Pictures
drorzel | November 7, 2013Two years ago, as of 4:35 this morning, The Pip was born. And now he's a great big toddler, obsessed with pirates and dinosaurs, running everywhere and talking a LOT...
He's had a bit of a rough week, with another flare-up of conjunctivitis in his right eye, requiring eye ointment and antibiotics, the less said about the administration of which, the better. He's a remarkably cheerful Little Dude by nature, though, and is all smiles and giggles mere minutes after the screaming stops.
His main birthday gift is going to be a big-kid bed, just like his sister's, that's supposed to be delivered in…
drorzel | October 24, 2013In the interest of household balance, I should note that while The Pip was home sick, SteelyKid had her first taekwondo class. She spent a week bugging us every day about wanting to go, and it falls entirely within the time of her after-school day care, so we said sure. Of course, on the actual day, she had to be basically pushed down there by her teachers, and sat most of the class out because she wasn't familiar with what they were supposed to be doing. She assures me she was watching carefully, though, and next week will do the moves with them. We'll see.
The important thing here is that…
drorzel | October 23, 2013The Pip has pinkeye. Again. This means he can't go to day care for at least one day, which means I'm home with him for the morning, and Kate will tag in at lunchtime so I can go teach my class. This, in turn, means that you don't get any substantive blogging today, because the second I start typing a real post, he'll demand... something. Hard to predict what.
Happily, this has done very little to dampen his mood-- he's fundamentally a very cheerful Little Dude, and we spent an hour or so at Panera chatting about birds and cars in the parking lot, and then ran some errands. And now, he's…
drorzel | October 19, 2013It's been a rough week, so here's some cute-kid stuff. The "featured image" above is a giant picture from SteelyKid's after-school day care, where they're talking about bodies and bones. It's a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what I think are meant to be nerves. This is all up to date with the very latest kindergarten medical science. She's even written books about it:
SteelyKid's medical books
We wanted to get a good picture of her for the jacket copy, but alas, she's too busy doing archival…
drorzel | October 18, 2013Yes, that's another TED@NYC picture as the "featured image," but don't run away! It's a post about science, I swear!
The photo up above is from the Flickr set (which, by the way, has been edited significantly since yesterday...), and I like it a good deal. Mostly because, as the joking caption suggests, that photo of Max Planck looming over my head has a kind of serial killer vibe to it. But here's the thing: this is the original phtoo that's on the slide:
Max Planck around the time he solved the black-body radiation problem. From wikimedia.
It's a black-and-white photo from 1901, and in…
drorzel | October 16, 2013The nice folks at TED have put up a giant Flickr set of pictures from last week's event. I'm not sure it's complete, but I happened to notice it this morning, and it already had several pictures of me in it, which is all I really care about. I particularly like the "featured image" above, which kind of makes me look like some kind of quantum demagogue urging my electrons on to more efficient production of interference patterns like the one over my shoulder.
But I also like this one, in which a deranged Max Planck looms behind me like a serial killer:
Max Planck knows what I did last summer…
drorzel | October 7, 2013I'm off to The City for TED@NYC on Tuesday, and while I might schedule something with the approximate text of my talk for Wednesday morning, more substantial blogging won't resume until Thursday. But I don't want to leave political post as the top thing on the blog, so here, have a cute kid picture.
This is SteelyKid at the Schenectady Curling Club, which had an open house this past weekend. Plan A was to go to the women's soccer game at Union instead, but I made the mistake of mentioning curling as a fallback in case of rain, and after half an hour of soccer, SteelyKid demanded "People…
drorzel | September 21, 2013It's gradually becoming clear to me that this blogging thing is old hat. It's a Web 4.0 world now, and we're all just Tmblng through it. So, I need to get with modernity, and start posting the listicles that are the bread and butter of the new social media order. Thus, I give you a web-friendly list of The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons.
The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons
1) The Photon
CGI photon from Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/aug/10/photon-shape-could… )
(Image source: This Physics World article)
The photon is the carrier of the…
drorzel | September 2, 2013It's Labor Day in the US, and due to a weird quirk of scheduling, for once I didn't have to spend it at work. This is also the traditional end of the summer season, so SteelyKid and I went over to the JCC pool for one last dip and a final ice cream cone from the snack bar:
Last ice cream of pool season.
She's gotten really good at swimming this summer, and in protest against the end of the season, she's wearing her swim goggles around the house. They're tinted blue, and she's declared that they're laser goggles, part of her superhero gear. She's now doing a complicated obstacle course…
drorzel | August 31, 2013We won a family pass to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum just across the river in Glenville, and since soccer was canceled for the holiday weekend, I took the kids over there this morning. They had a couple of their collection of decommissioned military aircraft open, including the Huey helicopter SteelyKid is thinking about co-piloting in the "featured image" up above, and this Chinese-made MiG:
I think you push this button to get it started...
