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Current Mood: romantic
Current Music: "This Must Be Love" by Phil Collins

Sitting in Pappy's Sweet Shop the other day, I was working on my calculus homework (partial derivatives and gradients), and enjoying the sweet sounds of the oldies on the juke box. Hearing this music got me thinking, however.

Typically, engineers and other mathematically or scientifically oriented people are painted (I feel unfairly) with an image of being unromantic. Their idea of romance, some would say, would be a program that creates an infinite loop of "I Love You"s, or the classic Valentine's Day nerd poem:

roses are #FF0000
violets are #0000FF
all my base
are belong to you

It's difficult, you see, for a person of integers or equations to express their emotions in a way that society deems acceptable. Geeky pickup lines and nerdy jokes don't work in a bar the other 364 days a year, nor do they work on the most romantic day of the year. Even expressing your love for somebody as a limit, say, as x -> inf. of (7x^3-8x+10)/(6x^2 -5x +8), is an equation for trouble, not romance. Can you blame a person for trying to quantify or find an expression for his or her feelings? Is that not a noble goal? With that in mind, I present a compromise. In honor of St. Valentine's Day, I give you an engineering analysis of 1966's number one hit, "My Love" by Petula Clark


My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine
Sunshine, or visible light from the sun, is comprised of photons emitted from the star which earth orbits around at a distance of approximately 93 million miles. At it's creation, sunlight is approximately 6,000 degrees K warm. Eight minutes traveling in space and filtered through earth's magnetic and atmospheric barriers, it has cooled to 288 K (58.73 degree F) by the time it has reached earth.

Softer than a sigh.
Sound, measured in on a logarithmic scale, uses the SI unit of decibels, 1/100th of a bel (so named for Alexander Graham). The absolute minimum threshold of human hearing is taken to be 0 decibels. Human breathing at 3 meters is equivalent to just under 10 decibels, so it follows that a sound softer than a sigh would fall around between 0 and 10 decibels.

My love is deeper than the deepest ocean
The deepest point in any earth ocean is the Mariana Trench located in the Pacific Ocean near the Northern Mariana Islands. It has a maximum depth of 10,923 m (35,838 ft).

Wider than the sky.
Given various conditions, such as altitude, atmospheric distortion, moisture, pollution, cloud density, sunlight, and other weather phenomenon, it's difficult to discuss what the maximum width of the "sky" would be. At most (from orbit), the sky takes up the entire radius of the earth, or 12,756 km.

My love is brighter than the brightest star
That shines every night above
The sun, of course, is the brightest star in the daytime sky, and many of the bodies in our solar system, such as Venus and the moon are very bright. But the song specifies star at night, which means the brightest star of visible light in the night sky (from any hemisphere) is Sirius, at an apparent visual magnitude of -1.46.

And there is nothing in this world
That can ever change my love

Something happened to my heart the day that I met you
Something that I never felt before
On a biological level, the human body reacts in a number of ways during physiological excitement, including increase in breathing rate, blood pressure, muscle tone (myotonia) and heart rate (tachycardia), as well as release of various chemicals and hormones in response to stimuli.

You are always on my mind no matter what I do
And everyday it seems that I want you more



Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!*






*Yes, this is my first year with a Valentine, and no, that's not my gift to her. I have something much bigger planned.