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drorzel | September 15, 2015I don't want to turn this into "Photo of the Kids of the Day," but I spent most of today with The Pip, because his day care was closed for Rosh Hashanah. And while I took a bunch of artsy shots of trees and stuff, I really like the way this one came out:
The Pip climbing up a twisty slide.
He's very determined, and also pleased with himself for being able to climb up the twisty slide at Schenectady's Central Park playground.
Fun as it was to spend time with the Little Dude, I'll be very happy when the JCC is open again...
drorzel | September 13, 2015Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000
Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500
Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.
My right hand.
SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. She "got a little carried away," and as a result it's too big for her. "But it fit one of the grown-ups, and I said 'Hey, I bet it would fit my dad!' So I want you to have it, Daddy."
So, I have…
drorzel | September 12, 2015SteelyKid spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing at a friend's house, so most of the photographic activity of the day involved The Pip energetically playing with various toys. This included a good while spent in the back yard with a Stomp Rocket:
The Pip attempts to send a Stomp Rocket into orbit.
In this shot, he's leaped with great force onto the rubber bulb of the launcher, sending the rocket up over his head. Kate is playing the Mission Control role.
This is cropped from a wider shot, part of a series of rapid-shutter images of the launch, zoomed out to get the whole flight. I…
drorzel | September 11, 2015Another crazy-busy day, with a really exhausting pick-up basketball game at lunchtime, but I did have a little time to try out two features of the new camera: the "Live" shooting mode, and the display screen on the back that flips out. These combine to allow you to take a really expensive selfie, if you want to do that sort of thing:
Yeah, it's still me.
Of course, this is kind of a silly use of an expensive DSLR camera. Also suboptimal, because the camera's pretty heavy, and it's hard to hold it steady in the necessary position. But it can<.em> be done...
And that's all I've got…
drorzel | September 10, 2015I said when I started this that there would inevitably be a few cell-phone snapshots, on days when I'm too busy to get fancy with the DSLR. This was one such, so here's a quick shot of SteelyKid at tonight's Elite Team taekwondo practice, talking to her coach.
SteelyKid, in sparring gear, with her taekwondo coach.
The Elite Team class is all sparring, all the time, and we established today that she's the youngest kid who goes to those classes. By about two months. Of course, the gap between second- and third-youngest is two years... (The second-youngest kid is the younger brother of one of…
drorzel | September 4, 2015It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | September 1, 2015Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were getting kind of flaky-- it's been bad at reading light levels for a while now, meaning I'm constantly having to monkey with the ISO setting manually, then forgetting to change it back when I move to a brighter location and taking a bunch of pictures where everything is all blown out. It also…
drorzel | August 28, 2015SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa for scale.
And now, of course, both kids are way bigger than Appa, so they wanted some up-to-date scale photos. Which, of course, I had to share with the Internet. So, behold, the attack of the giant children:
SteelyKid and the Pip are HUGE!
Standing photo so you can see Appa for proper scaling…
drorzel | August 10, 2015I was staring out the diner window, watching it rain, when Jimmy the werewolf slid into the booth behind me. “We got trouble, boss,” he said, and I spilled coffee over the back of my hand.
“Asshole,” I said, not turning around. “How about a little warning next time?”
“Don’t want to let on I know you. Because of the trouble.”
“How can we be in trouble? We haven’t done anything yet. What kind of trouble?” I probably sounded a little petulant, but I was annoyed about the coffee.
“Wizard trouble.” That’s a whole lot worse than spilled coffee.
“Where?”
“Across the street, bus stop.” I did my best…
drorzel | August 7, 2015Today is SteelyKid's seventh birthday, which she's been counting down to for a good while. It's a little hard to believe it's seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy.
She's become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and intense interests in Minecraft and Pokemon, math and taekwondo. She's a red belt now, which is only a few short of black, and this summer has started doing the "Elite Team" sparring classes. I'm pretty sure that if she really wanted to, she could kick my…
drorzel | July 22, 2015Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of different things.
