Skip to main content

Halloween

Yesterday was Halloween. Some people I know don't do anything on Halloween. I'm not one of them, and never have been; I've gone trick-or-treating every year since I was about 2 or 3.

When I first started, I didn't stay out very long, and at least one of my parents stayed with me at all times. Yesterday I stayed out for about 2½ hours with some siblings and a couple of friends, and would have stayed longer if I was allowed; the candy I get then is pretty much all of the candy I get for the next year. And it really does last that long. Even now, I still have a few pieces of candy left from last year! You might be able to guess that I'm proud of my self-control when it comes to Halloween candy. My other siblings finished off their candy many months ago.

The main idea for trick-or-treating is to dress up as something cool. This year I was planning on being a burglar, since I couldn't think of much else. My sister told me that she was dressing up as Buttercup from The Princess Bride (which is a really cool book, and also a neat movie). Bingo! I could be the Dread Pirate Roberts (from the same book), and then we'd match! So she decided to help me with my costume.

About a week ago, she decided to dress up as something else; but I still dressed up as the Dread Pirate Roberts. I guess he must not be a very well-known character; everybody kept asking me if I was Zorro (but that could be because they look so similar).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the ot...

Too Bright, Too Dark

The visible world around us is constantly changing. One second we may have the sun in our eyes, and another we're in a dark closet trying to find the light switch. Such fluctuations in brightness could have ended up being a serious problem for our vision if it weren't for a handy built-in feature: our eyes automatically adapt to the lighting conditions of the surrounding environment. Most people are well aware that their pupils change size to handle lighting conditions. A larger pupil admits more light and makes the scene brighter, while a smaller pupil admits less light and makes the scene dimmer. This mechanism is fast and effective, and is controlled by the brain stem, which acts autonomously - you don't even have to think about it. As useful as this type of adaptation may be, it has some limitations. For example, most artificial lighting is 20 times dimmer than the sun, while pupil dilation only brightens light by a factor of 4 (when compared with a fully constricted pu...