Joints, fire, and wind

If you thought that subject line was going to lead into a stoner joke you will be disappointed...

Thursday night I twisted my ankle by "rolling" my foot, that thing that can happen where the sole kind of folds to the side underneath your foot. Unfortunately I was running at the time so it caused a bit of damage. It was quite painful for about 20 seconds, then seemed alright so I continued on... about 10 minutes after sitting back down inside it started to hurt again and swell. I had to use crutches to some degree for most of the weekend. Now, however, with the aid of my super-ankle-support hiking boots, I can walk pretty normally, if a bit slowly.

This morning in physics lecture we had an AWESOME demo. Our prof took a metal tube which evidently had holes in the top, though I couldn't see them until he started, and a hose feeding into it. Apparently it was a gas hose, and he set the gas coming out the holes in the top on fire so then there was this tube with a row of little flames poking out of it. Then the cool part: a speaker on the other end of the tube. He adjusted the frequency and the flames changed in height! When it was at a random frequency, they were mostly the same height. When it was at a resonant frequency, standing pressure waves were formed inside the tube and the flames were short, taller, super tall, back down again in a static waveform according to the pressure variations. It was awesome!

It's just starting to get cold and windy in the way I normally associate with most of October and November, and which I'm used to seeing break with a nice rain in mid-December. Since it was already raining quite a bit earlier in the fall, I'm not sure what to expect from the weather this year. Strange.