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uusue2 is a 72-year-old female from United States.

My son married the love of his life in Indonesia on December 16, 2017. Here they are at the end of the religious (Muslim) part of the ceremony. They are both very happy, and are living in her home town of Bogor (about an hour from Jakarta) where he has a job teaching English.

January 5, 2017: My dad passed away yesterday, after not recovering from a fall in October. He was 95. If you have elderly parents, try to see if someone can check in with them at least once a day. My dad was on the floor for two days before anyone found him (I live 800 miles away).

November 9, 2016: Dear all, I want to make a pledge that is important to me, and that is to speak out against injustice, wherever I see it. To my LGBT friends, my Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, my atheist and humanist friends, my friends of color, and all my friends whoever and wherever you are - I have your back. I will not be silent. I will speak with love, not hate, and with peace in my heart. I will speak. Perhaps I have been silent too often when I could have said, this is wrong. No more. I will speak.
I love you all.

February 9, 2016: My husband Frank died at about 5:30 this evening. He was quiet, peaceful, and surrounded by friends. Thank you so much to all my Babble friends who have given us so much support and love over the past three and a half years. His memorial service was held on Saturday, February 20, and it was a wonderful celebration of his life.

Link to Lickety: http://r46.me/BabbleClues.html

Link to Babble Expert: http://r46.me/BabbleExpert20110410.zip

No More Enemies: http://www.nomoreenemies.net/
Written by my sister-in-law, Deb Reich, who is a writer and translator in Israel/Palestine. She has lived in New York, Wadi Ara, Abu Ghosh, Karkur, Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, among other places. A very important book and a very important idea.

Folding at Home: Folding at home is a distributed computing effort to understand protein folding (or misfolding), which is key to understanding diseases such as cancer and AIDS. Thanks to crosshair, we have a Babble team! Our babble team number is 173981. Just go here: http://folding.stanford.edu/ for the program client. After you download the client, select run or open and it will place a icon in the bottom right of the task bar. Right click on the icon and select configure, select a user name, put our team number in the space provided and hit enter:)

I am a professor of physics and mother of a son. I am retired now but will always be a teacher - I hope you learn something by reading this! Will read anything. I like puzzles of all sorts. You can find me on Facebook as Suzanne Willis.

Physics Babblets - an occasional series of words found in grids. Now alphabetical! These are words that are common (or in some cases not so common) in physics, but not in everyday speech. Sometimes I have included some words that are more usual, but that I thought had some pedagogical benefit (that is, if you read all this, I hope you learn a few things!).

abamp - 10 amperes (little used).

abmho - a billion mhos. Also little used.

abohm- a billionth of an ohm. Need I add that this isn't used much either?

aeromony - the study of the upper atmosphere, from the stratosphere on up, regions where photodissociation and ionization occur (that is, where incoming radiation has enough energy to knock electrons off molecules, and to knock molecules apart). It also includes the study of similar regions in the atmospheres of other planets.

albedo - a measure of the reflectivity of a surface. The albedo is the fraction of incident sunlight that is reflected by an object.

alnico - an iron alloy containing aluminum, nickel, and cobalt. Makes strong magnets.

ampere - see amps.

amps - plural of amp, short for ampere, the unit of electric current.

aneroid - without fluid (either gas or liquid). Barometers and blood pressure cuffs (sphygmomanometers) are often aneroid - they measure pressure relative to vacuum.

anion - a negatively charged ion.

anode - the point on a battery or other electrical device where current flows in.

antinode - the point on a standing wave with the largest amplitude. The points that don't move at all are called nodes; on a fixed string the ends are nodes. A closed pipe has a node at one end and an antinode at the other; an open pipe has antinodes at both ends.

apogee - point in an orbit that is farthest from the Earth. Adjectival form apogean.

apolune - point in an orbit that is farthest from the Moon. See apogee.

argon - element 18; the third most abundant element in the atmosphere. A noble gas.

astatine - the heaviest known halogen (similar to iodine), element 85.

axion - a hypothetical particle with very small mass and zero spin (so not a neutrino, which has spin 1/2 and is a fermion; the axion would be a boson). Has not been observed; could contribute to dark matter if it exists.

bels - plural of bel, a logarithmic ratio of the intensity of something (often sound) to a reference level. Usually we see the unit which is 1/10 bel, the decibel.

boron - element 5.

cathode - the point on a battery or other electrical device where current flows out.

cation - a positively charged ion.

ceric - containing cerium (element 58).

cerium - element 58.

cesium - element 55.

collimate - to make a beam of light or particles more parallel and narrower. For example, an X-ray machine collimates the X-ray beam so the X-rays only go where you want them to go, and don't spread out all over the place.

corona - the outermost layer of the Sun, typically only visible during solar eclipses.

cosec - short for cosecant.

