drorzel | February 1, 2016When Kate and I were looking for a house back in late 2002, one of the things that sold us on this place was the back yard. The lot is very deep, unusually so for this part of Niskayuna, so there's a lot of space in the back yard, and it was pleasantly shaded by trees. We've since taken down the maples that were on the south side, but there's an enormous oak in the northeast corner that we've left in place, which is a really nice tree.
Our neighbor to the north, however, was not as fond of this tree, as she was really into gardening, and the oak casts much of that yard in shade. When we were…
drorzel | January 31, 2016I've been neglecting the photo-a-day thing for the last week-and-a-bit, but for a good reason: I had a deadline of, well, today, to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. And while I fully realize that actually hitting that deadline is not typical academic behavior, I have A Thing about that, and was going to make damn sure I finished by the end of the month, as I had promised. So a lot of stuff got neglected, to the point where there were a few days in that stretch where I didn't take any pictures at all.
So, you get another catch-up post. I owe nine photos, but I…
drorzel | January 25, 2016One of the things about being a physicist that makes it tough to have any sensible work-life balance is that I'm constantly seeing little things and thinking "Oooh! Physics!" then getting distracted from what I'm actually supposed to be doing. Take, for example, our bathroom sink.
I have noticed, from time to time, a weird effect where the stream of water coming out of the faucet, which normally is fairly straight, will spread out when the water level in the container below gets close to the faucet. This turns out to be damnably difficult to replicate, though, and I've spent more time than I…
drorzel | January 22, 2016The Center for Quantum Technologies is running a "Quantum Shorts" contest, where they solicited short stories exploring some aspect of quantum physics. They cut their large number of applicants down to two short-lists of ten, one for the "Open" category, and one for the "Youth" category. They'll be giving out a "People's Choice Award" based on Internet voting, so you can go over there and vote for your favorite.
There are also judged prizes, and I'm serving as a judge for the "Youth" category (and already sent in my rankings), so it would be inappropriate for me to plug any particular stories…
drorzel | January 21, 2016Over at Scientific American, Amanda Baker has a story about what scientists say they would tell their younger selves.
I reached out to eight of my colleagues who are currently in STEM fields and asked them a series of questions about their childhood interests in science, school experiences, and roadblocks that they faced on their path from elementary school to their current positions. [...]
Their feedback covered not only what drew them to science, but also what had almost pushed them away. Below I have consolidated the feedback into five main points, including the advice they would give…
drorzel | January 21, 2016As mentioned last week, SteelyKid is doing Odyssey of the Mind this year, and her team has elected to build a balsa wood structure. The goal for these is to support the maximum possible weight, and the first step of the testing is to put a "crusher board" on top. This is a couple of 18" square sheets of plywood glued together with a hole through the middle for the safety pipe that runs up the center of the structure to keep everything aligned.
Since one part of the team had a test structure ready at the end of the last meeting, I wanted to have something we could use to see if it would hold…
drorzel | January 21, 2016When I arrived to pick SteelyKid up the other night, she and her friends were light-saber fighting with long balloons, which is fairly typical of that bunch. While I gathered her stuff up, though, she stopped and twisted her balloon into an animal shape:
SteelyKid's balloon dog, and The Pip's clay volcano.
She got a "How to Make Balloon Animals" kit a few years ago, but she doesn't often do anything with it. So I was pretty impressed that she did this completely from memory. (Of course, I'm easily impressed when it comes to my own kids doing stuff...)
The balloon dog (we'll call it a dog…
drorzel | January 19, 2016This past weekend, Kate went to Arisia, and in order to get a change of scenery and a bit of adult backup, I took the kids up to visit friends in northern Vermont. They have two boys, the younger of whom is just a few months older than SteelyKid, and I was pretty sure the kids would hit it off. I turned out to be right about that, as SteelyKid and C. spent hours engrossed in the construction of an elaborate pillow fort:
SteelyKid is really happy to be making a pillow fort.
This is a very early stage of the construction, from Friday night. They continued working on it all weekend, and at…
drorzel | January 15, 2016We have a couple of bird feeders near the house, one just outside the bay window in the front of the house, and the other on the side of the house right next to the dining room. (That one used to be farther out in the yard, where it functioned well as a means of luring bunnies and squirrels into the yard for Emmy to chase, but we took out the trees it was hung from, so had to move it...)
I try to remember to keep these filled up, because they're a reliable source of entertainment, even in the winter months. We got a bunch of activity at the feeders today, including a blue jay, and I ended up…
drorzel | January 15, 2016SteelyKid is in second grade, and The Pip goes to full-day day care at the JCC, so we get a LOT of kid work sent home-- various homework assignments and class worksheets for her, and assorted art for him. A lot of the art is just a few random crayon scribbles on paper, but some of it's pretty good. Like this robot that came home the other day:
The Pip's construction-paper robot.
(The shiny thing at the bottom is one of the cut-glass "jewels" that Kate got for the kids at the Corning Museum of Glass...)
Huge piles of this stuff build up, and every couple of months I'll go through and…
drorzel | January 14, 2016It's been a disgracefully long time since I did a links post covering what I've been posting over at Forbes. In my defense, December was a complete mess of a month...
