For the last few weeks, John and his friend Roy have been working in their spare time on a neat physics demonstration to show off at the Texas A&M Physics Festival this coming weekend.

If you know what a standing wave is, you’ve probably seen the classic demonstration with a vibrating string. But did you know you can also trace out a standing wave in FIRE? True story.

The apparatus is called a Rubens Tube, after its kind-of inventor. It’s a long metal tube with small holes drilled along its length, filled with a flammable gas and set alight. When you pipe music into one end of the tube, the flames jump into different wave patterns.

Last night I got to stop by campus and videotape their progress. With a little pretending and a little video editing, we almost made it look like they built this contraption in a single evening.

Pretty neat, eh?

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For the few of you who haven’t heard through email, text message, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, but mostly so this momentous occasion doesn’t get left out of my blog, John and I got engaged last week on our trip to Colorado. Squee!

Before we started planning the vacation, we’d talked about how we might be able to move our conjectural wedding date up six months or so from what we’d thought, so I suspected a proposal was coming, but I didn’t know exactly when.

On our first full day in Colorado, John picked out a hike for us up towards Pacific Peak, thanks to this handy website. The weather was perfect, and the views of mountains and blue sky all around were breathtaking.

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For two weeks now, Houston’s been hotter than … well, a mild fever. Which is hot, as air goes. And despite the lack of rain, it’s still a wet, heavy heat. At least the drought is keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Biking to work has become a somewhat icky endeavor; I’ve learned to bring an extra shirt to change into when I get there.

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I saw a car today with three bumper stickers: a Mac apple, a Houston Astros sticker, and a sticker that looked like those oval country/vacation spot stickers with initials in them but actually stood for “Jesus Freak.” I don’t know why the combination struck me as odd, but I kind of want to meet this person.

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I apologize in advance for the trite yearly-family-newsletter tone of this post. The videos are short, I promise.

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John, when he’s not grokking universe-defining equations, powering up a new radioactive cyclotron beam, or reminding young zoology majors of the difference between speed and velocity for the umpteenth time, has taken to brewing beer in his apartment.

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I’m almost done capturing my family’s old Beta tapes in digital format. Tonight I came across one of the last of the Beta era, a fifteen-minute tape from 1991 of my brother playing soccer. He was four.

Four-year-old soccer, I have to say, is pretty great. They play six on a side, no goalies, on a quarter-size field with something like a size two ball. The games are short, probably twenty or thirty minutes, with two halves. Having to aim for the opposite goal in the second half seemed to be just at the limit of four-year-old comprehension, so I imagine the only reason to even have halves is so there’s time for the Hi-C-and-orange-wedge break.

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