Over the last few weeks or so, it has become more and more obvious that Howard is starting to read by himself. It’s always hard to tell if a child is truly reading or if they’re reciting a memorized book, but you get hints as you try out books that are new to them.

Within the last week, he has very clearly started reading a large number of words in contexts that he hasn’t seen before. He’ll point to signs on the road and bottles in the bathroom etc. and ask, “Does that spell ‘more’?” or “Does that spell ‘vanilla’?” I’ve even tested him by typing words on the computer and having him read them.

To be sure, he’ll get words wrong, although interestingly for short words he’ll think that it’s a word with one or two letters different (e.g., mad vs made). He’ll also find the shorter words within longer words (e.g., “fun” in “fundamental”).

Now all we have to do is not scare him into thinking we’ll stop reading if he starts (something that I think affected Dorothy around this age), and then we’ll really be doing well!

Rhodium passed away this morning. Tom and Dorothy are out digging a grave for her now – we’re going to bury her under Dorothy’s tree, which has been in a pot for quite a few years but is really big enough to be planted. We will miss her so much!

Rest in peace, Rhodium. We all love you.

Happy new year, everyone! We just enjoyed a fireworks show at the Space Needle (from the comfort of our guest room, that is), and Dorothy is getting ready for bed. Stay safe and happy, everyone!

I was wondering if I’d ever blogged about having the phrase “incriminating evidence” pop up so much (at least as a parent) right around Xmas. It turns out I had, although it was 5 years ago. Some things never change, it seems.

This is very interesting, especially because our children fit the profile (i.e., they were each 3-5 weeks premature) and we’re seeing similar issues in at least one of them: “Higher rates of behavioural and emotional problems at preschool age in children born moderately preterm” (found via NYT: “Risks: More Woes for Preemies at Preschool Age“)

Preterm boys suffered more sleep and attention troubles than their full-term peers, but the effect in girls was more dramatic. Preterm girls were significantly more emotionally reactive, depressed and withdrawn than full-term girls, and over all they had about 20 percent more sleep problems, attention problems and aggressive behaviors.

Earlier this year, Dorothy seemed to have outgrown many of her clothes. Right before the start of the school year, we got her some new clothes so that she wouldn’t be wearing floods all the time (although she really didn’t want to give up some of her older clothes that were too small in our opinion).

This fall has been extremely hectic, and her clothing situation has not been on my radar. But it’s been permeating my consciousness that her clothes seem awful small on her, and I was wondering if maybe I’d dreamed having bought larger clothes for her.

Separately, she has often complained about her knees and legs aching. But since I only heard this complaint when walking with her to her bus stop (i.e., when she’d rather be getting a car ride to the bus stop), I chalked it up to a psychosomatic complaint that derived from her not liking it when Daddy made her walk to the bus.

Well, this week we went and measured her height, and damn if she hasn’t grown 3 inches since the start of school! She is now 4 feet, 4 inches tall. 3 inches in ~4 months is pretty darn fast, so I suspect she’s had growing pains for the last few months.

After Xmas, we’re going to go out and get her bigger clothes. Again. I can only hope that her body decides to take a break on this growing thing and give us more than 4 months’ use out of clothes…

Well, Rhodium certainly looks nothing like a cat that only has a couple of weeks to live. She’s still active, and her personality has not really changed at all. She’s not even hiding as much as she was before we took her to the vet.

She does yowl at us more than she used to – she is very demanding about her scritches and her food. She’s also pretty sensitive about the shaved patch on her tummy (from the ultrasound – it’s growing back in, but will take a while to get as long as the hair around it), and carefully protects it from view. But she’s still playing, and she can still get into a pretty good hissing match with Cobalt from time to time. We give her prednisone nightly, but other than that, no medication. She throws up from time to time, but it seems mostly to be tied to good food that she eats too fast, rather than growths in her digestive system.

We found out a little over a week ago that one of our cats, Rhodium, has cancer (Lymphosarcoma to be precise). She apparently has it in her spleen, kidney, intestine, and lymph nodes. Her behavior had changed a week or two before we took her to the vet, and it seems that at this stage the expected lifetime is 4-6 weeks.