Anyway, here's a great big bunch of stuff:
-- Football Physics: Can We Do Better Than Tossing Coins? In which I try to ease the sting of a bad overtime loss for my Giants by writing about the physics of generating random numbers.
-- How Big Is the Moon? Understanding Camera Lenses: Talking about angular size and resolution based on photos of my back yard.
-- Holiday Gift Physics: The Flying Turtle Scooter: SteelyKid has one of…
drorzel | January 14, 2016Back in the fall, a note came home with SteelyKid about an organizational meeting for an Odyssey of the Mind team for her elementary school. My father coached this for several years back in the 80's, and one of my sister's teams went to the World championships (held in Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, of all places, which put an odd spin on going there for basketball games when I was in grad school....), and of course, I'm all in favor of creative problem-solving. So we went, and I ended up as one of the coaches of the team.
The kids, to the surprise of the other coaches, voted…
drorzel | January 14, 2016This one's a bit of a cheat, but the only pictures I got Tuesday that turned out well had other people's kids in them, and I won't post those. So here, instead, is a picture from over the weekend, mostly because I want to tell the cute-kid story that goes with it.
On Sundays, I take the kids to the Schenectady Greenmarket, then to lunch at Panera, then to the grocery store, which gets our various errands taken care of and gives Kate a little quiet time. Depending on how they behave, I sometimes require a bit of quiet time of my own after this, and this past Sunday was One of Those Days. So, I…
drorzel | January 12, 2016Having picked up a new phone last week, it seems sort of appropriate to give a photo-a-day to a picture taken with that phone, as a kind of test. Also, I realized while on the way to SteelyKid's taekwondo class that I had forgotten to take any photos with the good camera, and wanted some insurance.
So, here's a shot of the very early crescent moon just after sunset, taken from the parking lot at Panera where we got dinner before class.
Crescent moon just after sunset, taken with my new phone.
Which, you know, isn't too bad, given the kind of difficult lighting conditions. This is, of…
drorzel | January 11, 2016One of my recurring half-serious grumbles about this photo-a-day business is that our neighborhood doesn't offer a clear view of the horizon, making it impossible to get nice sunset pictures. On sunday afternoons, though, we have a babysitter come stay with the kids for a while so Kate and I can do some work, and at this time of year, that window includes sunset. And my work yesterday took me to campus, where there are much better horizon views. Of course, it was grey and dreary for most of the day, but just before sunset, the clouds to the south and west lifted a bit, just enough to be…
drorzel | January 10, 2016I try not to have this be Cute Kid Photo of the Day, but really, when these are the subjects, how can I avoid it?
SteelyKid blowing a bubble toward The Pip, at MiSci.
This is from yesterday's morning excursion to MiSci, where they have added a soap bubble area. This, of course, led to the kids battling with each other by blowing huge bubbles across the table and each popping the other's bubbles. Here's the early stage of a bubble offensive by SteelyKid, shortly to be popped by The Pip.
Another highlight of the visit was the "put yourself inside a bubble" thing, which is a perennial…
drorzel | January 9, 2016When schedules permit, I like to take the kids to home basketball games at Union. This works out well for everyone, as almost nobody goes to the games, so the kids can rampage all over the gym and get good and tired without upsetting anyone, and we add somewhat to the crowd supporting the home team.
(I'm not sure what the players made of The Pip yelling "DAAAAAAAD! You can't tickle me when I'm way up here!" from the very top of the bleachers, though...)
This also gives me a chance to shoot some different subjects, in keeping with the general goal of this photo-a-day business. Thus, a couple…
drorzel | January 8, 2016It seems appropriate to use a power-of-two day for a new digital device, so here's a photo of my new phone:
My new phone on the wireless charger.
Getting and setting this up took up much of yesterday. It's a Droid Turbo, which is basically the Verizon-branded version of the 2015 equivalent of the Moto X I had previously. Yes, I know, Verizon is kind of unpleasant, but I do just enough travel that the better coverage they offer matters to me. And one of the regularly-cited grievances against them, that they don't push out Android OS updates as often as other carriers, actually verges on a…
drorzel | January 7, 2016After a ridiculously warm December, I was lamenting the lack of winter this year. Which led, of course, to its sudden return for at least a few days of blowing snow and single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures. The snow is, at least, kind of photogenic, though:
Crescent moon over the snowy roof of our neighbors' house.
This one took a bit of processing-- the raw image was kind of crooked, as it was a quick photo grabbed between trips ferrying school stuff out to the car. And the just-barely-after-sunrise sky always needs some color correction to make it look right.
Anyway, y'know, winter: cold…
drorzel | January 6, 2016For 11 months of the year (give or take), our Christmas decorations live in plastic storage boxes in the cabinet under the stairs in the basement. Of course, when we stow these away, there's inevitably one or two things that get missed in the initial sweep, and end up outside the boxes. And when I pulled the boxes out a few weeks back, something rolled off the top box, so I had to go fishing around in the back of the cabinet, where I eventually found both the ball I was looking for and this bit of pop-culture archaeology:
An old plastic car I found under the cellar stairs.
This is a little…