So, if you're at a place that might be interested in a science-y speaker on quantum physics, relativity, science communication, science in general, or something related to those, drop me a line. I'd be happy to talk about the possibility of visiting new places and talking to people…
drorzel | July 21, 2015This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on my experiences to this point, which in turn is a good excuse for a blog post. So, here are some things I've found out over the last 14 years of being a college professor:
-- Teaching is really hard. My first year, when colleagues from other schools asked how I was…
drorzel | June 28, 2015This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number of times it's been played according to iTunes):
Beautiful Wreck," Shawn Mullins, (280)
"In The Mood," Glenn Miller And His Orchestra, (279)
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," Darlene Love, (278)
"Almost Saturday Night," John Fogerty, (277)
"Shake It Up," The Cars, (275)
"Sunblock," Emmet…
drorzel | June 21, 2015Act I:
STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father's Day, Daddy!
DADDY: Aww, that's sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast?
STEELYKID and THE PIP: What?
DADDY: It's father's day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me.
STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!!
THE PIP: We can't cook breakfast for you. We're not tall enough to bake stuff. And, also, we're not allowed to cook.
DADDY: Well, I'm your father, so I can give you permission to cook breakfast.
STEELYKID: Yeah, but we don't know how to cook.
THE PIP: Yeah, so you have to cook pancakes for us!
DADDY: Oh, all right. I guess I…
drorzel | June 16, 2015Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion:
From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, “desirable” district we can afford is open-and-shut. TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high. That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation…
drorzel | June 14, 2015Commencement was today, the 14th of those that I've been to as a faculty member. As usual, the procession was led in and out by the Schenectady Pipe Band; I realized that after many years of this, I'm coming to associate "Scotland the Brave" with graduation...
This was a really unpleasant year for me in a lot of respects; happily, our students had nothing to do with that. They've been consistently terrific, and this was a good class. Not having them around the department will be pretty weird, at least for a while.
So, congratulations to Salina, Alex, Stephen, Will, Caleb, and Eason, the…
drorzel | June 6, 2015Back in October or so, SteelyKid's first-grade class started a weekly journaling exercise. Every Monday, we were supposed to send in a sheet with some prompts on it-- words about something interesting that happened over the weekend, and the kids started the day writing about... whatever it was.
I was a little dubious about having six-year-olds write journal entries, but, you know, I'm happy to defer to professional teachers, so we did it. Most weeks. some days we forgot, or SteelyKid would get all muley and refuse to help think of a topic and words.
Yesterday was the end-of-year party for…
drorzel | May 31, 2015Over at Wired, Rhett has a post providing mathematical proof that he takes too many photos. As is traditional, he includes homework at the end of the post, specifically:
Now it is your turn. Find the number of photos you have taken each year. Is it possible for you to detect changes in your life by significant changes in the image rate? Maybe you purchased a new phone or had a new addition to your family which resulted in an increase in images. That would be cool if you could see that in your data.
Well, I can't really resist a challenge like that, so I went looking at my own photo…
drorzel | May 20, 2015The big social media blow-up of the weekend was, at least on the science-y side of things, the whole "boys with toys" thing, stemming from this NPR interview, which prompted the #GirlsWithToys hashtag in response. I'm not sorry to have missed most of the original arguments while doing stuff with the kids, but the hashtag has some good stuff.
The really unfortunate thing about this is that the point the guy was trying to make in the interview was a good one: there's an essentially playful component to science, even at the professional level. I took a stab at making this same point over at…
drorzel | May 6, 2015A week or so ago, this statistical analysis of listening trends in pop music got a bunch of play on Twitter and Facebook, but I was too busy to do anything with it. The headline result, reported with all the accuracy you should expect of such things is people stop listening to popular music at 33.
By coincidence, in another part of the social-media universe, some friends were sneering at Top 40 music by way of highlighting a list of the current Top 40 chart to show how little of it they knew. As I'm currently marking time until I can call my doctor to get some help with what I suspect is a…