August 10, 2022
Original collage SueAn Stradling-Collins
My son Thomas and I travel quite well together. We get each other's jokes. We like the same music. We enjoy going places together, even if it is just a short trip.
Thomas, 24, is on the autism spectrum. He is very intelligent and high functioning, but he has had much with which to deal each and every day. He spends a lot of time learning about things that interest him. This means reading numerous articles or listening to podcasts. Once he has gathered the information, he feels compelled to share it with others. This is called info dumping. Getting in my Rav4 named Walt and beginning to drive triggers his dumping. Longer trips have brought me information on reverberation, apples, and dicots vs.monocots. His sharing of information is somewhat compulsive, and continues after hiking a trail at the Painted Desert, or shopping, or bathroom breaks. Until he has told me all that needs to be expressed, the information will continue to flow. I am pretty good at listening and asking questions when I don't understand. I am also pretty good at keeping my attention on the road and also partly listening to the radio (another large part of our traveling). I can change the subject for a time, and he knows that we can go back to his topic if needed. Some topics, dicots and monocots for instance, has been going on for a couple of weeks now and doesn't seem to be ending soon.
I love to learn, and I love my son, so I don't mind knowing more. Sharing in what interests Thomas brings us closer together. And as I look at my reasons for starting a blog, I thought that maybe I'm doing the same thing that Thomas does by info dumping my interests on you. I've asked you to travel a bit with me, share my interests, listen to what I have to say about what I think is interesting or what I am creating, or what I am reading, or what I am doing. Each Wednesday, I hope to share some of those things that I feel compelled to share. I don't want this to be a one-sided conversation, but I have chosen and paid for a year's worth of a format that doesn't allow your comments here. I would ask that if you feel compelled to share, that you do so on my Facebook page or at simplysuean@gmail.com. If you subscribed to this blog, I will send emails to the email address you shared. I hope this brings us closer together too.
I am turning the next few paragraphs over to Thomas. I am limiting him to one short paragraph on each of the above topics. He also created the short video that goes with this post. (Video unavailable.)
Hello, Thomas here. I'm happy to write for my Mom's blog. Here we go...
My interest in the reverberation stems from a greater interest in electronic music. Honing in on the topic at hand, I find the different methods of creating the many reflections and repeats of the sound as they bounce around a surface and fade away fascinating. There are acoustic methods, like playing a pre-recorded sound into a reverberant room, like a concert hall or a purpose built room in a recording studio, and capturing the result with a microphone. There's the electroacoustic way, to play the sound into a set of springs or a giant metal plate, which the sound will bounce around in before being picked up my a magnetic or piezo-electric pickup. And then there are the purely electric ways of doing it, with analog circuitry or digital recreations.
Now, the apples were less about apples and more about an entertaining website I happened upon. The comedian Brain Frange curates a site called https://applerankings.com/ in which he eats apples and reviews them on a myriad of different criteria. One I've tried and taken a liking to is the Pink Lady. https://applerankings.com/pink-lady-apple-review/ (language warning). It's a nice, sweet and tart apple with a beautiful skin on it. And as an example of a bad apple, here is his review of the red delicious. https://applerankings.com/red-delicious-apple-review/. With the prior acknowledgement that there is some crude language, I'd recommend Apple Rankings to anyone who can look past that.
Now, to greatly oversimplify, monocots and dicots, (short for monocotyledon and dicotyledon, respectively,) are the two largest groups within the flowering plants, the angiosperms. They are also home to some of the most important crops humanity has ever known. A cotyledon is an embryonic leaf present within a seed. Cotyledons are the first leaves to emerge from the ground. Botanists can use the amount of cotyledons present to differentiate and classify the two. In addition, there are the mangnoliids, a more basal family in the angiosperms, and the gymnosperms, seed bearing plants that do not form flowers or fruits. Some conifers (a sub-group of the gymnosperms) can have over a dozen cotyledons.
As I was eating my avocado on toast this morning, Thomas couldn't resist informing me that I was eating a mangoliid. It tasted better than that sounds.
Awesome work 👏