We are all sad about this news, especially because she is not quite 10 years old (which isn’t too old for an indoor cat). Dorothy in particular was extremely sad, but seems to have adjusted over the last week.

Rhodium has been getting lots of extra love and food this past week. I think Cobalt’s not sure what to make of all these changes, but he doesn’t want to lose his spot as dominant cat. Once Rhodium is gone, we’re not sure how Cobalt will adjust.

At the moment, Rhodium is on prednisone and a short-term drug to push back on the cancer a bit. We have decided not to pursue full chemotherapy because of the combination of poor chances, minimal life extension even if successful, and very high cost for those poor results. We will keep up the prednisone routine and see how she develops over the next few weeks.

I’ve been wondering more about the possibility of superluminal neutrinos, and a question occurred to me: what does the gravitational interaction of tachyons look like? Tachyons have a kind of negative mass (actually their mass squared is negative), and the range of their interactions with bradyons (subluminal particles, i.e., us) is not obvious to me. For example, what about gravitomagnetism (which produces frame dragging)? More specifically, mass current density gives rise to a gravitomagnetic field (just like an electric current gives rise to an electromagnetic field). While the neutrino mass is very small, its density from stellar fusion is huge and its velocity might, if the OPERA results turn out to be true, be superluminal. So there is the possibility of relatively large gravitomagnetic fields being created by galaxies, which leads to the question of whether or not they could create the effect that is currently assumed to be dark matter.

In other words, instead of dark matter, could the gravitational interactions of neutrinos, and in particular of superluminal neutrinos, explain the galaxy rotation curves?

As you’ve probably heard, an interesting set of experiments at CERN in Europe indicated that they had found neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s relativity says that no particle with mass can accelerate faster than light speed, although it does not preclude particles which start at superluminal speed (which are called tachyons). Massless particles, light photons (light), travel at exactly light speed.

Warren’s blog post “Superluminal” discusses the topic as well, including past measurements of neutrinos (with some suggesting negative mass, etc.)

There is of course the question of whether or not there was some kind of experimental error. But let’s assume for the moment that it’s a real result. What questions does it raise? What other explanations are there?

One question is why a similar result hasn’t been seen before. Most notably, the 1987a supernova should have resulted in neutrinos 3 years earlier (i.e., 1984) if the neutrino speed was the same as measured at CERN.

One idea that occurred to me while discussing the topic was about particle changes. Neutrinos are known to “oscillate” from one “flavor” of neutrino to another; in a sense, changing which particle they are. More generally, in quantum eletrodynamics (QED), particles can “absorb” or emit others, in effect changing from one set of particles into a different set. A common example is that a gamma ray can spontaneously change into an electron-positron pair.

So I wonder: if tachyons do exist, is it possible in QED for a set of sub-luminal particle(s) to transmute (via absorption/emission, or perhaps even oscillation) into a set of particle(s) that include some which are superluminal? And if so, is there an energy dependence on this effect? In other words, could the relatively low-energy neutrinos from 1987a have stayed as neutrinos, but could the higher-energy CERN neutrinos in some cases transmute into tachyons?

Howard was mad at me about something or other in the car the other day, and told me, “Mommy, you need to stick a sock in it.” (I will admit that we’ve said that a few times to the kids, especially when Dorothy will. not. stop. arguing.)

I told him, “you can’t say that to me, Howard – it’s not polite.”

There was a brief pause, then a small voice from the back seat said, “Mommy, you need to stick a sock in it, please.”

Well, I’ve learned my one thing for today:
The Supreme Court case Flemming v. Nestor, decided in 1960, apparently decided that there is no contractual right to collect Social Security benefits, regardless of how much you paid into the system. I’m surprised by that decision. Apparently Social Security payments are not property rights, and individuals are only protected by Due Process clause. As long as it’s not “patently arbitrary and utterly lacking in rational justification” then Congress can change what you get paid from the system without your having recourse. Watch for this concept to come up a lot in the next decade or so…