drorzel | September 29, 2015The JCC day care was closed again today, so I spent the day out and about with The Pip while SteelyKid was at school. While I did take the DSLR along, none of the pictures I got were all that great, so you get a cell-phone snapshot that's mostly interesting because of the subject matter:
The Pip playing air hockey.
One of the two stops on our big outing of the day was the bouncy-bounce place in a local mall, which also has a bunch of awful game machines. And a kid-height air hockey table, which The Pip and I made heavy use of for a while. It's all physics, after all...
Day care re-opens…
drorzel | September 29, 2015The images from my new camera are huge-- 6000x4000 pixels-- so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it's never worked right on the rare occasions that I've tried). Since I'm opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and color-correcting. When I'm taking photos of the kids, it's often hard to get them framed really well for the initial shot (they insist on moving and doing cute stuff...), so the cropping is sometimes very significant.
One of the rules for composing photos that even a doofus like me knows…
drorzel | September 28, 2015The JCC day care is closed today and tomorrow for the start of Sukkot, so as a result, I spent most of the day home with The Pip (SteelyKid went off to school as usual). Which means I got a whole bunch of photos of him playing at home and at a couple of local parks.
The best for photo-of-the-day purposes was this one of him looking out from behind a wooden bench at one of the parks:
The Pip grinning from behind a bench.
I like the way the bench and the concrete pavers behind it are basically monochrome, making his face and hair really stand out. Probably would be even more striking with…
drorzel | September 27, 2015Really, was there any question at all what the subject of today's photo would be? I mean, I'm a geek, I have a fancy camera-- of course I was taking pictures of the lunar eclipse. But more importantly, I was sharing it with SteelyKid:
SteelyKid looking at the eclipse through her telescope.
That's SteelyKid looking through her telescope at the early stages of the eclipse. The light is from the lamp in our front yard, which would be no good at all for trying to see anything actually faint, but isn't really an issue when you're looking at the full moon.
The telescope-- a Celestron FirstScope…
drorzel | September 26, 2015The image here of a pancake cooking isn't particularly interesting in its own right, other than as documentation of our weekend ritual at Chateau Steelypips. Saturday and sunday mornings, Kate sleeps in while the kids watch cartoons and I cook pancakes for them. SteelyKid absolutely drowns hers in maple syrup, then refuses to eat them, while The Pip regularly wolfs down two plain pancakes, eating with his hands:
A pancake cooking at Chateau Steelypips.
As I said, this image isn't especially interesting, but it's here mostly as a teaser for a different thing, namely this thermal-imaging…
drorzel | September 25, 2015I spent a while today shooting video of myself on the back porch. Which technically qualifies for the photo-a-day project, because I used the video feature of my new camera. So, here's a still frame.
Still frame from video shot for a physics thing.
What am I doing here, and why? You'll have to wait until I finish the analysis and write it up for the blog. Right now, I have errands to run before I go get the kids from day care.
drorzel | September 25, 2015Another collection of posts over at my blog for Forbes:
-- Wormholes, Monopoles, And Weyl Fermions: Making Exotic Physics Inside Ordinary Matter: A sort of deep background look at what makes condensed matter cool. Drawing heavily on Jimmy Williams's talk at the Schrodinger Sessions.
-- Why Does My Car Change Color In The Morning?: SteelyKid pointed out that my car appeared paler than normal in the morning, and explaining why suggested a quick optical physics post.
-- Football Physics: Nobody Catches The Ball At Its Highest Point: My Giants frittered away a lead against the Falcons over the…
drorzel | September 24, 2015While I have a bunch of stuff in progress, it's been a hectic week already, so I blew off the middle park of the day to go to Thacher State Park and take a hike with my camera. I got a whole bunch of photos from this, and later on, I'll sort them all and put the good ones in an album on G+. for now, though, I have two that are good photo-of-the-day candidates.
When I set out on this hike, I only took my two fixed-focal-length lenses, the 50mm f/1.8 and the 24mm f/2.8. Each of them fits easily in the pocket of a pair of cargo shorts, and I figured swapping between the two would provide a…
drorzel | September 23, 2015This afternoon, I drove over to Vermont to give a talk on "What to Tell Your Dog About Einstein" for the Green Mountain Academy of Lifelong Learning. This was held at the Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, VT, which sure is pretty:
Playing field and mountains at the Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, VT.
The audience for the talk was roughly evenly split between the two academies-- the high school's physics teacher encouraged her students to come, and the turnout was apparently good from the older Green Mountain folks. It made for a nice full room, and the talk was very well…
drorzel | September 22, 2015Over the last few years, I've developed a routine of working at Starbucks in the early morning, between the bus picking SteelyKid up (at 7:30-ish, ugh) and when I need to be on campus. Now that I'm on sabbatical and don't need to go to campus every day, I'm still going to Starbucks, just extending that a little later.
So it only makes sense to include a shot of my "office" at Starbucks in this photo-a-day series:
My usual spot in the Niskayuna Starbucks.
