What is Jispa?

Yesterday i was having a nice conversation with Jispa and her friend Sheel. Sheel is a smart boy who with Jispa in her nursery. Sheel went to a different school but now he has come to join Jispa’s school in the 8th standard. Jispa had to practically repeat her lower Kg as the cut off for her current school was off by a few months. hence she is the oldest in her class and Sheel is one year ahead of her academically.

Jispa has been having evening school thanks to her annual concert. He annual concert has been a really boring affair. I think i only enjoyed it in the first two years after which i think generally the quality degraded and the novelty wore off. I hate those concerts. they are normally ill written with bad acting, bad direction and fundamentally a crap script. Then they have this rule that every kid gets to go on stage with a role no matter how small. So they end up with the lead character role being distributed amongst two tree kids. Even the villain roles are played like thus. So the first time I was wondering what happened to the hero - where did he go? who is this other guy in the same costume… till it dawned on me the great benefits of having an egalitarian and democratic society in a school concert. Total anarchy reigned. so inspite of being  highly involved dad I decided once or twice to just give it a miss. Jispa too doesn't care too much for it. She knows how dumb her concerts are and how amazingly ridiculous her costumes are. The worst is always the final days where she has to dress up and go to the concert with her stupid costume and face with make up. Jasmine has hardly ever used make up. But she has a complete set with all colors just for Jispa’s stupid concerts. I am hoping to miss this time’s one as well.

To manage crowds the concerts are performed over two days and yesterday was the first day when we went to pick her. Sheel was hanging around and we decided to drop him home. Since it was late we went for dinner first. Sheel is the quite intelligent smart guy who likes to read. And he tends to ask nice and intelligent questions and he loves to eat. So when we took him to dinner we started talking about lactose intolerance. It was a nice conversation that went from genetics to darwinism to Einstein. I felt nice.

I was explaining that lactose tolerance is actually a mutation because mostly people should be intolerant after they are around 4. As a human race we started eating so much lactose only in the last few decades. Cheese milk butter was not as plentiful earlier as it is today. Thanks to the modern dairy industry. So Sheel asked me if then over a period of time will people eventually all become tolerant - laws of adaptation since we eat so much lactose in our daily lives. Then was my proud moment i recollected from a book i read eons ago - Survival of the sickest - “Fittest you mean?” he asked me. Nope Sickest. What we consider today to be sick may have been the reason for survival in the years gone by. For example the sickle cell anaemia may be an issue today, but it helped people affected by it survive malaria - hence those sick with it were the most likely to survive. Similarly hemochromatosis being baneful to survive the bubonic plague which ravaged a large part of Europe.

This was a nice conversation after a long time.

I have had this feeling for some time that Jispa doesn't really value my knowledge. For her talking intelligent stuff to her dad is something that she takes for granted. in the middle she refused to have these conversations with me. She would ask irrelevant questions, needlessly dumb down the conversation and sometimes, just stop asking questions. I was quite annoyed with her. Till i realised that this is the way life is. I don't think she will realise the value of all the stuff that I read. When i first go to a place they go crazy and listen to me all day. Then when they hire me - I am on a tap. No body values knowledge given on a tap. i find this extremely irritating but i have learnt to deal with it.

So yesterday when i was talking to Sheel, Jispa also joined in. And this time, i continued my focus on talking and maintaining eye contact with Sheel. The ploy seems to have worked. it was a conversation with Sheel that she could join in - a different kind of conversation. It ended being highly esoteric - that the speed of light is constant and even if you running with a torch and you switch it on - the speed of light will remain the same. The last question before ending dinner was - if you were travelling at the speed of light and you look behind - what will you see? - Jispa said - everything black. At the time i thought thats right - but i guess right now searching further - i realised its much more a difficult question to answer. it ranges to black to frozen to a question of behind not existing at all!

See the problem of too much bull shit info! But sure you get the point and i got a conversation.

All for a cracked CD

Oh god. I had no clue this was so complicated.
Jispa found a CD floating around the house. She came to us and asked if this was an important CD. Oh no, that was just around, waiting to be junked. She then asked “Can I put it in the microwave please?” WHAT? Why would you want to do that? “I read somewhere that if you keep the CD in the microwave then it will crack.” Uh ok. I looked at Jasmine and I figured that WTF. Let give it a go. We took a Corel plate and kept the CD on it and put it inside the microwave. In exactly two seconds the CD began to crackle with electricity. It looked so cool. The sparks on the CD looked like how a city looks at night from an airplane. It was pretty cool. We stopped it immediately. Then we started it again for three seconds. Wow. Cool nah? We did it again a couple of times.
Then we removed the CD to see it. The plastic was untouched. It was the mirroring on the CD that was affected. Then I tried to explain that to Jispa. I explained that the CD was actually a transparent plastic disk with troughs on it. so while it looking smooth to you, it actually has many small dimples of sort. Then I had to explain this via a cross section drawing. At first it was difficult to think of the drawing as cross section but eventually she got it.
Then I had to explain how the laser in the CD player throws a laser which bounces back. She then asked me if laser is like electricity. On which I then had to explain how laser is essentially a light beam, narrowly focussed. Like those red lasers which you get. Then I had to explain how light essentially has to bounce for us to see stuff. then I took her to the bathroom with a torch and explained how by merely shining a beam on the mirror you cant see yourself. But if you throw that beam of light on yourself, you can see yourself in the mirror. It merely bounces off the light it gets and hits the eye and hence you see what you see in the mirror. That was one major oh ho moment for her. She thought the mirror works in some other rocket science way. Now that I write about it, I am making a mental note to ask her what did she actually think, on how a mirror works. Then I got the beam on the top of her head and she figured that the light moves in a straight line as her head was illuminated and not her chin.
Now establishing light, we continued to understand the CD and explained to her that the CD language is in dips and troughs or something like that and that the laser (which I showed her on the comp) throws this beam and catches the bounce and understands the language and translates it into the screen image and music. “so, who wrote that language”. Er I don’t know but some body did I guess. “so if you don’t know the language?” “ya you need to know the language. The computer knows the language and then translates it for us”.
Then I had to explain that how the CD goes round and round in a computer and the read goes up and down to read it and that’s how you get to see a movie etc.
Then we went back to the concept of the microwave that sends out an electric signal of sorts that pass through the metal portion and what you see are essential electric sparks on the CD.
Wow this took up at least half an hour, but it was well worth it. Then she decided to take the CD to school as a part of show and tell. I had also explained that the CD would then melt if it would have been heated too much. Today morning as she was putting the CD in her bag, she also wanted to take the small plastic cream bottle that we had kept in the car. That bottle, thanks to it being in the car had twisted out of shape in the car. She wanted to show what happens to plastic if it gets heated too much.
Whew. What a large explanation all because she wanted to see the CD crack in the microwave. Cool nah.
My inspiration for this was Richard Feynman. In the book, 'Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman', he explained that how his dad explained Triboluminescence. It is the light emitted when crystals are crushed. His dad explained that as the blue light you see when you crush sugar. Google search throws this line - “'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."
I even found an online version of this lovely book. You can get it here