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drorzel | November 30, 2015We had our usual tv time on Sunday morning at my parents', with the kids alternating picking what they watched. When it came around to SteelyKid's turn, she opted for MythBusters, which wasn't available on demand, but she has several episodes on her tablet. Of course, if SteelyKid was going to watch video on her tablet, then The Pip had to watch video on his, which led to this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip watching video on their tablets.
And also blissful, blessed quiet, a gigantic improvement over the sounds of "Paw Patrol," which was The Pip's cartoon of choice on this trip. And, well,…
drorzel | November 29, 2015Saturday was still warm, but grey and rainy, so we needed indoor activities. We took the kids down to the Roberson Museum to see their annual Christmas display, with lots of trees donated and decorated by local organizations, toys and games from the 50's and 60's, and a giant model train display. And the "International Forest" of trees decorated in the style of various countries.
The Polish display at the Roberson "International Forest" of Christmas trees.
This is the Polish display; SteelyKid was duly impressed to learn that the word for the heraldic bird at the top of that flag is the…
drorzel | November 27, 2015So, today, we engaged in the traditional Black Friday activity of, um, going to the park and chasing birds:
SteelyKid and The Pip scaring geese with their swords at the park on the day after Thanksgiving.
It was an unbelievably warm day for late November-- if you look closely, you can see that SteelyKid is wearing shorts and a T-shirt-- so we couldn't very well sit inside. So we went across to the other side of Whitney Point Lake to Dorchester Park to let the kids run around. We hiked up the stream, played on the playground, and chased the big flocks of Canada geese into the lake.
This did…
drorzel | November 26, 2015We're at my parents' house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY, for Thanksgiving, so of course there's only one appropriate subject for the photo of the day:
Thanksgiving dinner.
That's our traditional turkey dinner, from my seat at the table. We ate very, very well, as always, and the kids have been generally very good (with a few minor squabbles). SteelyKid got bored during dinner, but I made up some math problems to entertain her, so all is well.
If you're celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope your day was full of awesome food and family and other stuff to be thankful for. If this isn't a holiday…
drorzel | November 25, 2015We're visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and one of the highliughts of any trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa is that they have Nerf swords for the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip in their traditional Nerf sword battle.
This raged for a good while before dinner. Hopefully, they'll sleep well tonight...
drorzel | November 24, 2015I spent a good chunk of the morning across the river at the Honda dealership, because of this:
The nail they pulled out of my tire this morning.
That's the nail that they pulled out of my right rear tire, which had developed a slow leak late last week. It was one of those leaks that took several hours to significantly reduce the pressure, and I had stuff to do yesterday, so I've been pumping it back up with a compressor that I keep in the car.
Happily, it was in an easy to patch place, so the whole thing only cost me $27. And the shape of the end is sort of interesting, so I got a photo…
drorzel | November 23, 2015I was headed outside to take a bunch of photos with which I plan to do some SCIENCE!, but that won't be the photo of the day, because this little critter was energetically banging on the side of our house when I got outside:
The woodpecker that was banging on Chateau Steelypips.
I think this is probably a female downy woodpecker. Though I could be wrong. Anyway, she jumped off the side of the house as soon as I opened the door, but obligingly posed on the branch of a nearby tree for a few shots before flying off to bang on something else.
And, really, how could that not be the photo of the…
drorzel | November 23, 2015The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject:
The Pip's collection of superhero toys.
Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population.
The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…
drorzel | November 22, 2015I try not to have this be the cute-kid-photo-of-the-day, but really, how could I not use this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip discussing the finer points of Lego superhero stickers.
The Pip was not a huge fan of the antibiotics that came with his strep-throat diagnosis, so we bought a sticker book as a bribe reward for taking his medicine. Yesterday afternoon, in one of the brief quiet periods of a busy day, SteelyKid sat down with him and they had an intense conversation about the identities and powers of the various heroes and villains represented in the sticker pages.
Which is too cute not…
drorzel | November 21, 2015For a brief, glorious moment the time change meant that I didn't need a flashlight for my weekday morning walks with Emmy. Sadly, the inexorable motion of the Earth in its orbit means that we are once again into the zone where the sun isn't above the horizon when we take our morning stroll:
Niskayuna High School a bit before sunup.
That's the high school a few blocks from here. It's not on our usual route, but I detoured over there in hopes of getting a decent sunrise photo, as that's the clearest view we have of the eastern horizon, and there was about the right amount of cloud cover for…
drorzel | November 19, 2015A little while back, I did a comparison of the different ISO settings on my camera, and a bunch of people commented that it would be interesting to try to match two photos at different levels. So, here's that:
Trying to match two photos at the extremes of the ISO settings on my camera.