cotan - short for cotangent.

curie - a unit of radioactivity equal to 3.7 x 10^10 decays per second.

debye - a unit of electric dipole moment. The dipole moment is related to the electric field of the dipole (it is equal to the magnitude of the charge multiplied by the distance between the charges).

deuteron - a hydrogen nucleus with an extra neutron (normal hydrogen is just a single proton). The atom is called deuterium.

dewar - a container for cryogenic liquids, kind of like a thermos bottle on steroids :-)

diatron - an electrical circuit that uses diodes (at least that's what the one definition of it that I could find says; never heard of it myself!).

diode - an electrical element that passes current much more easily in one direction than the other.

dipole - a pair of equal but opposite electric charges (electric dipole), or the magnetic field of a simple current loop (magnetic dipole).

dopant - a small amount of impurity added to a semiconductor to alter its electrical properties. Can also refer to small amounts of impurity added to affect optical properties as well.

dynatron - a tetrode, once frequently used as an oscillator in radio, in which an increase in the plate voltage results in a decrease in the plate current because of emission of electrons from the plate.

dyne - unit of force in the cgs system (in the SI system the unit of force is the newton).

dynode - an electrode in a vacuum tube that serves as an electron multiplier through secondary emission. This means that when an electron hits the dynode, several more electrons are emitted by it. These secondary electrons are accelerated through a potential (voltage) difference, usually to another dynode, which further increases the number of electrons emitted, until a sufficiently large current is detected at the final dynode.

earthed - British for grounded, as in a grounded circuit.

einstein - a unit of photosynthetically available radiation, equal to one mole of photons (that is, 6.022 x 10^23 photons). This is used more by chemists and biologists than physicists, but since it is named after probably the most famous physicist of all time I have included it.

emfs - plural of emf, which stands for electromotive force. Not really a force so we use the abbreviation more commonly now. It's the voltage put out by a battery (or other voltage source) before you take into account the internal resistance. Used in circuit analysis, and abbreviated in equations with a script E.

entropy - a measure of disorder. In any closed system (one with no energy entering or leaving), the total entropy either stays the same or increases.

ergs - units of energy in the cgs system (which is not used much; the usual system is the SI or mks system, where the unit of energy is the joule).

etalon - an optical interferometer in which a beam of light undergoes multiple reflections; can be used with active electronics to stabilize the wavelength of a laser.

farad - a unit of electric capacitance. A capacitor stores electrical energy, and the capacitance tells you how much voltage is across the capacitor for a given amount of charge on the plates.

faradic - an obsolete term meaning alternating current. Current only flows through a capacitor if it is alternating; direct current does not flow through a capacitor.

faradise - obsolete term meaning to treat (medically) with faradic currents. See faradic.

fermi - another name for a femtometer, or 10^-15 meters.

fermion - an elementary particle of spin 1/2, which obeys the Pauli exclusion principle. Electrons are fermions. Particles with integral spin are called bosons; photons are bosons. You can have as many bosons in the same state as you like.

fets - plural of fet, a field effect transistor. All transistors amplify signals; a field effect transistor is less noisy than the other common type of transistor, the junction transistor. The MOSFET is a common type of field effect transistor made from a metal-oxide semiconductor (hence the MOS part).

fissile - capable of sustaining a chain reaction through fissioning. Only certain isotopes of uranium are fissile; the most common one, U238, is not, which is why uranium has to be refined before using it in a reactor or a weapon.

geoid - The equipotential surface of the Earth's gravity field which best fits, in a least squares sense, global mean sea level. An equipotential surface is one where the gravitational potential (and therefore force) is equal everywhere; the direction of the gravitational force is perpendicular to this surface. It reflects the detailed distribution of mass around the earth and is therefore quite irregular.

gilbert - a unit (seldom used) of magnetomotive force in the cgs system. Magnetomotive force - not really a force - is something that produces magnetic flux (a magnetic field traversing a current loop). In the SI system the units are ampere-turns, since electrical currents are what produces magnetic fields; the "turns" refer to coils of wire (the more wire you have coiled up, the bigger the magnetic flux is). One gilbert is 5/(2 pi) ampere-turns.

goniometer - device for measuring the angle of something. Used in physical therapy; also in surface science (measuring the angle of surface tension) and crystallography.

hadron - an elementary particle that contains quarks. Protons, neutrons, and mesons are hadrons; electrons, muons, and neutrinos are not (they are leptons). See meson, muon, and lepton.

hafnium - element 72

helium - element 2 (you knew that, of course)

henry - a unit of electrical inductance. Inductance tells you how much voltage will be created by a changing current; a one-henry circuit will generate one volt of electric potential when the current through it changes at a rate of one amp per second.

hertz - unit of frequency. One hertz is one cycle per second.

