Chaos and peeing

Here is some (disturbing?) insight into me.

I love math. That is no surprise. I teach it, I have a degree in it.

This summer I was taking a math education course and we had to do a group project/teaching presentation on a topic. The professor gave us a list of possible topics and said we should pick one that we haven't studied before. Since I was one of the only people in the class with a math degree, I had studied a lot of the topics. One topic I hadn't studied was chaos theory. I've always had a thing for chaos theory, and here is why.


Have you seen Jurassic Park? It came out when I was 13 and it was one of the only movies my family owned. So I've seen it 15 million times. There is a small scene that introduced me to chaos theory. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbloom's character), a mathematician, is explaining/hitting on Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern's character) and explaining how chaos theory works via an example with a drop of water traveling down her hand . This scene stuck in my head for some reason.

I was thinking about it once when I was going pee. I notice that when I go pee, the pee never travels out of my body into the toilet the same way. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, sometimes it dribbles down my butt, etc. I've experimented too, thinking about this chaos. I've tried positioning myself different ways too ... I've sat straight up, I've slouched, I've bent my torso over my legs, I've hovered above the seat, etc. Then it changes depending how diluted my urine is with water. It also changes depending on my hair style. I've spent way too much time thinking about urinating and chaos theory.

Anyway, I ended up convincing my group to do chaos theory where we showed the clip in Jurassic Park to the class as an intro to chaos theory. We then ended up playing with double pendulums to look at something that moves chaotically. We got a good mark on our project.

Yes, I did tell my group why I wanted to do chaos. They thought it was funny, and a bit strange .. .but they weren't so weirded out because they know I'm a bit bizarre.

If I ever do my PhD in math (which I think I'll never do), I'd like to explore the chaos of peeing. It would at least amuse the people evaluating my thesis.