A miracle of physics

First, an on-topic tangent: Everybody is absolutely just fine, Lil' Genghis is still scheduled to hang out at the hospital on Monday night, and to arrive sometime Tuesday. Everything is on track, everybody is ready, everybody is healthy, everything is just fine.

This message goes out largely to Aunt Leeanne and Aunt Catherine, two professional editors that, regardless of how many memos you write and calendars you post, still believe you're going to blow deadline.

Second, we need to talk some here about Grandma Biziza. We could talk about how wonderfully supportive she is, how she up a job that occupies her from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. to stay here for a month, how she's trying to make mom comfortable and is always bringing her water, how she never takes vacations but still took a month off to be with her daughter and granddaughter.

Yeah, we could talk about all that, but it's better to talk about how Grandma Biziza defies nature. Specifically, her very life violates the laws of thermodynamics.

Witness: The human body requires energy simply to exist: to maintain a constant body temperature, yes, but to pump the heart, which moves the blood, which carries the oxygen from the working lungs. dad has heard that a body at rest burns energy equivalent to a 60-watt light bulb, which, if you've ever done the bicycle-light bulb thing at the science museum, you know this is a lot of energy. It's tough to keep that light bulb lit when you're trying your hardest, even when your body does it all the time with seemingly no effort.

So it takes the body a lot of energy just to exist. Per Wikipedia:

More simply, the First Law [of Thermodynamics] states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; rather, the amount of energy lost in a steady state process cannot be greater than the amount of energy gained.

Yet Grandma Biziza can go for hours and hours on a single piece of toast.

Then there's the idea that without added stimuli, things will kind of average out.

In simple terms, it is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system which is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process has progressed.

Yet Grandma Biziza always seems to have a constant level of energy and interest, regardless of food or sleep. In fact, there's damned little of either.

Heck, Grandma Biziza drinks from the little 8oz/24cl cans of Diet Coke, and slowly sips decaffeinated coffee.

There can only be one explanation, then: Grandma Biziza isn't using energy in the normal sense of the word. "energy," per se, has to be conserved, but there are different forms of energy. Food contains chemical energy, measured in calories, but she isn't eating enough to do the kinds of things that she does. Clearly, then, she's translating the mass of the small food into a different kind of energy. Yes, folks, Grandma Biziza is a nuclear weapon, always splitting the atom. It must be the only explanation.

Lil' Genghis will have a lot to hear from her.