Pass it on

(Date is approximate)

If you come across good, pass it on.
Pass it on. How?
Share the happiness good has given you.
Share it. Show it. Give it. Let it flow.
It dies out alone. It thrives when flowing.
Like water stays fresh when moving.
Like fire, it needs more places to burn.

But happiness & love, unlike fire, cause no harm. They uplift and refresh, they burst with beauty and cries of joy. I feel it. I'm drinking a bag of milk I just bought. It is most creamy and delicious. On this bench, right now, I wish I could say these words to you as they come. And hug you, look to your skin for warmth, and rejoice, both of us, knowing that we love each other, that we can share our joys & Love with one another, and wishing we did the same with others. And mustering up the courage to do so, and doing so, and believing in it, and knowing that we are living the best way we can. Happily, joyfully, spreading the love, and contributing to this beautiful world.
~Apr 19, 2011

Quick log

I've been in Guatemala for about 9 days now, and I just want to recap on what I've done so I don't forget the timeline:

• Friday came in at the airport, waited for Elisa at the empty airport lobby, did exercises, came back to the house, went out and played with Josue and Daniela, came back, fell asleep, tired, at about 6PM.
• Saturday, not much? Stayed and gave stuff to Manfredo, Elisa, and Alicia.
• Sunday, went out with Elisa to pick up laundry and visit Tio Manfredo, Tia Alicia. Left right before a procession began. Fell asleep.
• Monday, called Tia Violeta, she picked me up, I met up with Miriam and her son, met Miriam's neighbors. The 81-year old woman who looked less than 60 impressed me very much. She says the secret is music, happiness, art, joy. And don't consider yourself old. Met up with (Mara compu - Bidkar) at Majadas. Had cheesesticks and onion rings.
• Tuesday, met up with Marcelo again, asked him if I could use his WiFi while he was gone to Argentina with his family. He agreed to it.
• Wednesday, came to work at Marcelo's, all day. Configured Eclipse, downloaded plugins, the project, etc...
• Thursday, worked again all day.
• Friday, left early with Elisa and Alicia to Scandinavia Gym, they dropped me off at CC Proceres, was picked up by DD to have lunch, we had lunch at a japanese place, I ate cucumber sushi, we talked about math, its applicability to Life, girls, computer stuff, and the industrialization of the world with respect to its effect on society and its individuals. (Loss of individual skills).
• Saturday, I got together with Bidkar! He woke me up at 10AM, Manfredo dropped me off at about 11 or so, I talked with Bidkar and Guicho for awhile, then we went grocery shopping, bought potatoes, tomatoes, pasta, rice, butter, pepsi, milk, and then Bidkar's gf came along and took over the kitchen to make almost everything. She's a reaaally good cook! I mean, she knows her stuff! Does everything almost automagically!
• And today I played a little with J&D in the morning, and now I'm at Marcelo's using some Internet, waiting for Maia to come around to Sancris. We're gonna go walking and talking and catching up on stuff. It's going to be fun :D.

Miscellaneous Observations

• I sweat and stink more when the temperature is higher - even at night.
• Cold water here in Guatemala isn't really cold cold. It's... refreshing. But that may also be cause it's hot. So the water is indeed a bit warmer AND it helps cool one off.
• The BIC disposable razor might be the best razor I have shaved myself with so far. It's a razor made out of a whole piece, tries to look like Gillette, double blade, nice rubbery grip. I didn't cut myself once, I feel no irritation whatsoever, and I shaved off about two weeks of beard clean, all the way, without the need for another razor. I was even sad to throw it away (but used razors have not proven so effective for me in the past). Highly recommended.
• All of my injuries keep healing more and more. Gradually, I've noticed I can almost run, lift my arm up high, and hurt a little less when bending my ankles to move around. Body heals itself awesomely.
• It is possible to live without a smartphone.
• Things I'm noticing about Guatemala:
• There's grass and plants and flowers falling and all kinds of naturey stuff around the streets, houses, and everywhere. So much more colorful.
• Prices on food and services are lower, which I knew already. And food is richer (has a richer flavor).
• Prices on technology are higher. Oh well.

I had more observations but I kinda forgot :(. I gotta do stuff now, bye.

Temperature

So recently, especially while enriching my cooking skills, I have been thinking about what temperature really means. Ever since I learned the concept of temperature and the degrees to measure it with, I have never really grasped what temperature means, in "absolute" terms. Is 20C twice as hot as 10C? Not really. Is 0C as cold as it can get? Also untrue. Why are there different scales of temperature measurement, even with different origins? How is this related to actual thermal energy, which as I learned later on in chemistry classes, is directly connected to temperature? Why aren't there easily understandable "conversions" between thermal energy and temperature? Not even Kelvin degrees allows this.

But recently I think I found a suitable explanation, which I now also hold as true. The temperature of an object can be defined as the OUTPUT RATE OF THE OBJECT'S THERMAL ENERGY UNTO A CONSTANT ENVIRONMENT PER UNIT OF AREA (assuming objects are three-dimensional). It's not the amount of thermal energy the object HAS. It is the rate at which it is letting it out. I would like to use 0K as the constant environment used in the definition, but I don't know enough about such extreme cases to be certain, especially with Bose-Einstein condensates and whatnot. So for the sake of explanation, let's assume the constant environment to be regular air at 25C.

So how hot does water at 50C feel when touched? 50C. Why is that? Well, because. How do we feel? How do we feel the temperature of an object? We perceive temperature only through the thermal energy being output by the object. This transmission is what allows us to perceive the object's temperature. It doesn't tell us how much thermal energy this object still has inside it, but only at what rate it is being transmitted to us.

