personal
drorzel | February 3, 2015It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local schools and the snow-day day-care program we signed the kids up for were shut down, with good reason- I had to go to campus for my 10:30 am class, and that two-mile drive was pretty nerve-wracking.
Since the kids were home for the day, we did a bit of playing outside, even though the temperatures…
drorzel | January 29, 2015Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a procedure. It adds a step to what at a lower level is a simple turn-the-crank algorithm: given this set of symbols, do these abstract operations, and write down the answers.
This is a very familiar problem in intro physics, where I regularly have struggling students tell me "I can do the math just fine, I…
drorzel | January 26, 2015Tonight's bedtime stories included two books involving flying characters: Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond (in which the title character gets blown into the sky by a gust of wind), and The Magic Brush. The latter is a dead-grandparent book, but ends with a cheerful picture of the kids reunited with their grandfather in their imagination, riding a flying horse. The Pip didn't pick up on the death bit, luckily for me.
"Look at them, Daddy, they're flying!"
"Yep. They're on a flying horse."
"But why are they flying?"
"Why? Well, because flying would be a lot of fun."
"I wish I could fly."
"…
drorzel | January 25, 2015I've mentioned in a few places that SteelyKid frequently comes home from school/ camp/ day care singing garbled versions of current pop hits. So for the first time since about 1990, I added a Top 40 station to my car radio presets, so I would know what she was actually trying to sing. This leads to a bunch of seat-dancing and sing-along in the back seat as I drive her to taekwondo and so on, so I give you three of the songs that she's grooving two these days:
First up, we have:
My first reaction to hearing that was "Hey, it's great that Morris Day is getting work..." But, you know, I enjoyed…
drorzel | January 21, 2015Having made several mentions here of the two tenure-track faculty positions we were trying to fill, I feel like I ought to at least note the completion of the search. As of last Friday, all the papers have been signed with properly dotted i's and crossed t's, and we have two new tenure-track assistant professors on board to start next fall.
It feels a little weird and possibly inappropriate to go into much detail about the folks we hired, though, given that this isn't an officially official sort of blog, and it would definitely be wrong to go into details of the process. I will say that it…
drorzel | January 15, 2015SteelyKid missed the bus this morning-- she was dressed and ready, but I was talking to Kate, and if there isn't a person at the end of the driveway when the bus comes around the corner, they won't stop. So I drove her over to school myself (which is faster, anyway). The GE research lab complex is behind her school, so there's a nice view from the parking lot to the eastern horizon, where the sun was just poking over a big band of clouds.
"Hey, look at that cool sunset!" she said as we were walking from the car to the building.
"That's not a sunset, honey, it's a sunrise. It's morning."
"Oh,…
drorzel | January 15, 2015"Daddy, ask me a math problem."
"OK. What's 18 plus 6?"
"Ummm... 24."
"Correct."
"See, I just keep the 18 and then add 2 from the 6 to get 20. That leaves 4 from the six, and 20 plus 4 is 24."
"Right. Good work."
------
"Hey, SteelyKid. What's 120 plus 180?"
"Ummm... 300."
"Very good!"
"I just added the hundreds to make 200, and then 80 plus 20 is 100, and then I add them all together to get 300."
"Nice work."
"It takes a little while, though."
"Yes, but you keep practicing, and getting faster."
"Practice makes perfect!"
------
"That would take ten minutes, which is... six hundred seconds."
"…
drorzel | January 2, 2015As mentioned briefly here and on Twitter, I spent the past week at the Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, SC. This is a biggish smart-people festival, running for 30-odd years now, bringing together a wide array of people from politics, finance, science, and the arts. Bill Phillips has been going to it for years (though he wasn't there this year), so when I got the invitation, I jumped at it.
Unfortunately for blog purposes, they have a strict policy about everything said there being off the record, so I can't post really detailed stories about anything, but it was a very cool experience. And…
drorzel | January 1, 2015So, it's January 1, which means a ton of social-media traffic commenting on the year just concluded, most of it very negative-- "Good riddance, 2014, don't let the door hit you on the way out, etc." I'm a little more ambivalent about the whole 2014 thing, and of course, being a good squishy liberal, I feel guilty about that.
Because, of course, in a lot of ways, 2014 was very good for me, personally. This is probably exemplified by my current circumstances-- I'm typing this from the tail end of the Renaissance Weekend (actually, from a Starbucks across the street, because I thought that…
drorzel | December 26, 2014
Ernest, the purple aardvark
Had a long and hairy nose
And if you ever saw it,
You would really say "Boy I bet you could eat some ants with that thing..."
All of the ants in Tasmania
Use to run away when they saw him
Because if they ran to slowly,
[Loud slurping noise] Ernest ate them up.
Then one foggy Christmas Eve,
Santa came to say,
"Ernest, we have a terrible infestation of termites at the North Pole,
Can you come eat them up while I deliver toys to good boys and girls?"
Then how the elves they loved him,
And they knitted him warm nose cozies
Because aardvarks normally live in tropical…
drorzel | December 25, 2014Once again, it's Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a really boring Thursday on the Internet for those who don't. In keeping with tradition, we've taken the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY for a few days.
