Birds I Can Manage, Quarks, Not So Much

Ed, K., and I studied the birds again today who are nesting on the garage drainpipe, and we have decided that they are Eastern Phoebes. They are amazing little bug catchers (hooray!), and their coloring and tail bobbing thing are just as described in my reference book, Books of the Carolinas.



(The picture isn't mine, but one of the birds looks just like this one.)



We're taking a break from watching Ed's beloved "Monarch of the Glen" series (I need time to recover from practically seeing poor old Hector get blown to pieces by his Springer Spaniel puppy) and watching a Nova series called "The Elegant Universe." It tries to explain things like String Theory and Quantum Mechanics in a way that people who don't know anything about physics or math can understand. I think this may be rather a tall order, but they have lots of fun special effects, and I can almost imagine, while I'm watching, that I have some grasp of what the jaunty narrator is talking about. When the t.v. goes off, though, and I try to think about strings, probabilities, and stuff, I realize that all I've retained is the image of a ball (representing earth) rolling around on a sheet with a grid on it (representing space-time, I think) and the brain boggling idea that there could be eleven dimensions. It is fun, but all I am really learning is that some subjects don't lend themselves to being clearly explained to the average mental bumbler.