The Pip
drorzel | July 19, 2013The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both, though the Tenure She Wrote poster seems to be in a field whose conferences run on a different model than that used for most meetings I go to.
The Physics Focus post was particularly interesting to me, though, because I spent last weekend as the portable conference day-care while Kate…
drorzel | July 4, 2013It's Independence Day here in the US, so here are some patriotic kid photos for you.
"Wait a minute," you say, "That featured image doesn't have any flags or fireworks or gilled meat products! How is that patriotic?"
"Ah," I reply,"It was taken at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC last weekend." Game. Set. Match.
Here are a couple of other pictures from that visit:
The Pip is impressed with skeletons of ancient megafauna.
SteelyKid racing a triceratops skeleton.
And since I've already had to bite back a couple of "Oh, go fuck yourself" responses to political tweets, I'm…
drorzel | May 26, 2013Kate's off at Wiscon this weekend, so I came down to my parents' with the kids, rather than be outnumbered at home. We packed everybody into the car Saturday and drove to Ithaca to go to the Sciencenter, which the kids absolutely loved. In the "featured image" above, you see The Pip playing with the giant bubble maker (which we did for about fifteen minutes...), and SteelyKid emulating a recent Mythbusters by building a wooden house on a shake table to simulate an earthquake (with my grandmother). Other highlights included petting a snake, feeding balls through pneumatic tubes, and building…
drorzel | May 19, 2013During our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket, we took refuge from the rain in the Open door bookstore, where a short while later I saw the following scenes at opposite ends of the kids-book aisle (also the "Featured Image" for this post, but I'll reproduce it to save the RSS folks from having to click through):
SteelyKid and The Pip, both reading.
So, clearly, they take after me and Kate...
(We ended up buying the "How to Make Paper Airplanes" book SteelyKid is looking at, because paper airplanes are awesome. The music-playing book about an orchestra that The Pip is looking at…
drorzel | May 6, 2013My parents have a DVD of the Bacon Brothers singing "The Wheels on the Bus" over an animated scene, which The Pip loves and insists on watching over, and over, and over, and over... As the parent sitting through this on Sunday morning, I got a little punchy over on Twitter, and invented some quantum-physics-themed verses (if you don't know the tune, 1) count yourself lucky, and 2) here's a clip from the video on YouTube). Here are the results:
The electrons on the bus are fermions,
fermions,
fermions.
The electrons on the bus are fermions, in antisymmetric states...
Operators on the bus are…
drorzel | March 26, 2013The Pip is getting really into books these days, and SteelyKid has been into them for a good while now (she's four-and-a-half, after all...). At some point last week, she asked about my writing, so I got down a copy of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and showed her her name in the dedication, which she was tickled by (she now refers to it as "my book"). Encouraged by this, I read a bit to them both-- the dog dialogue from the first chapter, which started life as this old blog post-- doing the silly dog voice. SteelyKid giggled in the right places, more or less, and The Pip listened very…
drorzel | March 8, 2013WordPress's upload is broken, so here's a link to the photo: SteelyKid and The Pip.
February was... not a good month, in a lot of ways. Let's leave it at that. One of the unfortunate consequences of this was that I went just about the entire month without even taking any pictures of the kids, let along posting any of them here. this was, obviously, a shocking dereliction of duty both as a parent and a blogger.
So, as partial compensation, here's a composite of two pictures (which I'll use as both the "featured image" and insert below, so those reading via RSS can see it without clicking…
drorzel | January 27, 2013It's been a good while since I did any Cute Kid Blogging, due to excessive busy-ness. There's big news among the younger residents of Chateau Steelypips, though: SteelyKid lost one of her front teeth the other day:
SteelyKid showing off her missing tooth
That gap? Wasn't there on Friday morning. Lest you think we're horrible people who let her run headfirst into a pole or something, while we were surprised to have one come loose this early, she's within the normal age range for losing baby teeth. Just barely, but then she got teeth really early, too-- she had eight at eight months old. So I…
drorzel | December 31, 2012The Pip's ringing in the New Year... Well, OK, he's actually asleep upstairs. Because when you have a one-year-old and a four-year-old, you don't really get out to a lot of parties on New Year's Eve.
Anyway, to be honest, I won't be all that sorry to see 2012's taillights fade to black. There were undoubtedly some good things-- the publishing of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and a few smaller things, and the sale of How to Think Like a Scientist, along with some other weird-but-fun stuff that's not tangible enough to talk about yet. There were also some very bad things-- several deaths…
drorzel | November 29, 2012In the comments to yesterday's post about college admissions, Joseph Yoon quoted my statement that "I'm somewhat sympathetic to claims that Asians have a difficult position in higher education," and shot back with:
I wonder if you will feel more strongly about this in 10 years when your kids are near college. Will you advise them to not check the Asian box if it decreases their chances?
