I've been so sick this week. It must be a flu, because colds I can shrug off, but the flu kicks me in the butt. Whatever this is, it's kicking me in the butt.

I think the worst part is not just letting work pile up, but not being around for my labs, for my kids. I love interacting with my students, it's probably my favorite part of being a physics instructor.

But, I don't want to be Typhoid Mary. I don't want to get my students sick, so I stay away as much as I can.

I feel like I might be getting better. But I also took generic nyquil, so who knows.

For those of you that might wonder, there are some nice days in Fresno. Today is one of them. There aren't a lot, by my growing-up-in-the-bay-area standards, but they do exist.

On one such day in Fresno, I remember thinking about when I would play a video game way to much (as I would occasionally do) that there were two odd mental phenomena that would occur. One, is that I would have vivid dreams where I was playing the game. The other, and this only happened when I played the game way, way too much is I would see the game when I closed my eyes.

Every avid gamer I've spoken with has confirmed experiencing this sort of thing, but as far as I knew this wasn't well studies. Just yesterday, though, when looking around for interesting things to bring up in my class I found an article about these sorts of effects, but it was specifically for those avid (some might say "addicted") players of Tetris.

It would be interesting to find if there was any educational content that would be a match for this intense mode of learning and if it could then be exploited for learning those ideas. Maybe something like a simulation of celestial mechanics. I wrote a such a simulation way back in the DOS age, when 286's roamed the Earth, but nothing recently and nothing fancy enough to be this engaging (for anyone except perhaps me and a very few quirky people like me).

Writing simulations was one of the more interesting things I've done in my own research. It would fun to get back into it.