Bon mots: rotation

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"
--Louise Bogan

"Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold."
--Diane Glancy, as quoted in What Is Found There, Ch. 12, by Adrienne Rich (1993)

"The lazy manage to keep up with the earth’s rotation just as well as the industrious."
--Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Fifth Selection (1988)

"Let the wheel spin out,
Till all created things
With shout and answering shout
Cast off rememberings..."
--Philip Larkin, “All Catches Alight”

"Spin and die,
To live again as butterfly."
--Christina Georgina Rossetti, "The Caterpillar (Sing-Song)"

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."
--Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842)

"Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."
--Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)

Overheard: what is the fish?

Physics 8A, Fall Semester 2006
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Overheard during an in-class activity (rotational kinematics with a constant angular acceleration):

Student 1: "What is the 'fish?'"
Student 2: "What?"
Student 1: "This 'fish'...what is it?"
Student 2: "Oh...that's alpha."
Student 1: "Okay... What is 'alpha?'"

The conversation is somewhat embellished, of course.