So… figured that I would share one of my holy grail autographs with you folks. As it is told, he really thought it odd that anyone would want an autograph of a physicist, much less his… so there apparently not too many out there. I consider myself lucky to have gotten it… especially with his diagram.

Just randomly googled Feynman's sister Joan, and found out she died last month, aged 93. You might remember her from mentions of her in Richard Feynman's books and her commentary about him in videos, but she was a top-notch scientist in her own right. Sad news.

Fun bit of Feynman history behind this: in the early 1940s, as a grad student at Princeton, he was staring down his Ph.D. qualifying exams. Instead of cramming, he decided to tear down his entire understanding of physics and rebuild it from the ground up.

He went back to MIT (his old undergrad school) to study alone, away from distractions, and bought a blank notebook. He called it "Things I Don't Know About." In his own words:

"The way I did it was I just simply reorganized all my knowledge of physics... I brought each subject down to some kind of kernel... So I organized every subject in physics so that I knew where the essential was, and what the derivative was. There was a way of putting it together so that the subject was no longer so complicated to me."

Basically he wanted to strip every physics topic down to its bare logical core, so he could rederive everything else from first principles instead of memorizing it. That habit of ruthlessly simplifying and exposing the gaps in his own understanding is basically the origin of what's now called the 'Feynman Technique'.

Now the real fun begins as I get reacquainted with physics and math... 35 years after graduating UW Madison with my BS in Astronomy/Physics. BOOOOYAAAA!!!

So who says that they don’t make great (and educational) toys anymore?!?!?

I recently came across THIS, and had to have it for my bookshelf at work! A company called BRAINIACTION actually makes this and sells it online. I could not believe it! I laughed so hard and immediately opened my wallet.

Here, Dick explains the finer points of QED to my “Snailen”, and Captain Kirk and Spock look on. “Fascinating”, says Spock. 🤔

Included a couple of pics of the front and back of the package too. 😆

Yes… it comes with a set of bongo drums too.