Iowa, beer, and orbits

Iowa, the land of $7 six packs and tarmac country roads. Sunny days and rolling green landscapes. The Heartland. My parents moved since the last time I was here, and I admittedly was a little apprehensive about seeing their new house. It's a nice place, and it already feels like their home. It's already starting to smell like a Shaff/Bahr residence, like the house in St. Paul. Yesterday I went on a ride with my dad and some family friends. It was gorgeous. The weather was nice and cool, the sun was beaming, and it felt like we had a tail wind for the whole ride. We stopped for about an hour at a bar and had a couple of beers. It's so nice to sit and chat with people that I've known my entire life. Also, Iowa has a rad local brew scene! One of the highlights of yesterday was the fact that I got to ride my road bike. After rolling around on my Diamondback all semester, the road bike is a dream. It's light, responsive, "laterally stiff and vertically compliant", and it looks bad ass, especially with a port-o-potty in the background.

The crabondale!

 Here's a shot of some of the landscapes I encountered yesterday out riding. Sometimes I feel like plane travel is too fast. Going from the West Village in Manhattan to this in the space of a half day is too fast to process. It's disorienting. I know that in a couple of days the feeling will pass, and I'll settle in to this place, but for the time being I get to revel in the wonder and discomfort that comes with being transported, almost instantaneously, from place to place.

One of my favorite parts of GR was looking at the Schwarzschild metric. As Gruz' said, it makes one think that one knows GR because it allows one to see geodesics in a solution to the Einstein field equations. Instead of jumping in to solving the geodesic equation associated with this problem, I thought it would be fun to start with the classical orbital mechanics problem. We talked about this problem extensively in Mechanics last year, but I never actually sat down and solved the equations of motion associated with this problem. I don't know how to solve these equations analytically, but I do know how to solve them numerically. I'll write more about solving this problem in my next post, once I figure out how to put LaTeX into blog posts.