Theme of the Week 2 – What is one thing you would like to learn more about, but haven’t been able to?

Hi all,

I’m working with a breaking keyboard today that keeps dropping spaces, so if I’m talking gibberish it’s not my fault 🙂

Theme of the Week #2:

What is one thing you would like to learn more about, but haven’t been able to?

I’ve always loved the ideas that are wrapped up in Physics – big questions like “what is the universe?”, “how big is it?”, “why does gravity work?” and so on – but I’ve always struggled with understanding the concepts. I skipped Physics in high school and took Biology instead (didn’t work out so great, story for another time). I’ve tried to read Professor Hawking’s books multiple times, and never made it past the first few pages – even the ones that are supposed to explain Physics to people who know nothing about it.

I would love to understand quantum mechanics, and entropy, and the Doppler Effect, and a million other things that govern how our universe works – but I can’t even get past Schrödinger’s cat. I mean, is it dead? Is it alive? How can it be both? The one thing I understand and can describe to other people is Bernoulli’s principle (mostly because I read a LOT about WWII airplanes and that was important to understand how airplanes work) – so if I have to sound “smart” about physics, that is my go-to to talk about. Makes great party conversation 😄

Anyway, if somebody could infuse me with an understanding of the mechanics of physics, I would take it!

Remember: tag your entry TOTW2 down in the tag section, if you want it to show up on the Theme Page.

Other business:

1. We’ve been working on a Help diary – some of you may have seen some of the entries going by on the front page over the last few days. This will be a resource for people to find out the how-to’s of OD and we will be connecting it to the site navigation in the next few days. Once that is done, it will be an evolving place that will change as we add new things to OD.
2. The team has been working on a ton of updates and changes to the site this week – but one big one I wanted to point out was connecting the “featured image” functionality for entries to the media manager that we are using for the site. This means that now when you are writing an entry, you need to click the “Set Featured Image” button up at the top, and that big space that used to be up there for you to add the image is not there anymore. The great part of this is that those images will now be stored with all the other ones you add to OD, so they will be available to re-use in other entries, if you’d like.
3. We are working toward opening the doors to the public sometime around the New Year – that will be a very exciting time for us, and hopefully there will be many other old OD members joining us. If you have any housecleaning to do before then in terms of privacy settings – please do so! We’ve had a few members ask about ways to change all of their “old” entries to Private (since they want to start with a “clean” slate) – we are working on a utility that will allow you to do this, and it should be coming soon.
4. Some of you asked for the recipe for my Grandma Olive’s orange cookies (a DM family holiday favorite) – please see below if you’d like to take a shot at making them yourself 🙂 In Grandma’s words,”I never think one recipe is practical. They have a way of vanishing.”