Patrick M Brennan
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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me : I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun. I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats. I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality, and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm an idealist? I did, OK.) I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Twinkle Indeed

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.
We know you're a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you're shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I'll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I'll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.
posted by Patrick Brennan 11:26 PM | link

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Patrick M Brennan Programmer, Playwright, Righteous Geek