Yesterday, a review session for our classical mechanics course was held in preparation for the final. At one point our conversation about angular momentum and angular velocity was derailed by a heated disagreement about the orientation of these two vectors for an airborne football. What you might not realize is that, for such simple scenarios, discussions can get quite aggressive among people who take an enormous amount of pride in their physical understanding. Eventually the two camps were able to glean enough of the "enemy's" arguments over the shouting to realize the origin of the problem was a disagreement about the inertia tensor (basically a matrix that contains the information about where mass is located in an object). This stopped us short and immediately led to the query: what kind of football was in question? It turns out that roughly half of Physics graduate students are either international, and thus thought we were discussing what Americans call a soccer ball, or are from America but are so detached from the world of sports that they actually don't know the shape of an American football. Despite these embarrassments, this resolution meant that all of our physics was correct. The final peace accords were lain down over chinese food. I had some deliciously fiery Mapo Tofu.

We'll I'm off to check out amazon for a Christmas present for my brother. I have ideas, but he probably wouldn't be happy to open a box full of plans.

And since we're in the Christmas spirit, you should expect several holiday villains during this merry month. I'll start with one of the all-time greats, the Grinch!

The eponymous villain of Dr. Seuss's famous How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch's name immediately evokes his grouchy, joy-sucking, fun-destroying personage. What really sets Seuss's green fiend apart from other holiday haters is his devotion; not content to simply grumble to himself about the cheer of others, the Grinch actually attempts to annihilate the holiday that is the cause of his woes! In blatant mockery of the entire gaudy affair, the Grinch garbs himself as Santa and ironically enters through chimneys and extracts presents, employing an excellent song during this process. Of course in the end the story is one of redemption and, the Grinch perched precariously at the very peak of Mt. Crumpet, he has a moment of revelation documented by what literary scholars agree is one of the most legendary couplets in the English language:

 "And then the true meaning of Christmas came through,

and the Grinch found the strength of ten Grinches, plus two!"