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geometry: the language of love
Nov. 4th, 2013 06:57 pmOnce of the reasons it took us so long to get the lights up in the two nooks in the hallway is that we only have three, and we need four; however, the IKEA in Waldorf didn't carry this kind any more, so that meant we'd have to go to Mannheim (it might only be 23km, but when you're doing it be public transport, it's about 1.5 hours one way). But Joel volunteered to give up part of his day today to head out, since there were, by now, a number of things accruing on our IKEA list. He hoped to be back into Heidelberg around 12:00-12:30, so I suggested that he text me when he got back in and we could do lunch together, since I usually eat between 12:00 and 1:00. Of course, today was the day my stomach started rumbling around 11:30 -- and, of course, Joel kept missing all the convenient bus/train/tram connections and so ended up getting back in around 2:00. By the time we met up, we were both pretty hungry!
So flammküchen seemed like a good choice; they're really good and filling, but I don't get one more than once every other week or so because they're rather more expensive than the falafel with hallumi (and rarely do I have a day which cannot be improved by judicious application of fried cheese). We went to the upper part of Altes Hallenbad to eat, where the comfortable benches and the at-table bar service are, and spent about an hour eating and talking. One of the things he'd picked up was a round cast iron pot, since the oval one that we have is just a bit too big for making a good loaf of bread; it comes out too flat. We'd been unsure whether the round one would be sufficiently smaller in footprint to result in a sufficiently taller loaf, and Joel mentioned that he'd noticed that yesterday when I was calculating dimensions I had to look up the formula for the area of an ellipse online. I had to confess, that's one I never managed to memorize, and there'd be no way I could re-derive it myself. And then he launched into a lecture about the relationship between the formulas for circles, ellipses, and rectangles.
Every knows that pi-r-squared (no, they aren't, pie are round!); that is, pi * radius * radius. Now imagine an ellipse: there's two radii, one short, one long. Or, if you think of it this way, a circle is a special case of an ellipse where the radii are the same length. So if the area of a circle is pi * radius * radius, this is also the same as pi * short-radius * long-radius, it just happens that short-radius and long-radius happen to be the same length. So, there's your equation for the area of an ellipse!
And then he told me how this relates to the area of a rectangle whose sides are the lengths of the long and short diameters of the ellipse, and it was something like "swap 4 for pi", but by then I was getting lost in the details (geometry is NOT my thing), and was instead just sitting there happily reveling in the fact that I was getting an incredibly detailed lecture on a subject I really couldn't care less about, from someone who was passionate about the details. I love it when Joel talks to me like that. It's been a long time since I've fallen asleep to the sound of a recitation in minute and excrutiating detail of some obscure battle in some ancient war; I've missed that.
One of the most important qualifications I had in looking for a future spouse (heck, even a boyfriend) was "someone more intelligent than me". Very few people came anywhere close to measuring up. It's really nice to be reminded that one did. :)
So flammküchen seemed like a good choice; they're really good and filling, but I don't get one more than once every other week or so because they're rather more expensive than the falafel with hallumi (and rarely do I have a day which cannot be improved by judicious application of fried cheese). We went to the upper part of Altes Hallenbad to eat, where the comfortable benches and the at-table bar service are, and spent about an hour eating and talking. One of the things he'd picked up was a round cast iron pot, since the oval one that we have is just a bit too big for making a good loaf of bread; it comes out too flat. We'd been unsure whether the round one would be sufficiently smaller in footprint to result in a sufficiently taller loaf, and Joel mentioned that he'd noticed that yesterday when I was calculating dimensions I had to look up the formula for the area of an ellipse online. I had to confess, that's one I never managed to memorize, and there'd be no way I could re-derive it myself. And then he launched into a lecture about the relationship between the formulas for circles, ellipses, and rectangles.
Every knows that pi-r-squared (no, they aren't, pie are round!); that is, pi * radius * radius. Now imagine an ellipse: there's two radii, one short, one long. Or, if you think of it this way, a circle is a special case of an ellipse where the radii are the same length. So if the area of a circle is pi * radius * radius, this is also the same as pi * short-radius * long-radius, it just happens that short-radius and long-radius happen to be the same length. So, there's your equation for the area of an ellipse!
And then he told me how this relates to the area of a rectangle whose sides are the lengths of the long and short diameters of the ellipse, and it was something like "swap 4 for pi", but by then I was getting lost in the details (geometry is NOT my thing), and was instead just sitting there happily reveling in the fact that I was getting an incredibly detailed lecture on a subject I really couldn't care less about, from someone who was passionate about the details. I love it when Joel talks to me like that. It's been a long time since I've fallen asleep to the sound of a recitation in minute and excrutiating detail of some obscure battle in some ancient war; I've missed that.
One of the most important qualifications I had in looking for a future spouse (heck, even a boyfriend) was "someone more intelligent than me". Very few people came anywhere close to measuring up. It's really nice to be reminded that one did. :)
