Its 8:58 am. Got to work a bit later today. Kids got up around 7:30 and I didn’t bother to prepare my lunch or gym stuff before then. We sang along with some kids songs at breakfast, head shoulder knees and toes, wheels on the bus, itsy bitsy spider, 5 little ducks. All of Alexandra’s favorites.
The day care center we checked out yesterday is in kind of a crappy neighborhood, near a desolate, half-abandoned plaza. The day care center seems fine but I’m not that excited about sending Alexandra and Harvey there for a full day. It seems a bit dirty, and there is a lot of kids per class, 9-10 kids per teacher. We’re still trying to figure out what exactly to do in the fall for child care since we let Jessica go.
I had a sushi lunch with Dushyanth at 11:30. I learned that at age 9 he moved from New Jersey to Indiana, a small town west of Indianapolis, and grew up feeling like a total outsider. It sounded like a pretty painful childhood. I could relate being that I also felt picked on a fair amount growing up, maybe in part because I was smarter than most kids. Or maybe because I gave off that feeling, haha. And that I didn’t respond to being picked on like I didn’t care. We also chatted about fatherhood, and the weird dichotomy in our mind’s that, when we’re away from our kids, we think about wishing to spend more time with them. But when we’re with them, it can be hard to be present and not be distracted about a “need” to do something else. It was fun to get to know him a bit better.
After lunch I met with Kelly Lindholm in regulatory affairs at Duke, and she gave me some information about creating a design history file for the cartilage implant, as well as answered some questions I had about doing a GLP study at Duke. Seems it’s not very common to do such a study. Mike Therien called and wanted me to update my CV before it’s sent out for the full professor evaluation. Later I met with Jennifer Roizen, Myung Jun, and Miles to talk about the electrosynthesis project. Myung Jun ruled out the role of methanol as causing us not to get higher yields. He’ll focus on thinner electrodes to further improve the difference between the results with high surface area and low surface area electrodes. Finally, I met with Heng Xu about the silver plate project, seems he’s got the reaction slowed down and is ready to perform experiments on single crystals.
At home, Keira cooked a great meal as usual, including fried pork belly, a spicy fish soup with noodles, rice, and brussel sprouts. After dinner we went to the pool. Alexandra floated around in her boat with Keira, playing with a watering can someone left at the pool. I carried Harvey around while he sat on a kickboard and held onto a plastic jellyfish.
Before bed, I read some of the first 1957 paper that proposed the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. My basic interpretation of the introduction is that the Schrodinger’s cat problem requires an outside observer to see whether the cat is in the box or not, but there is no outside observer for the universe. So, all possibiliteis must exist in the universe simultaneously, and the only way for this to happen is for the universe to actually be a multiverse.
It’s 9:21 am.
