personal
drorzel | July 14, 2014We spent the weekend down in the Boston area, where Kate was doing stuff at Readercon and I was running the kids around the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science (nominally in the company of a friend form college and his family, and some of Kate's cousins (respectively), but either SteelyKid or The Pip was usually in a different room than everybody else, so there wasn't a lot of adult conversation...). Adding a fun element of excitement to this was the fact that some sort of electrical fault in my car had caused the speedometer to go dead right around the time we reached Boston on…
drorzel | June 30, 2014For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system.
"OK, how about a rock as big as Jupiter?" That's a much harder question to answer, and required a trip to the Internet. Not during dinner, of course-- it's hard enough to get her to eat when we're all sitting at the table-- but a day or so later, which led to this blog post.
So, there are a couple of…
drorzel | June 27, 2014I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US.
The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there's more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money--…
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 19, 2014Kate's arguing a case in Connecticut today, so I was solo-parenting last night and this morning. which means that while I did manage to watch Cosmos last night, and have some thoughts about it, I don't have the time or energy to write them up this morning. As explanation, I offer this video from dinner last night, in which SteelyKid and The Pip explore subtle issues of plant biology:
As you might guess, it's very trying to deal with such sullen and mopey children all the time...
This was also on the heels of a classmate's birthday party with SteelyKid on Saturday, which was preceded by two…
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 30, 2014I had hoped to have another post or two scheduled for the end of this week, but The Pip got some kind of stomach bug, and threw everything into disarray. And tonight, I'm flying to Houston to give a couple of talks as part of Physics Day at Space Center Houston. Life being what it is these days, I'm still fiddling with the talk, so I don't have time to get any more big blog posts done.
If you're in the Houston area and free in the middle of the day Thursday or Friday, come by the Space Center-- I'm talking at noon both days. If you're not in Houston, or not free at lunchtime, well, I'll…
drorzel | April 29, 2014Before going to the playground Saturday to investigate non-intertial frames, SteelyKid and I went over to campus to do some experiments in relativity. Galileian relativity, that is:
What you see here is SteelyKid sitting on a rolling lab cart with a camera bolted to it. She throws a ball up in the air a couple of times with the cart at rest, then I start pushing it across the room, and she tosses the ball a few more times. You can see from the video that, other than the motion of the background, the two cases look very similar.
This is a demonstration of the principle of relativity, which…
drorzel | April 22, 2014"DAAAAADDDDDYYYYY!!!!"
"What's the matter, honey?"
"I don't like being alone."
"Well, I'm sorry, honey, but I have work to do, and it's time for you to go to sleep."
"But when I'm alone I get scared."
"Well, I can put on some music if you like. You can listen to that, and it might give you something else to think about."
"Yeah, put the music on."
"I don't know if you've noticed, but when I sleep, I always put music on, because it helps me feel less lonely."
"The music helps, but I still worry about things. Like bad guys. And the evil snakes from Lego Ninjago. I worry that they might be around…
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 | April 4, 2014Yesterday's frat boy post prompted some interesting discussion, one piece of which is a response from Matt "Dean Dad" Reed (also at Inside Higher Ed), who overlapped with me at Williams for a year, but had a very different reaction to the social scene there. His take mirrors mine from the other side, though, which suggests I'm not wildly off base.
The other chunk is a comment exchange on Facebook where some colleagues mentioned the problem of social exclusivity as an issue that I didn't address. And that's true-- as I was at a school without fraternities, where all organizations were formally…
drorzel | April 3, 2014I was invited to a dinner last night hosted by one of the umbrella organizations for fraternities on campus, with a stated goal of improving communication between faculty and frats. It ended up being kind of a weird crowd-- most of the non-students there were Deans of one sort or another; I think there was only one other regular faculty member there. I'm not sure quite how they drew up the invite list, but I suspect the two of us are probably among the most sympathetic faculty members-- I went to a school without frats, but the rugby club was functionally equivalent, and the other guy proudly…
oracknows | April 1, 2014Of all the cranks, quacks, antivaccinationists, and pseudoscientists that I've encountered (and applied a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to) over the years, there are a few who belong in the top tier—or, if you prefer, the bottom tier. They stick out in my memory for a variety of reasons, either through their sheer crankitude on a variety of subjects (such as Mike Adams), sheer persistence on one subject (such as Jake Crosby or any of the denizens of the antivaccine crank blogs Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms' Revolution), or fame for promoting quackery (Joe Mercola). One of these…
drorzel | March 24, 2014This week is Union's spring break, and like basically everything associated with Union's academic calendar, it's too short. I have to turn in my Winter term grades today, and next Monday is the start of my Spring term class.
I also find myself in a place right now were every little thing is pissing me off, which is a terrible place to start the Spring term. And since social media functions largely as an aggravation engine right at the moment, that means I need to step back for a bit. So, don't expect much of anything here or on Twitter for the next week at least. We'll probably still do…
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 19, 2014"Daddy? How do you make water?"
"You mean, what is it made of?"
"Yeah, what's water made of?"
"Hydrogen and oxygen."
"Oh. And what's hydrogen and oxygen?"
"They're chemical elements."
"So, when we drink water, we're drinking chemicals?"
"Well, yeah. In a sense, everything is chemicals. Water's a chemical, air is made of chemicals. "
"What about, like, wood?"
"Chemicals."
"What?!?! Is everything chemicals?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"What about lights?"
"Light isn't a chemical, but the things that make light are made out of chemicals."
"Yeah, like, the Sun is fire, and it makes light, but is the…
drorzel | March 13, 2014"So, that's the science show with space pictures. What did you think of it, honey?"
"Science. Space pictures. Awesome!"
Our umpteenth winter storm of the season delayed school two hours this morning, which is kind of the worst of all possible worlds from a parenting perspective-- when the schools are closed, there's (usually) a snow-day day-care program, but they don't take kids during a mere delay. On the bright side, though, it gave me a chance to show SteelyKid the Cosmos reboot from Sunday night. Her capsule review is at the top.
In a little more detail:
-- I asked her if she wanted to…
drorzel | March 7, 2014Not that long ago, SteelyKid was doing something violent with toys (she's very tough, as you can see from the featured image above), and in the process made the canonical falling-bomb whistle noise. And it occurred to me to wonder, why that sound?
I mean, I've seen footage of falling bombs and the canonical sound seems like an accurate enough. But I'm not sure I understand it from a physics perspective. Specifically, when you do the falling-bomb whistle, you do a whistle that decreases in pitch. But the bomb is falling faster as it approaches the ground, so if anything, I would expect the…