personal
drorzel | June 17, 2013The other big event of the weekend was Commencement at Union. I didn't make it in time for the academic procession and all that, but I did hear John Lewis's speech, which was great. More importantly, though, I was there to see our students graduate, and congratulate them in person.
As I told my thesis student, I'm not always the best about praise and positive reinforcement-- I tend to react to progress in the lab with "That's great. Now, the next thing to do is.." But this year's class was a good bunch of students, and it's been a pleasure to work with them over the last four years.
So,…
drorzel | June 17, 2013This past weekend was more complicated than it might've been. On Friday night, we drove to Whitney Point to my parents' house, then on Sunday morning very early we drove back to Niskayuna so I could make it to Union's graduation on Sunday (I arrived just in time to hear Civil Rights icon John Lewis give the main commencement address, an excellent speech).
The reason for all this driving around was that on Saturday evening, I was inducted into the Whitney Point Central School District Hall of Fame. This is, quite literally, a hall, run ning from the front lobby of the high school to the…
sa smith | June 2, 2013Some folks have been worried about me, so I thought Id write this post to mention that I am okay, Arnie is okay, everything is okay with me.
In the seven years Ive lived in OK, Ive been though a lot of storms. Its only been bad enough for me to come to work (I live close to work, work has an emergency shelter, generators, etc) three times.
This past Friday was one of those three times. And the first time I was actually scared. The wind, the frantic way the trees were shaking, the way the windows were breathing (not in unison)-- Its the first time Ive left my penthouse lab for the emergency…
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 12, 2013SteelyKid has a new prize possession: a training-wheel bike!
You can't quite hear what she says at the end of this, when she stops the bike, but it's "That should be a full video!" She knows her fan base.
On the way back, she wiped out (the first bad crash on the new bike) and has been much more cautious since. But she's practicing a lot (around the neighborhood, in the Field House, around the neighborhood again...), and will hopefully gain confidence.
Here's hoping your weekend brought you something a tenth as much fun...
drorzel | May 8, 2013My 20-year college reunion is coming up at the start of next month (at the end of the week of DAMOP in Quebec-- I'm going to be completely wiped out...), so I've been thinking a bit about nostalgia. A little while back, the subject of reunions came up on an email list, and somebody trotted out the classic "Those are the best four years of your life" line. This produced a definite split, with some people scoffing at the idea that college or high school could legitimately be considered the "best," while a couple argued that it's not necessarily ridiculous on the face of it: after all, you're…
drorzel | May 8, 2013An astute observation from SteelyKid, as part of her jumping game:
With bonus photobombing by The Pip toward the end.
drorzel | May 1, 2013SteelyKid takes a bunch of enrichment classes at her day care, none of which are explicitly science. I was, however, thrilled to discover that they were doing actual science in her computer class though. The "Featured Image" at the top of this post (sorry, RSS readers, you'll need to click through) is a cell-phone picture of the worksheet she brought home the other day. Apparently, they made a computer-controlled Lego robot to kick a ball, and measured its performance, as recorded in the table in the picture (keep in mind, she's 4.75 years old, so some letters and numbers occasionally undergo…
jdupuis | April 26, 2013I'll admit, I'm a bit of a book snob, a strange thing to say for a lifetime comics/science fiction/fantasy/horror/mystery fan, but there you go. Perhaps more precisely, I'm a snob about books versus other media.
But in my defense I'll maintain that I'm getting better as I get older -- more tolerant and accepting and less snobby. Perhaps not coincidentally, I think my takes in reading material are getting more diverse too.
In any case, let's all enjoy 30 things to tell a book snob.
1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will…
drorzel | April 24, 2013The playground outside SteedlyKid's day care, amazingly in this litigious age, has a merry-go-round, a rotating disc with a really good bearing. The kids can really get the thing flying, which is kind of terrifying at times. But on the bright side, it's an excellent venue for the physics of angular momentum:
In the embedded video, SteelyKid runs in and starts the merry-go-round spinning, then jumps aboard and goes around one full rotation before moving to the center for a few rotations, and then starting to move back out.
This isn't exactly what I was hoping for-- amazingly, a four-and-two-…
drorzel | April 18, 2013In the car, on the way from day care to campus to watch a softball game
DADDY: So, what did you do at school today?
STEELYKID: Daddy, I'm a superhero. They call me Strong Ninja Girl. Strong World-Saving Ninja Girl.
DADDY: Because you save the world?
STEELYKID: Right. And M____ is World-Saving Rainbow Girl. And O____ is Silly Super Boy.
DADDY: Silly Super Boy?
STEELYKID: Yeah, because he just goes {Silly voice} "Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah" and distracts the bad guys. Then M___ and I sneak up behind them, and say "Hey! Bad guys! We can turn you into good guys!" And then we do that, and we save the…
pharyngula | March 31, 2013I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here's what I've been up to.
On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on "Moving Atheism Beyond Science". I argued that modern atheism is built on the twin pillars of anti-religion and science, and not that there's anything wrong with either of those, but that we have to have a wider foundation. In particular, I defied the recent trend to broaden science to encompass morality — I see that more as a conservative…
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 22, 2013OK, here's my idea: We put a leash on Emmy and we put her up on top of this rock that's on top of all these other rocks. Then she jumps down into these petals. so she'll be safe. And you pull on the leash so she jumps down a little faster.
I'm down here on the bottom. This is my arm, holding this petal. And this is my face. I'm holding the petal for Emmy to jump down into the petals, so she'll be safe.
The plan for tomorrow
The Story of How Do Grasshoppers Run Away?
Once upon a time there was a grasshopper, and a grasshopper friend. They went to a lake to get a drink, and one of the…
drorzel | March 19, 2013OK, Daddy, guess what? Here's my idea. We get a stick of wood and we put a timer on it, then we get a big rock and put it on the end. We have to put feet on the big rock, so it can stand on the stick.
Then when the rain comes down, down, down, we push really hard on the stick. We have to do a really big push, then the rock will go up in the air and come down, and the mountain will grow. Then we measure how much weight it took, and how much damage it did when it hit the ground. With the timer. Which isn't a timer, it's a scale.
That's what we're going to do tomorrow!
SteelyKid's plan for…
drorzel | March 15, 2013The kids are off at Grandma and Grandpa's, so Kate and I went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and I found myself with a bit of time to blog... but no particular substantive ideas. The whole "publishers behaving badly" theme of last week seems to have run its course, between Random House re-thinking its awful ebook contracts and the whole wrestling-with-pigs argument over paying people to write stuff for the web has kind of exhausted itself. And I don't have the time or energy to write up serious science in detail (it's the last week of classes, and between grading and end-of-term…
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 | February 28, 2013Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.
The NPR piece is about eating and exercise habits, and the way families struggle to do what they know they ought to:
More than half of children ate or drank something during the "crunch time" window that can lead to unhealthy weight gain, as perceived by their parents. And more than a quarter of…
drorzel | February 6, 2013[Scene: Dinner at Chateau SteelyPips. DADDY is starting to say something about his day at work, when STEELYKID interrupts.]
STEELYKID: If you eat too many hot dogs, you'll turn into a hot dog!
DADDY: That would be pretty silly. Luckily, you're eating chicken for dinner. Eat your chicken.
STEELYKID: There's a magic hot dog, and if you eat that, you turn into a hot dog. And if you don't eat it, then you won't turn into a hot dog.
MOMMY: That's good, because you wouldn't want people turning into hot dogs for no reason.
STEELYKID: Yeah, that would be silly.
DADDY: So, where is this magic hot dog…