Funeral Dirge.

Today there was a death in my family. Bertha, my 1998 Honda minivan, broke down. I am inconsolable. Here's how it happened:

So I was driving around, minding my business after a fun dinner at 5 guys burgers and fries. With far too many fries to be healthy. Anyways. Andro and I intended to do these two physics problems there and eat delicious burgers at the same time. That didn't happen; we would much rather eat fries rather than do problems. On the way home to actually work on problems, Bertha started to make some funny noises. At first I thought it was the gravel in the road but then the sound got progressively louder and then the car jerked and sputtered and the stearing wheel gave too much resistance and then I thought the car would blow up and I feared for my life. Andrea was laughing her head off. I pulled into the parking lot of an ice cream shop that was close by and called my dad to come assess the situation.

Full disclosure: Apparently Bertha is not dead, per se. A belt came off where it's supposed to be, so it isn't broken, but they need to figure out why it moved since that could be indicative of a greater problem. Also the check engine light has been on for the past month and I didn't check it out. Also the CE light is always on so it really didn't mean anything.

At the ice cream place Andrea and I tried to work on physics but obviously we got no work done. It was cold and the sun in the sky obviously lied to us that morning about the temperature since I was not well-equipped for the cold. My T-shirt gave me no cold defense. +0 ice def. Pathetic.

We ended up going back to my house amidst a lot of tears on my part to finish these two problems. Did you know that the moment of inertia for a triangle rotated along its height is 1/12*b*h*h*h? Yeah neither did we. We know the answer but we couldn't get the answer through many, many, MANY derivations and anti-derivations. It was awful. At one point we thought we had it. We were off by .5 B*H. recognizable by the simple triangle area formula. But lambda does not equal that. And we forgot to square the distance in the parallel axis theorem. Oy. We were so off. Oh well. We tried. I think.

Sitting Shiva

Dan