This will coincide with a big drop-off in social media use on my part, for a number of reasons; I've got one more post scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and that's probably it for 2014 blogging. I'll be ringing in the New Year in Charleston, SC at the Renaissance Weekend event there, and while that promises to be a good deal of fun, they've got very…
drorzel | December 17, 2014I visited SteelyKid's first-grade class yesterday with several liters of liquid nitrogen. Earlier in the fall, they did a science unit on states of matter-- solid, liquid, gas-- and talked about it in terms of molecules being more spread out, etc. Looking at her homeworks, I said "Oh, damn, if it wasn't the middle of the term, this would be a perfect excuse for liquid nitrogen demos..." I mentioned it to the teacher, though, and she loved the idea of having it in December, as a call-back to earlier science lessons.
It turned out to be weirdly difficult to find assorted round latex balloons…
drorzel | December 12, 2014One of the questions from a caller when I was on the "Think" show was about how to keep kids interested in science. As I said, the issue isn't so much creating in interest as working to not squelch the interest that's already there. Taking kids to cool places like zoos and science museums is a great way to do that, and just generally encouraging them to ask questions and try things out.
But if you'd like some more specific gift ideas, here's a selection of science-y things that SteelyKid and The Pip enjoy that you might try out on other kids of your acquaintance:
-- Magna-Tiles These. Are.…
sa smith | December 6, 2014Want a unique gift for your sciency-nerdy-geeky-gamer friends this holiday season?
Ethan shared a list of his favorite ugly gamer sweaters, and I want to share a list of some things I like:
Geeky/Sciency Pendants: OrfebreEvolution, including the 'Lady Knights' designs by Ryan Grant Long
Geeky art: Ryan Grant Long has a shop up at Society6
Chain-mail, jewelry, pretty things: BinarySoul
Really really really beautiful wildlife photography: LouisShackletonPhoto
Please feel free to share your personal favorite, unique gift sites in the comments :)
drorzel | December 6, 2014We flew down to Florida Friday afternoon, on a Southwest flight to Tampa. While waiting to board, SteelyKid of course struck up a conversation with basically everybody in the vicinity, but mostly an older Asian woman who was behind us.
That woman also ended up in the seat directly behind SteelyKid. As this was a window seat, there was a good deal of space between the seat and the window, so while we waited to take off, SteelyKid carried on cheerful conversations with both The Pip iun the row ahead of us, and the woman from the boarding line in the seat behind. I didn't pay all that much…
drorzel | November 30, 2014You may not know this, but I have a book coming out in about a week. I know, I've been pretty quiet about it...
Anyway, this being the modern era, I thought there probably ought to be some sort of central web presence for the book, but unfortunately, it shares a name with a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, a SyFy show that was pretty good before it was canceled, and a famous exclamation by some dude from Syracuse. So the namespace containing obvious forms of the book title is pretty comprehensively gobbled up.
And, of course, this is my third book, and I've been doing a bunch of other…
drorzel | November 27, 2014SteelyKid's first-grade class has been doing a bunch of Thanksgiving stuff. A lot of this is the lies-to-children version of the first Thanksgiving, and some of that is a little dubious (they had a dress-up "feast" on Tuesday, where SteelyKid was an Indian with a construction-paper vest and feathered headband, and oh, the parental eye-rolling...). This has also included some reflection on gratitude, though-- as mentioned on Twitter, the list of non-human things she's thankful for includes "dogs, world, sun, moon, toys, games, trees, books, food, water, air, stars, beach." (There were other…
drorzel | November 26, 2014The Pip's current phrase of choice is "How do you build...?" We get asked this several times a day.
"Daddy, how do you build a glass?"
"Well, you get the right kind of sand, and you get it really hot, so hot it melts. Then you make it into the shape of a glass, and let it cool down. Then it's a glass."
----
"Daddy, how do you build a building like that one?"
"Well, you get a bunch of bricks, and stack them up to make the building you want."
"How do you build a brick?"
"Well, you get a bunch of the right kind of mud, and mix it all together. Then you make it into a rectangle, and get it really…
drorzel | November 16, 2014I've been quieter than usual here, partly because I've been crushingly busy, but primarily because most of the things I want to talk about, I can't. Not yet, anyway. But I'm still alive, and this murderous term will be over soon, at which point blogging will pick up a bit.
I will throw in a quick teaser for something coming up in the future, though, by way of a thank-you to the folks at Schaffer Library who let me take some photos of the rare books collection:
An 1845 edition of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," published anonymously but now known to be the work od Robert…
drorzel | November 7, 2014Exactly three years ago today, The Pip arrived, in a manner that will allow him to kill Macbeth should that become necessary. This is the age where kids first become aware of the concept of birthdays, so he's just a tiny bit excited about this.
He's a fast-developing Little Dude, chattering more and more every day. And using big words-- in the car the other morning, I pointed out that he could fit his whole hand in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, which he proceeded to do. "I want to show Mommy this, when we get home," he said. "Meanwhile, I can do it by myself!" He's getting into…