These aren't quite perfectly matched, because the time settings give me a limited range of options, but it's pretty close. The higher ISO setting ought to be 128 times more light-sensitive than then lower, and it's 1/125th of the exposure time.
And... those look pretty similar. I'm honestly not sure how one…
drorzel | November 18, 2015the Pip officially has strep throat, and thus had to stay home today, but the antibiotics he started yesterday (over his very strenuous objections) have worked wonders, so his energy level was pretty much back to normal. Which means that we spent a while out in the back yard raking up a big pile of leaves, whereupon:
The Pip mid-leap into the leaf pile in the back yard of Chateau Steelypips.
This is a small fraction of the leaf pile we used to be able to get, before we had the big maples that used to be on the south side of the yard taken out. It's not even everything we can get now, as…
drorzel | November 18, 2015As threatened yesterday, another staged shot for a "quantum is difficult" image for an upcoming talk.
Some notes and caffeine.
This is a piece of a homework solution that was on a pad I had lying around-- those are infinite square well wavefunctions. It's about as trivial as you can get from quantum, but looks math-y enough to make the point I want to make.
The Pip is home sick again today, so that's about it for me.
drorzel | November 17, 2015Another talk-prep photo, because I wanted a shot to suggest the academic side of quantum physics. Of course, my actual textbooks are all in my office on campus, but then, they mostly have boring covers and titles, so they're not a great visual. So I stacked up some pop-physics books:
A selection of quantum physics books.
I meant to write out a couple of pages of equations, too, but I had to break off to cook dinner, and then I fell asleep at 9pm, so that never happened. Maybe today.
Anyway, I liked all these books, so, you know, check them out. Or read this post about good pop-quantum…
drorzel | November 15, 2015It was a cool clear morning when I took Emmy out for our morning walk, with a band of high clouds running eat-west across the sky to our north. After watching a bit, I realized that these were probably entirely seeded by jet contrails, as I saw at least four planes flying along that band during the walk.
This shot catches one of them (the big band crosses the frame diagonally at lower right), plus a second running parallel to it but a bit farther south, and a third crossing them:
Contrails crossing in the northern sky.
I'm guessing this must be a route from Boston to points west, possibly…
drorzel | November 15, 2015Another day when I only took a couple of pictures, on the morning dog walk. I noticed that one of the now leafless trees on the route looked interestingly creepy, so I took a couple shots of that. I didn't notice that the mode selector on the camera had gotten bumped to full manual, though, which meant the sky behind the tree got all blown out. Switching to greyscale sorta-kinda redeems this, though:
Bare tree branches are interestingly creepy.
(It was dismal and cloudy, so this isn't even an inaccurate representation of what I saw...)
So, um, let's pretend I did this deliberately, for…
drorzel | November 14, 2015This is a pure document-my-day shot, not one of my random attempts at artsy effects. One of The Pip's birthday presents was a big vinyl wall decal from Chic Walls, a gift from Aunt Erin in California. These are a little complicated to install, and SteelyKid being sick messed up the whole week, but I finally got around to putting it up Friday:
The Pip's new Gotham City wall decal.
So, our superhero-crazy Little Dude now has Gotham City on his wall. He's all fired up about this.
And that's it from Friday; I'm still fighting a cold of my own, so between this and some video shooting for a…
drorzel | November 12, 2015Another day with a staged-for-talk-prep photo:
My desk, with social media on both computers.
I needed a picture of social-media apps on computer screens for an upcoming talk, so I took one. After first tweeting a cute-kid photo:
Cute-kid photo because I want to take a picture of Twitter to use in a talk. pic.twitter.com/QIYHTda0vL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) November 12, 2015
Yeah, it's shameless. But look at them, they're adorable! And the reminder of their adorableness was really needed today, because it's been an incredibly frustrating week, kid-wise.
I should note that I do not actually…
drorzel | November 11, 2015It's a grey, dismal, rainy day here at Chateau Steelypips, and I'm a little groggy from cold medication. Which means it's not a great writing day, but it is a good day to stay inside and do a little SCIENCE! for the photo of the day. thus, this:
Some toys and the cable box in our basement, shot at every ISO setting my camera offers.
This is a small assortment of toys set on the table in our basement next to the cable box, and photographed at every one of the eight ISO settings my camera offers. Everything else is the same in these shots-- I put it on manual focus, the maximum aperture (f/1…
drorzel | November 11, 2015Spent all day yesterday with SteelyKid, who, while she was officially medically diagnosed as suffering from strep throat, was not in any conventional sense "sick." We built Lego sets, watched tv, went shopping, played with an RC helicopter, tried and failed to make a physics video, and generally wore me out. so you get another delayed photo of the day.
This one is a seasonal thing in our tree-filled neighborhood: the town has a big vacuum truck that comes around to pick up leaves, so people will rake their yards to make great big piles lining the roads:
Leaf piles lining the road near…