Part of my previous puzzlement was caused by the fact that a pot on the stove is very easy to heat up to a high temperature, say 100C, but water takes a muuuch longer time. But seemingly, the water receives thermal energy at a very similar rate as the pot in which it is contained. Why, then, does water take so much longer to get to 100C?

Because water can hold a LOT more thermal energy than the metal the pot is made of. If something has more thermal energy inside it, it makes sense that it would "leak it out", "radiate it" at a faster rate, just like a leaking gas chamber with a higher pressure lets out the gas at a higher rate. But even if the water is holding more thermal energy as the metal, it doesn't mean it will radiate thermal energy faster (feel hotter) than the metal! Why? Because they're different materials, that's why. Complicated molecular chemistry stuff should provide further details, but I'm satisfied with this simple explanation.

Also from chemistry, I learned that there is this thing called specific heat. And I think its dimensionality is Joules/C. And I remember that water's was much higher than most metals'.

Hmmm... I wonder. I don't think specific heat can determine how LONG will an object take to heat up, only how much thermal energy is required to get it up a certain amount of temperature. I guess "heat transmission coefficient" can be another measurement for materials. There's this thing called aerogel, have you heard of it? I have no idea how much its specific heat could be, but they show pictures of a flower resting on a slide of aerogel with a blowtorch flaming at the slide from below, and the flower completely unharmed. So it must have suuuuuuch a low heat tranmission coefficient. Hmmm.

And so the reason why the temperatures of objects in a room tend to converge onto a single temperature is because the heat transmissions are balancing themselves out. Like a two-way chemical reaction. Dynamic equilibrium. Everyone gives the same amount of energy to each other, so everyone ends up with the same amount of energy, at all times.

Oh yeah, another thing that helps explain it. You know how metal always feels cold? That's cause it's such a good heat conductor, so what we feel is the fast transmission of heat from our skin to the metal object. Not that the metal is actually colder than, say, the shoe beside it, but the metal will absorb our heat more eagerly. Thus, it feels colder.

I wonder if I'm right about all this stuff...? I haven't done much chemistry since... long time ago. I'll go and check wikipedia out. But I like the definition I made up. Makes sense to me.

Laura Bday Text

I just spent some of the 3 most exciting days of my Life. I don't know if the most, but some of the most. Other instances that come ot mind are the Ecosol race, some other love affairs, such as the one with Andrea and SLT, the IMO/OIM trips, my Europe trips, and others. But they were certainly very significant. I visited Laura as a surprise gift for her on her birthday. Her birthday was yesterday, and today, April 6th, 2011, I am leaving Pittsburgh on an airplane, Southwest, heading back to Chicago, to where my dad and my mom and Pedro are, from where I will, in two days time, take another plane south to Guatemala, down to visit my family and friends over there. Rapid changes, lots of movement. Scrambling to find meaning and fulfillment in my life.

Laura is ... Laura. I love her. She is beautiful inside and outside and everywhere in between, and we have spent some super duper amazing days together. I surprised her on sunday by going to her parents' dinner. We ate paches. We cooked together again. I got her little gifts. We junked out her closet. We engaged in fervent, passionate, steaming sexual activities, to both our intense pleasures. The first night was intensely steamy and even educational - and I love her attitude towards sex. Passionate, and yet objective. Non-taboo. Like I want it to be, like I feel it should be. Compatible with me. It's amazing, awesome, and I love her.

Things we learned on this trip. We look for convenient parking spaces so hectically sometimes because of the regret factor. The theory that Min explained to me - that we humans do not usually base our decisions attempting to logically masximize out utility, but rather to minimize our potential regret. "I could very well park in this spet, 50 feet away, and walk only a bit to the house. But... what if there were a closer parking spot and I didn't see it before? I'd regret having parker in this relatively far away spot." It's all about comparison. We compare what is with what could be, and we cause ourselves woe.

Another thing - women genitalia possess more critical pleasure points that the fairly well-known clitoris, G-spot, and vagina walls. Some other spots are also intensely pleasurable, and Laura can make really high-pitched moans when these are hit appropriately. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... astounding. Delicious. Magical.

Her dad is reaaaaaaaaaaaaally uptight about... almost all things that people can be uptight about. And talks a lot. And knows a lot, too. But mostly talks a lot. But he's also really polite and nice and happy.

Let's see...
I talked to Ashley Valo on the phone
We had an almost-sex session that took her shirt off and mine, but which led to no further physical engagement (nakedness), but which was very fulfilling, I'd say, both at the physical and the emotional level. Oh man. She said she was looking at the color of my golden brown skin, and that she suddenly just felt this overwhelming affection and love for me, and she began kissing me. I was sitting down, she kissed me from above - our lips caressed each other's through an amazing, magical exchange of energies between us. We reached for each other, stretching our bodies, longing to approach each other further. I tried to pull her lower, so very slightly, but she resisted, so I came up to her, and our bodies became a fluid harmony of movement, caresses, love, and passion. It was wonderful. Truly wonderful. At one point I felt that taking her shirt off was the next step, although it didn't feel exactly quite right, but I still did, and I sensed her... not hesitation, but not the synchronization we had been feeling only moments ago. Her arms allowed me her dis-shirting, and I went ahead and removed my own myself. And there we were - chest-naked to each other, embracing and caressing our bodies, and suddenly we felt fine. I felt fulfilled. Well, also the trancey-style track from Jill Scott, Free (Epilogue) music stopped and we caught our breaths for a moment, and that was enough to allow us time to reconsider our process. We gradually, softly descended to a gentler feeling of our skin, and we suddenly felt fulfilled. Our bodies had an unspoken conversation of telling each other to take it easy, and so we did. And we felt fulfilled. And it was amazing. I loved it. She loved it. It was amazing.