This is at one corner of the bar; the canisters behind the laptop are beans for the clover machine, out of frame to the right. This was…
drorzel | September 22, 2015I took this yesterday morning while walking the dog, and said "Yep, there's the photo of the day." Which morphed into "I already posted the photo of the day" at some point, so it wasn't until this morning that I realized I hadn't.
Sunrise 9/21/15
Anyway: sunrise. It's pretty, it's damn early. I could probably get a basically equivalent picture in about fifteen minutes when I take the dog out for today's walk. One of these days, we'll extend the walk over to the high school and shoot across the soccer fields where you can see more of the sky without so many trees.
drorzel | September 20, 2015I got a little bit of time today to play with the new lens, which included a couple of nice shots of the kids. I'm trying not to have this be "photo of the kids of the day," though, so here's a different shot making use of the limited depth of field of the f/2.8 lens:
Scratch paper with calculations for a football physics post at Forbes.
That's the half-sheet (it's the back of a draft of a book proposal, if you must know) of projectile motion calculations that I scribbled down while writing this Forbes post about the dumb football commentary "he caught the ball at its highest point". Which…
drorzel | September 19, 2015Weekends around here tend to be ridiculously busy, so you get a cell-phone photo again. But with a twist-- over in Twitter-land, Frank Noschese mentioned a smartphone app called Motion Shot that takes short video clips and processes them to provide multiple images of some moving object. This is, of course, basically irresistible for a physicist.
SteelyKid was invited to a classmate's birthday party today, held at a trampoline park, and I shot some video of SteelyKid bouncing around. Which Motion Shot turned into this image:
Multiple images of SteelyKid bouncing at the trampoline park.…
drorzel | September 18, 2015There's only one obvious choice for today's photo of the day, namely the brand new lens that just arrived:
On the right, the f/1.8 50mm lens I've had for a while. On the left, the f/2.8 24mm lens that arrived today.
This is a really compact 24mm f/2.8 lens, which isn't quite as fast as the f/1.8 I used for the depth of field experiment the other night, but has a much wider field of view, meaning it will likely work better for taking pictures of our hyperactive kids. And just look at how small and cute it is!
Of course, I don't have time to really play with it tonight, but you can look…
drorzel | September 17, 2015SteelyKid's elementary school had their annual open house tonight, and they tried something different with it this year. Rather than having prepared presentations in the classrooms, they had the kids lead a "tour" for their parents-- she got a map and a "bingo" card, and then led us to her classroom, the cafeteria, the library, and various other spots to say hi to the various teachers. It was very cute, though maybe not all that informative.
Her second-grade class did a thing where each kid colored an owl and wrote three clues on it. The whole collection of owls were left out on a table, and…
drorzel | September 16, 2015I've been doing a lot of opining on my blogs of late, and much less science-ing that I would like. So I thought I'd try bringing a little science to the photo-a-day project, by playing around with f-numbers.
I put the camera on the tripod, with my fastest lens (a 50mm f/1.8 prime) and set up an array of SteelyKid's Lego minifigs to be targets. Then I shot pictures of the scene at different aperture settings spanning the full range I could select. The two extremes are shown here:
Lego minifigs shot with the two extremes of my fastest lens. Top is f/22, bottom f/1.8.
I had to put it on…
drorzel | September 15, 2015I don't want to turn this into "Photo of the Kids of the Day," but I spent most of today with The Pip, because his day care was closed for Rosh Hashanah. And while I took a bunch of artsy shots of trees and stuff, I really like the way this one came out:
The Pip climbing up a twisty slide.
He's very determined, and also pleased with himself for being able to climb up the twisty slide at Schenectady's Central Park playground.
Fun as it was to spend time with the Little Dude, I'll be very happy when the JCC is open again...
drorzel | September 14, 2015Today was Rosh Hashanah-- happy new year to those who celebrate it-- meaning that both SteelyKid's school and The Pip's day care were closed. In an effort to maintain my sanity while keeping them entertained, I took them to the local science museum to rampage through hands-on exhibits. We also caught the planetarium show, because why not.
The show wasn't really pitched right for my 7- and 3.8-year-olds, but it did make me wonder how the new camera would do at photographing the sky. And it's pretty clear tonight, so here's a shot of the sky more or less straight up at about 9pm Eastern:
Stars…
drorzel | September 14, 2015I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I've been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it's been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
--Physics: Complicating Everything Since The 1600's: A look at the subtle and picky issues that need to be addressed before you can claim to have definitively tested something in physics.
--A Qualified Defense Of "Science Literacy": A bunch of people on blogs and Twitter were hating on the science…
drorzel | September 13, 2015Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000
Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500
Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.
My right hand.
SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. She "got a little carried away," and as a result it's too big for her. "But it fit one of the grown-ups, and I said 'Hey, I bet it would fit my dad!' So I want you to have it, Daddy."
So, I have…