Wednesday, May 02, 2007


I am not sure that learning how to diagram a sentence ever led to me seeing the light or to apply it to everyday living.

But I can safely say that there are two pieces of knowledge learned at school that I have been able to apply in a practical and useful manner. Both have some connection to water and to Sir Isaac Newton. Every couple of years I have to drain my fishpond. This used to be a messy job until I remembered that if I put a hose in the pond and sucked on the end and placed the hose in a lower part of the garden, the pool would drain by itself thanks to gravity. If I drained the pond on my rose bed I found that the pond water, rich in organic silt, gave me bigger and more plentiful roses in May and June.

For years I have known how gravity affects the human body. Never more so than now when at age 64 I look at myself in the mirror. This means that I have known to never photograph a woman on her back as gravity pulls down and makes her look fat. But I accidentally learned that there was a happy exception and that you could place a woman on her back, as long as she was in a tub of water. This is a prime example that confirms Newton's Third Law of Motion that states formally:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Water in a tube gently pushes back (counteracting gravity) on a woman's body lifting any part of her body that just might sag!

Since I have been of late writing about roses, here we have a photograph of Rose (Terri Casel) showing how Newton's Third Law works. As for Rose blowing into the water both Newton and competitor Huygens would have argued about the wave-particle duality.