hyperon - a baryon containing one, two, or three strange quarks, but no top, bottom, or charm quarks. A baryon is a particle containing three quarks, such as a proton or neutron.

indium - element 49

iodate - to add iodine to something.

ionium - old name for thorium-230 (see isotope)

ions - atoms that carry a net electric charge due to having gained or lost one or more electrons.

iridium - element 77

isohel - a line on a weather map connecting points that receive equal amounts of sunshine

isophote - a line joining points of equal surface brightness, often on a galaxy or other astronomical object.

isotone - nuclei with the same number of neutrons but different numbers of protons (so they are different elements). See isotope (which is a much more common term).

isotope - a nucleus with a particular number of protons and neutrons. The number of protons tells you which element it is, and the number of neutrons tells you which isotope of that element it is. Isotopes are usually written (in plain text) using the chemical symbol and the atomic mass number, which is the sum of the number of protons and neutrons (collectively known as nucleons). So deuterium (see deuteron) is H2, or hydrogen-2; it has one proton (since it's hydrogen) and one neutron, making a total of two nucleons in the nucleus. U238 is an isotope of uranium with 92 protons (just like all uranium isotopes) and 146 neutrons. Note that ALL nuclei are isotopes.

joule - unit of energy in the SI (metric) system.

kaon - a type of meson, called "strange" due to its lifetime, which was considered unusually long when it was discovered. Now known to contain a "strange" quark, which decays only weakly.

kenotron - a vacuum diode used when high voltage and low current is required, such as in X-ray equipment.

kiloton - a thousand tons. Often used to measure the destructive power of nuclear weapons; one kiloton is equivalent to the explosive power of a thousand tons of TNT (this was actually calibrated during WWII by exploding 500 tons of TNT). The weapon dropped on Hiroshima, small by today's standards, was about 12 kilotons; the largest weapon ever tested was about 50 megatons (a megaton is a million tons).

lepton - a class of elementary particles that do not interact via the strong nuclear interaction. Examples include electrons and neutrinos.

lidar - LIght Detection and Ranging, a way of measuring distances and other properties of objects using light (often from a laser).

linac - a linear accelerator (as opposed to a circular accelerator such as Fermilab or CERN). There is a linear accelerator at SLAC in California. Electron-positron accelerators are often linacs, as those particles radiate away a lot of their energy if you bend them into circular paths. Low-energy injectors for high-energy circular accelerators are also usually linacs.

loran - LOng RAnge Navigation using triangulation from multiple radio transmitters

maser: stands for Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. Like a laser (which stands for Light Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation) but for microwaves.

meniscus - the shape of the surface of a fluid in a container. Plural menisci.

meson - a strongly-interacting, short-lived particle, made of a quark-antiquark pair.

mesotron - original term for meson; changed after Heisenberg corrected Yukawa's understanding of Greek.

mhos - units of conductivity (the inverse of resistance).

monopole - a single magnetic pole (either north or south), also known as a "magnetic charge". Not observed to exist in nature; all magnets are at least dipoles, having both north and south poles. (This is because all observed magnetic fields are due to moving electric charges - even permanent magnets, where the moving charges are the electrons in the atoms).

muon - a heavy lepton, similar to the electron.

negaton - obscure early term for electron.

neutrino - a particle that has no electric charge and almost no mass; it is a lepton, and is emitted in beta decays.

neutron - a nucleon, similar to the proton, but with no electric charge. Most nuclei (except hydrogen) contain both protons and neutrons.

newton - the unit of force in the metric system. Force is mass times acceleration, so one newton is one kilogram-meter per second squared.

nicad - nickel-cadmium (actually a registered trademark), used for batteries.

niton - old name for radon.

nuclei - plural of nucleus.

nucleon - generic name for either a proton or a neutron.

nutate, nutation - a wobbling in the precession of a rotational axis, particularly that of the Earth. Although right now Polaris is directly north of the North Pole, the direction in which the North Pole points precesses - it describes a circle in the sky that takes approximately 26000 years to complete. Nutation refers to a slight wobble in that circle.

oersted - a unit of magnetic field strength in the cgs system.

ohms - plural of the unit of electrical resistance.

orometer - barometer that measures elevation above sea level

orrery - a mechanical model of the solar system. Plural orreries. Here is an orrery of exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) discovered by the Kepler spacecraft: http://www.universetoday.com/83468/orrery-of-keplers-exoplanets/

osmic - pertaining to osmium

osmium - element 76

parsec - the distance at which the PARallax of an astronomical object is one arc-SECond (hence parsec). Parallax is the shifting of a closer object against a more distant background when viewed from two different points (you can see this by looking at your outstretched hand first using one eye and then the other); for astronomical objects it is measured from opposite sides of the earth's orbit (6 months apart). One parsec is about 3.2 light-years, where a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.4 trillion kilometers.

