Advent Calendar Day 18

The postman brought an unexpected surprise yesterday in the form of a letter from DD’s school. Nothing bad, in fact, quite the reverse. It seems that she’s been “identified as the most focussed learner in the Maths lesson on Friday” for which she has been awarded 2 house points.

Just to be clear here, this doesn’t mean that she’s a bit slow-but-trying-hard and they are giving her a bit of encouragement. No, she is very good at Maths (so much so that her Maths teacher was almost bouncing up and down with excitement at Parents’ Evening) and rather ahead of the level of most of her peers, so this is genuine recognition of her skillz – she haz them 🙂

Anyway, we aren’t going to say anything until we’ve had a chance to get her a little something by way of our own recognition of the school’s recognition of her achievements 😀

I think something suitably intellectual is called for today, so I’ve chosen the Tarot of Physics and drawn….Judgement.

This card is entitled Subject Reality. When is reality not subjective, I’d like to know? Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder beholder. Time is an illusion, (lunchtime doubly so). And Christmas is a time of good cheer, not slaving over a hot stove for a bunch of ingrates that get drunk and try to punch each others lights out.*

There is no accompanying text of any kind with this deck and my physics is a bit rusty,  so I won’t bore you with lengthy speculations about what the deck creators had in mind in assigning this to the Judgement card.

I will say that, in Quantum Physics, observation has an effect on the behaviour of particles, which may or may not exist in various states until observation confirms, a concept akin to the tree falling in the forest making a sound or not, or whether Schrodinger’s Cat is alive, dead or simply not in the box and so on.

Suffice to summarise that reality is in the eye of the beholder, so whether your Christmas is a good one and whether your gifts are a joy or a disappointment, depends largely on how you see it.  I work on the basis that any gift is a pleasure to receive (unless it’s a dead cat, of course) and Christmas is a time to be merry, even if copious quantities of alcohol are required to lubricate the happy train.

Anyhow, I hope your observations at Christmas are positive and happy (with no dead cats) 🙂

*This does not happen in our family, though I am given to understand that it is a regular occurrence amongst the soap-watching classes. I don’t know why people do watch soaps, an activity I regard as akin to watching paint dry, but with more punch-ups, apparently.