Pictures
drorzel | October 13, 2014I recently shot a bunch of video of myself in front of a green screen, for something that will be revealed in due time. Of course, if you have green-screen footage of yourself, you're pretty much obliged to do something silly with it, so here's a quick GIMP-ing of a still from the video (also visible as the "featured image" above...).
One does not simply science into Mordor
(I was going to try to put myself inside Mount Doom holding a Ring, but I couldn't find a suitable background image, and I've already spent too much time on this silliness. It's not the classic Boromir pose, but it'll…
drorzel | June 15, 2014Today is Father's Day in the US, so I got a bunch of little gifts from the kids. The Pip's was just a construction-paper card mostly made by his teachers, with a bit of scribble on it. SteelyKid's, though, included a fill-in-the-blank booklet that she wrote on and drew pictures to go with.
Some of the pictures are extremely detailed and colorful, such as this one where she describes a conversation we have Every. Single. Night.:
SteelyKid's extremely detailed depiction of a conversation we have every night.
(SteelyKid is a terrible eater, and it's a struggle to get her to eat anything. She'…
drorzel | June 8, 2014Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to several other passengers who found themselves holding boarding passes from online that had the same seat assignments as passengers who had printed them at the airport. To be fair to Delta, this was the only glitch out of four flights, but it was a doozy.
Anyway, DAMOP was a lot of fun, but exhausting. So…
drorzel | May 24, 2014I've had a lot of weird things happen in the time I've been teaching, but the above image is my new favorite message from a student. We gave an exam Thursday night, so a couple of my colleagues canceled class on Friday, but I'm going to be at DAMOP the last week of class, so I want to get a little bit ahead to reduce the amount of stuff other people have to cover for me. So I had a class as usual.
All but two of the students showed up, which either means we terrified them with the exam, or they actually like the class. And, actually, there was only one student who didn't show up at all-- the…
drorzel | May 9, 2014Last weekend, the circus came to town, and Grandma and Grandpa came up to help us take the kids. We took SteelyKid a couple of years ago, and figured The Pip was old enough to go this time, too. Having bought tickets a couple of years ago, I got sent a pre-sale offer link, and followed that to get tickets in the front center section.
What I didn't realize was that these put us in the "Circus Celebrity" section-- when the show started, they came and gave us these ribbon things to wear, and a bit before the intermission some of the performers came over to our section, and led us out to the…
drorzel | April 20, 2014The kids spent last week at Grandma and Grandpa's, as school was closed for Passover/Easter (best wishes for each of those holidays to those who celebrate them), and Kate and I went down there for the weekend. During which trip we went up on top of the flood control dam in town, and flew a kite, as you can see in the "featured image" above, or the copy of it below:
SteelyKid, flying a kite.
SteelyKid had a great time flying the kite, and played out so much string that you can barely make out the kite in the photo, even after a bit of image processing to enhance it.
And, for balance, here's…
drorzel | March 20, 2014Since not all that long after he was born, I've been referring to The Pip as "Little Dude," which had become ingrained before I realized it was lifted from Otto the bus driver on The Simpsons. He's not as talkative as his sister yet, which is why she gets more press on the blog, but he's getting to be kind of chatty at times, and occasionally says really cute things.
Such as last night, when I read him his usual collection of bedtime stories-- a selection of Mother Goose rhymes, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, and Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late. After the third story, he asked for…
drorzel | March 14, 2014The other big nerd event of today is that it's Einstein's birthday, on this date back in 1879. I keep meaning to take and post a photo of the cool picture of Einstein we have in the department's collection of stuff, and this is as good an excuse as any.
Charcoal drawing of Einstein giving a talk in Schenectady in 1939. The original is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy office, donated by Carl George, who I think got it from the artist originally.
If not for him, we wouldn't have anything to sarcastically call smart people who do dumb things. Oh, yeah, and the whole General…
drorzel | February 19, 2014Ages and ages ago, I posted the picture that's the "featured image" above, and asked people to submit physics comments about it. Then I got distracted by a series of shiny things, and never did anything with the handful of responses I got. Because I'm a Terrible Person.
