Category: Miscellaneous

My wife loves dogs; I get along with them. For several years, we had two Shih Tzu dogs. Tina was adopted when she was a pup and was a pretty good companion. Did not mind very well and had an obsession with food, any kind of food. Also loved to eat rabbit poop which did not agree with her digestive system all the time.

By 14 years old, she was definitely showing her age. Early in April 2020 she really started to decline. She used to bark at my wife to get treats and stopped doing that. Then stopped eating and drinking. She could still walk slowly but that was getting difficult. She mostly stayed in her bed and did not move much. She developed a weird smell and the various signs we noticed pointed to organ failure.

We had discussed that when such a time came, we were not going to make heroic efforts to intervene medically just to extend her life a couple of months, which probably would not be vey pleasant. Time cannot be reversed.

Over a weekend, she seemed to be hovering on not being able to hang on much longer and we were looking into where to take her for a humane end. On a Monday, she seemed to rally a bit but on a Tuesday, she seemed to be in really bad shape. She had crusty eyes and something odd was oozing out of her mouth. We decided that it was time.

At this point, she was not moving and the smell was getting bad. Since I am not the emotional one, I took her to a dog shelter. I wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the back seat of my car and drove the 20 minutes or so to the shelter. This was as the COVID pandemic was quickly ramping up so a lot of places were closed and traffic was lighter than normal.

When I got there, I scooped her up and carried her to the front of the building and read a sign that said that there were to be no pets brought in. So back out to the car, back onto the back-seat, windows rolled down slightly and I went back to the building to fill out more paperwork (had some printed out already) and pay the fee.

I was told to drive around to the side of the building where I would meet a worker to hand over Tina. I did and the worker came out, I picked up Tina, handed her to the worker, petted and stroked her for a few seconds, said goodbye and left.

The strange thing is over the 45 minutes or so from picking her up at home to handing her over, she never whimpered, whined, moaned or shook. She did at least some of those if we took her to the groomer. When I handed her over, she never growled or made any sounds and seemed so peaceful as if absolutely nothing was wrong. One would never guess how bad she looked two hours earlier. Did she know that her last breath was perhaps about 30 minutes away?

It was a tough day, very hard on my wife.

We have the second dog, Miss Bella. She is a few years younger, we think. Being a rescue, nobody knows. She took it very hard as well and has not been the same since. Who knows when her day will come?

https://www.rainbowsbridge.com/Poem.htm

Most non-physics people who do not know the difference between a bosom and a boson have heard of the equation that arose out of Albert Einstein’s famous theory of special relativity:

E = mc²

This simply says that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. The actual equation that Einstein came up with is:

E₀ = mc²

Here, E₀ is called rest mass, the mass that something has when it is not accelerating. Minimizing motion and maximizing rest is something that I can identify with.

This is a beautiful equation (mathematicians like to call certain equations “beautiful”) and its simplicity probably makes it very appealing. One can solve it and rearrange it without having to resort to MATLAB or Mathematica. Not that this is the only such equation. There is, for instance:

This is also a beautiful equation that informs quite a bit in a very succinct formula. Yet I never hear sports announcers make references to Maxwell’s equations.

Oh well, naively letting my weight and mass be the same thing within the constant (?) gravity field of my humble abode, a place I have spent an inordinate amount of time resting in for most of the last year, it easy to calculate the energy that I have. I arrive at: 7.2 x 10¹⁸. Carrying through the units, as any good engineer or scientist must, we also arrive at: (kilograms x meters squared) / seconds squared. This just happens to conform to the SI unit of joules, ergo (another cool mathematical term) I am consistent.

That is a ginormous number, one that even the United States government would be impressed by. They have not (yet) managed to spend that many dollars (or pennies) in one year. Not from lack of trying from our feckless “leaders.”

One would think that with such a large amount of energy, I could put up numerous quality antennas, paint both the inside and outside walls of my house, rebuild the kitchen, achieve DX honor role and many other things all before Good Morning America signed off.

However, I have noticed something. Over the last several years, my weight has crept upwards. I suppose that this could be because a huge blob of viscous lower Earth gunk has settled below my humble abode and thus increased the gravity field that I rest in. It is always handy to have something to blame one’s foibles on, anyway.

But, at the same time, my total energy has been on the decline. This does not make sense; according the Einstein’s equation, every time eat too many nachos, my energy should soar.

My doctor informs me that my situation is not exceptional to just me. I’m not sure since I suspect that few of her other patients geek out over the phenomenon that one can synthesize an arbitrary waveform by the summation of a judicious selection of plain sinusoids of proscribed amplitudes and phases. I do not know what is wrong with those other patients but this seems like such an incredible thing that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission would invoke the famous line: “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is.” However, it can be easily proven that this is in fact valid.

My good doctor and many other medical professionals seem to frequently say that the way to increase one’s energy is to decrease one’s weight. This would imply that there is a reciprocal relationship between energy and weight and thus Einstein’s equation should be written as:

E = c² / m

The medical profession has seemed to show that Einstein’s most famous equation is wrong.

QED, ipso-facto and all that jazz.