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While preparing a tall mug of tea, I had some interesting thoughts about silverware.  We have a bunch of different sets of silverware all mixed up in my house, so when using utensils one is presented with a conundrum.  Do we specifically select which utensil from which set is preferable, or do we surrender ourselves to random chance and just grab one?  I would argue that it is best to choose, as I have discovered that the different sets tend to be useful for different things.

First of all, some of the sets are simply bigger and bulkier than the others.  These tend to be good for serving food.  However, the spoons from one of the thicker sets are also my first choice for cereal, soup, yogurt, and almost all liquid dishes.  The exception is hot drinks, which need to be stirred.  Tea requires a long-handled heavy teaspoon.  It is important that it be a teaspoon to allow for the proper amount of honey.  And if it is not long-handled and from one of of the heavy sets, it will overheat quickly and become useless for stirring, as it will be too hot to touch.  Other hot drinks do not necessarily require a teaspoon, as they usually just need to be stirred.  But it is still important to use a heavy set, as the same thermal restrictions apply.

The various butter knives are entirely interchangeable.  However, we have two sets of sharp table knives, one that is distinctly steakish, and one that is sort of para-steakish.  The steakish set is sharper and more heavily serrated, so I find it especially useful for bagels, where I can use the same utensil to first cut the bagel and then spread cream cheese.  This then requires the invocation of a fork for lox and onions, but this is a matter I will deal with shortly.  The para-steak-knives are somewhat jacks-of-all-trades.  They can be used as butter knives in a pinch, but also work fairly well for cutting, especially fruit.

Forks are somewhat more straightforward.  I always prefer the smallest forks from one of the light sets.  The heavier ones are just not accurate enough to be used when eating.  I find it difficult to eat anything with anything as large and non-dexterous as these.  Good for spearing potatoes, perhaps, but not for the delicate task of conveying food to my mouth.

Clearly, there’s a lot of depth to this topic.  It seems petty, but I think that my thought process on this matter represents a lot of the way I think about things like efficiency.  I.e. is it useful for me to use a specific type of silverware over another in a certain situation, or is a waste of my time to even be thinking about it?

Perhaps I will continue in the future with a discussion of our similarly fragmented glass, plate, and bowl populations.

Currently Physics is being accomplished.  Napping was not.

Perhaps when one thousand of these merge, they form Nano Boulevard.

I have just returned home.  My various meetings went very well, and a couple of us went to see Milk after we had dinner.  I had already seen it, and was happy to do so again.  It did not disappoint.

And now, to bed.  I have to wake up early for school, and I need to pack tomorrow evening.  I was supposed to do it tonight when I got home, but I had not originally planned on going to the movie.  Sleep is more important.

I just got back from a friend’s Christmas party, which was excellent.  Today was our last day of school; we are off until January 5th.  I had a bunch of people over at my house for the third night of Hannukah, and we were here until about ten, so I only was at the last hour or so of my friend’s party, but it was a fabulous evening overall.  At my house we ate a lot of food, and played Charity Dreidel Smackdown, a game we invented last year where you play a normal game of Dreidel (which is entirely luck-based) and whoever wins gets to choose which charity all of the money gets donated to.  My youngest sister won and chose Heifer International, so we are donating all of the money (and matching it ourselves).

Apparently I missed sledding at my friend’s house, since the party started at seven and I got there at ten-thirty, but I did get there for the present swap (I brought brownies, and received a rubber fish for putting over a trailer hitch), and I saw A Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time.  I feel like much more of a man now.  Also, I surprised everyone by knowing all of the words to the Christmas carols they sang.  Christmas carols are awesome.  For many years, I have gone caroling with some close friends, and I hope to again this year.  It is a ton of fun.

Tomorrow I will be sleeping extremely late, and getting a leg up on a rather daunting homework load.  My old Calculus BC class might have a reunion this weekend and go out for Chinese food, which would be a lot of fun.

I am glad to have a vacation.

I just got back from my school’s faculty holiday party.  Since my dad works at the school, I was invited.  I had an excellent time.  One rather intriguing thing that happened was that I discovered a Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate bar that was packaged upside down.  Chocolate bars are in the shape of a trapezoidal prism, and usually the longer side of the trapezoid is the one on the side of the wrapper with the seam that you peel to open.  The shorter side, with the ingots and respective logos stamped into it, is on top, where the brand is printed on the wrapper.  However, this one was backwards.  It was very confusing, and I have saved the chocolate for posterity, and further consultation with the requisite authorities.  My statistics teacher and I discussed the implications this has for quality control, but given our low sample size (there were no other chocolates of the same variety [thus n=1]), we could not draw any statistically significant conclusions.

So it goes.

There is a man here jumping rope at incredibly high velocity. I estimate his jump frequency to be about 5 Hz, giving an angular velocity of 10pi rad/s. If the jumprope has a radius of about 4 feet, this gives a tangential velocity of about 125.663 ft/s. That’s pretty fast.

My backpack got a lot heavier today. It looks as though I may be doing an independent study of Calculus 4, so I’m now carrying around the Anton Calculus book, which is almost 1500 pages long. I haven’t even received my Chemistry or Statistics books yet.
My academic load this year looks to be quite heavy, if you will.