Anyway, it's long overdue, but here are the responses, with some comments from me. The first to send me something was Keith Hester, who emailed:
I find quite intriguing the lengthy unbroken --- and seemingly unsupported --- extension of snow that has slid over the left edge of the roof. The coefficient of friction between…
drorzel | February 9, 2014SteelyKid's gotten a bunch of press here recently, so it's time to give her brother his due. So here's a cute picture of The Pip from this afternoon (as the "featured image"-- if you read via RSS, you'll have to click through). He's wearing a "superhero cape" made from a fuzzy blanket, because SteelyKid was bouncing around in a cape made from an entire twin bed sheet.
Of course, the effect here is maybe less superheroic than monastic, especially with his hands folded like that. This could be a photo of Brother Pip of the Order of Little Green Frogs.
And yet another possibility would be that…
drorzel | February 7, 2014SteelyKid's class at her after-school day care has been learning about space for the last month or two (the program is very flexible-- the teachers ask the kids what they want to learn about, and then they spend however long on that topic the kids like), so we've been getting a lot of tidbits about astronomy related to us during car trips and dinner conversation. Last night, there was an open house at the Union College Observatory, so I picked her up a little early, and took her to campus to look through the big telescope (20-inch Cassegrain, for those who care about such things). This served…
drorzel | January 16, 2014"Daddy, you know what? I bet you didn't know, but my school bus can fly."
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Yeah, there's a button up at the front with a picture of a flying bus, and if you press the button, the bus flies."
"That's amazing."
"Yeah, and guess what? The other day, the bus driver called me, and said '[SteelyKid] come up here, and press the button,' and I pressed the button, and the wings came out, and we went flying."
"Wow. Where did you fly to?"
"Um, to school. And then to the JCC."
"You didn't go anywhere else interesting in between, ith the flying bus?"
"Well, we flew to Grandma…
drorzel | January 8, 2014A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid's playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays.
Anyway, the next time I'm likely to have the free time to write anything substantive is next Tuesday morning, so let me renew that call now, while people are trapped indoors by the POLAR VORTEX! with nothing to do but think about the physics of cold things. So, if you have physics-related ideas about the photo above (there's a view from a different…
drorzel | December 25, 2013Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, happy Wednesday if you don't. That's about all there is to say, isn't it?
Warm holiday wishes from Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | December 20, 2013While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It's warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out the kitchen window to see the scene in the "featured image" above, which I will duplicate below:
Snow hanging off the edge of SteelyKid's playset.
That's the snowpack from the top of SteelyKid's playset, now melting, just barely hanging on from sliding off the edge of the plastic cloth stretched over…
drorzel | December 6, 2013I'm giving my talk about blogs as a tool for science outreach again on Monday, and need an updated version of the cute-kid picture screenshot I use in that. So here's a composite of the two kid pictures I posted a week or two ago, because it should all fit on screen, even on my laptop.
I probably should do something more directly productive, but I drove down to NYC yesterday to do an interview and meet up with some folks from the TED@NYC event back in October, and got stuck there because the attendants at the lot where I parked my car didn't warn me that they would lock the place up before I…
drorzel | November 30, 2013"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn't need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I…
drorzel | November 24, 2013Since SteelyKid got her own cute-photo post last night, it's only fair to give equal time to The Pip. This morning, for reasons that passeth adult understanding, the kids decided to balance teddy bears on their heads, SteelyKid using Bertha the Big Bear (who is just a little smaller than The Pip), while the Little Dude had a tiny neon green beanbag bear. Leading to the "featured image" above, which is my new favorite picture of Il Duderino.
"Yeah, I got a bear on my head. And I make it look good."
Lest you think his exceptional knowledge of forces in equlibrium is employed only for totally…
drorzel | November 23, 2013One of SteelyKid's classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent "new kinds of water." The "featured image" above shows her reinventing stock images... And doing a better job of it than this clown. If you need an image to illustrate your chemistry story, shoot me an email-- our rates are very reasonable.
(The sludgy brown mixture in the tube is water with soap, cinnamon, and cracked pepper floating in it. If you shake it back and forth a bit, the pepper does float around in a kind of…
drorzel | November 10, 2013Because I know there are still a few people who come here for the cute-kid pictures, I give you the official SteelyKid portrait for the 2013-14 academic year. This is actually a photo of a photo, because that's the easiest way to convert the print they sent us to a digital format, and also because it gave me an excuse to play with GIMP a little. It's not the greatest reproduction, but it's good enough for blogging.
I'm not entirely sure what's up with her hair, here. There were a few days when she went in with a braid, and this might've been one. Or she might've asked somebody to put it up…