parton - original name for constituents (parts) of the proton and neutron, now known to be quarks and gluons.

pentode - similar to triode, but with five electrodes.

phon - a unit of perceived loudness. If a given sound is perceived to be as loud as a 60 dB sound at 1000 Hz, then it is said to have a loudness of 60 phons. The human ear's response is frequency dependent, so apparent loudness is not directly proportional to sound intensity.

phot - a unit of illumination, equal to one lumen per square centimeter; the SI unit is the lux, which is one lumen per square meter. It is a measure of the amount of light from a source as perceived by the human eye.

pion - a type of meson, very short-lived, found in cosmic rays.

pionic - related to pions.

quasar - a quasi-stellar object, actually a very energetic galaxy existing in the early history of the universe (all the quasars we see are billions of light-years away).

radian - natural angle measure (arc length divided by radius). A circle is 2 pi radians.

radii - plural of radius.

radome - a dome that houses a radar unit.

radon - element 86, radioactive.

rads - a rad, which stands for Radiation Absorbed Dose, is a unit of absorbed energy due to radiation, 0.01 joule per kilogram. Has been replaced by the SI unit called the gray; one gray is 100 rads.

rems - a rem, which stands for Roentgen Equivalent Man, is similar to a rad, but multiplied by a "quality factor" that approximates the relative damage done by different types of radiation (even though they deposit the same amount of energy). The quality factor ranges from 1 for gamma and beta (electron) rays up to 20 for alpha rays. Has been replaced by the SI unit called the sievert; one sievert is 100 rem.

rhenium - element 75.

roentgen - a unit of ionizing radiation exposure, now seldom used. Also spelled rontgen.

scalar - a quantity with magnitude only. See vector.

secant - a line that intersects a circle at two points. Also the inverse of the cosine.

secpar - parsec. Does not seem to occur in actual use as far as I can tell (that is, it exists in dictionaries but nowhere else).

sinh - hyperbolic sine function. Also cosh, tanh (although Enable doesn't recognize tanh, and cosh has other meanings).

sone - another unit of perceived loudness; a loudness of 1 sone is equivalent to the loudness of a signal at 40 phons. However, unlike phons, the loudness in sones is a power law function of the signal intensity in decibels.

spinor - a vector specifically used to indicate the spin of an elementary particle (which is an intrinsic quantum property of the particle, and not due to anything actually spinning)

stator - the stationary part of an electric motor (the moving part is the rotor)

tachyon - a theoretical particle that travels faster than the speed of light in vacuum. As far as we know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum; if tachyons were to exist their rest mass would have to be imaginary. The equations of special relativity allow for this but no hints of such particles have ever been observed.

teleran - a navigational aid that uses radar to map the sky above an airfield, which, together with a map of the airfield itself, is transmitted by television to aircraft approaching the field. Short for Tele ( vision ) R ( adar ) A ( ir ) N ( avigation ).

tensor - a two (or more) dimensional array of quantities, used in mathematics and theoretical physics.

teraohm - a trillion ohms.

terbic - adjectival form of terbium, element 65

terrella - a small magnetized sphere used to demonstrate the earth's magnetism

tesla - a unit of magnetic flux density in the SI system. The earth's magnetic field is about 30 microtesla.

tetrode - similar to triode but with four electrodes.

thoric - adjectival form of thorium, element 90.

thoron - former name for an isotope of radon, produced in the decay of thorium.

toroid - a doughnut shape; also torus. Toroidal - adjective form.

torque - force times lever arm. It takes a torque to change an object's rotational velocity, just as it takes a force to change its velocity (so torque is the rotational analog of force).

torr - a unit of atmospheric pressure, named after Torricelli and approximately equal to 1 mm of mercury (in a mercury barometer)

triode - vacuum tube with three electrodes (filament, grid, and plate). Mostly replaced by transistors now.

triton - the nucleus of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and two neutrons. See deuteron.

troland - measure of how much light falls on a retina from a source of a particular strength through an opening in the pupil of the eye of a particular size (technically, if you have a source of one candela per square meter falling on a pupil that is one square millimeter in area, the amount of light falling on the retina is one troland).

umbra - the darkest part of a shadow

varistor - a VARIable resiSTOR, whose resistance depends on the voltage across it

vector - a quantity with both magnitude and direction.

weber - unit of magnetic flux. One weber per square meter is one tesla, where the tesla is the measure of magnetic field strength.

xenon - an inert gas, element 54.

ylem - word coined by Ralph Alpher to describe the primordial plasma created during the Big Bang. Now understood to be a quark-gluon plasma. Alpher did his doctoral research with George Gamow; Gamow added Hans Bethe (a very famous physicist) to the committee so the paper would be authored by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow - a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, and gamma.