the Mount of Venus of one of the interns and explaining how he got it. It led to the resignation of the disgraced Congressman.