As a general matter, I try to avoid responding to comments when my initial reaction is "Oh, go fuck yourself." But I'll make an exception here, because I think it goes to a more general issue about college…
drorzel | November 7, 2012...and The Pip will be five. Happy birthday, Little Dude!
Oh, yeah, there was also some kind of election. In which a bunch of crazy people lost, and a guy I played rugby with was elected a US Senator. Which is a great way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this momentous occasion.
And here's the "featured image" pasted into the post, for those reading via RSS. It's a grainy cell-phone picture from a couple of days ago, when Grandma and Grandpa brought up a big birthday balloon:
It's hard to be a little dude with a great big balloon.
Here's a somewhat better picture, of The Pip…
drorzel | September 27, 2012SCENE: The library at Chateau Steelypips. DADDY is typing on the computer, while THE PIP plays on the floor. Enter STEELYKID.
STEELYKID: I'm already four years old.
DADDY: Yes, yes you are.
THE PIP: Thbbbbbbbpppt!
STEELYKID: How old is The Pip?
DADDY: Eleven months. Not quite one year.
STEELYKID: When The Pip is four, how old will I be?
DADDY: You'll be seven.
STEELYKID: And when he's seven, how old will I be?
DADDY: You'll be ten.
THE PIP: (pulls himself to a standing position) GA BA DA BA Phbbbbt! (falls down)
STEELYKID: Daddy, how old are you?
DADDY: I'm forty-one.
STEELYKID: And when I'm…
drorzel | September 4, 2012So, a couple of months ago, I said I was taking some time off from the blog, and wasn't sure I would make it back. What was up with that, anyway?
Well, for one thing, I had a bunch of stuff to work on, and needed the extra time. I wrote a proposal for a third book that's being shopped around now, about which I won't say anything other than that it doesn't involve Emmy. (She's taking it in stride. As long as she gets treats and belly rubs, we're cool.).
I also wrote two papers, posted to the arxiv: first, Searching for New Physics through AMO Precision Measurements:
We briefly review recent…
drorzel | September 1, 2012I might return to physics blogging at some point, but I know what people really want from this blog. So, here's a cute kid picture.
Don't worry, Daddy, we're not up to anything
The Pip is increasingly mobile, and here we see him trying to climb into my lap, with an assist from big sister SteelyKid. Giving them superhero-ish noms du Net may have been a mistake, because I think they may be planning to take over the world...
drorzel | June 23, 2012I had hoped to get the next Ten Years Before the Blog post queued up for today, but what with one thing and another, that didn't happen. It probably won't happen before Monday, either, as the weekend will be full of family-type activities-- taking SteelyKid to soccer this morning, and her summer camp orientation tomorrow, and so on.
So, here's some cute-kid material in honor of that. The featured image above (not visible in the RSS feed, alas) is me with the two kids, The Pip sporting the Yankees outfit his Aunt Mary sent him (Uncle Dick would've been proud), and SteelyKid in her spiffy new…
drorzel | May 2, 2012I've gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip:
Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid's kind of camera-averse at the moment, and it apparently took some doing to get her to agree to sit for this, so I'm surprised it came out this well. The Pip doesn't have as much ability to fuss about having his picture taken, so I've got some shots of him in his play gym:
He's a happy and active little dude, and when he figures out how…
drorzel | April 15, 2012We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to say that someone who's 97 is dying too soon, well, we always assumed she would outlive us all through sheer orneriness, so this is a nasty shock.
Thus, we're badly in need of some cute around here. Happily, the kids' day care was closed on Friday for Passover, and my mom came up…
drorzel | March 18, 2012Captain's Log, Stardate 031812USS BabyPod
Lieutenant Commander The Pip reporting:
Hey, this space pod thing is pretty neat:
Wait, what? You mean I get to be in charge of this. All by myself?
That's so awesome!!! Woo-hoo!
I can fly it however I want! Look, Ma, no hands!
Whee!!!! This is the most awesome thing ever!
Thanks, big sister Space Commander SteelyKid!
drorzel | March 15, 2012Yesterday was "Pi Day" (3-14, in the American style of writing dates), and while I personally find it kind of silly, The Pip took it to heart, using it as the occasion for his first rotation of π radians about his long axis. That is, he rolled from his back onto his stomach. Which is both good and bad: good, because it's a milestone, bad because now we can't leave him unattended on any flat, elevated surfaces.
Anyway, to mark the occasion, here's a picture of the two kids. With Appa for scale, even.
He's not in the porta-crib very often-- he prefers to be held so that he can "stand" on his…
drorzel | March 9, 2012I had planned to catch up on blogging a bunch of things this afternoon, but I decided I needed a nap more than I needed to pump up the blog traffic. So, here's a cute-baby picture to make up for it:
This is The Pip, trying to figure out what's up with the little dude in the mirror in his portable crib. He had his four-month check-up this morning, and got a clean bill of health, other than some mild concern that he's a skinny little dude-- his weight has gone up, but down in percentile terms. SteelyKid had the same thing happen when she was little, and she's a solidly built preschooler these…