I didn't want August to slip away without one last set of cute-kid pictures, so there you go.
drorzel | August 25, 2013Early last year, we began marking SteelyKid's height off on a door frame in the library. She occasionally demands a re-measurement, and Saturday was one of those days. Which made me notice that we now have a substantial number of heights recorded, and you know what that means: it's time for a graph.
The "featured image" above shows the results, and I've stuck in a zero-day point using her length at birth. The solid line in the graph is a linear fit to the data, because nothing could possibly be wrong with that. According to the fit, we can project that she'll reach a height of 3.0 meters a…
drorzel | August 18, 2013The "featured image" above shows SteelyKid and The Pip checking out a couple of books at The Open Door during our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket. As cute as this is, though, the image can't do justice to the full scenario.
We were in the toy section looking for a birthday present for SteelyKid's BFF, and after she found a couple of things, she announced her intention to look at books in the cheap paperback racks right next to the toys. The Pip, for his part, waddled off to poke around the store looking for books featuring Elmo, or things that look like Elmo, or just odd bits of…
drorzel | August 8, 2013Long-time readers will remember that I used to do weekly kid-blogging, posting pictures of SteelyKid with a reference animal, Appa the sky-bison from the Avatar cartoon. I stopped a couple of years ago, because SteelyKid started being reluctant to pose for the pictures every week.
I got her to pose for a few yesterday, though, so we can see what a difference 260 weeks makes. Here's the first really good Appa-for-scale picture, one week after she was born:
SteelyKid and Appa at age one week, back in 2008.
And here they are on her fifth birthday (also the "featured image" for this post…
drorzel | August 7, 2013SteelyKid was born five years ago today. I'd try to be clever and schedule this for exactly five years to the minute of her time of birth, but I've mercifully forgotten exactly when the delivery was, only that it was early in the morning after a very, very long night. Here's what she looked like then:
SteelyKid, five years ago today.
Here's what she looks like now, with her little brother for scale (also the "featured image" for this post):
SteelyKid and The Pip.
Or, if you prefer something a little more active, here she is engaged in the study of optics.
SteelyKid investigating…
drorzel | July 27, 2013A lot of heavy blogging this week, so here's a cute kid picture (as the featured image; click through if you're reading via RSS). This is SteelyKid and The Pip at play this morning, when they were back and forth across the yard a dozen times to pick up rocks from our gravel path and throw them into the pond (just behind them in this picture). They're such sad and solemn children.
SteelyKid seems to only get more social as time apsses-- at soccer this morning, her coach asked rhetorically why they stretch before playing, and got a five-minute spiel about getting hurt and being safe and this…
drorzel | July 5, 2013The picture above shows the new sign on SteelyKid's door. She had to ask us how to spell the words-- she's not five for another month, yet-- but she is now the proud owner of a hand-lettered "DO NOT ENTER" sign for her bedroom. About half a dozen years earlier than I was hoping for...
I made good progress on the draft chapter of the moment this morning, which means that I'm allowed to blog today, per the terms of my agreement with myself. But this is kind of a lost day, anyway, so while I am going to write a post explaining some cool physics, I'll schedule it for Monday instead of posting it…
drorzel | May 26, 2013Kate's off at Wiscon this weekend, so I came down to my parents' with the kids, rather than be outnumbered at home. We packed everybody into the car Saturday and drove to Ithaca to go to the Sciencenter, which the kids absolutely loved. In the "featured image" above, you see The Pip playing with the giant bubble maker (which we did for about fifteen minutes...), and SteelyKid emulating a recent Mythbusters by building a wooden house on a shake table to simulate an earthquake (with my grandmother). Other highlights included petting a snake, feeding balls through pneumatic tubes, and building…
drorzel | May 19, 2013During our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket, we took refuge from the rain in the Open door bookstore, where a short while later I saw the following scenes at opposite ends of the kids-book aisle (also the "Featured Image" for this post, but I'll reproduce it to save the RSS folks from having to click through):
SteelyKid and The Pip, both reading.
So, clearly, they take after me and Kate...
(We ended up buying the "How to Make Paper Airplanes" book SteelyKid is looking at, because paper airplanes are awesome. The music-playing book about an orchestra that The Pip is looking at…
drorzel | May 8, 2013My 20-year college reunion is coming up at the start of next month (at the end of the week of DAMOP in Quebec-- I'm going to be completely wiped out...), so I've been thinking a bit about nostalgia. A little while back, the subject of reunions came up on an email list, and somebody trotted out the classic "Those are the best four years of your life" line. This produced a definite split, with some people scoffing at the idea that college or high school could legitimately be considered the "best," while a couple argued that it's not necessarily ridiculous on the face of it: after all, you're…
drorzel | May 1, 2013SteelyKid takes a bunch of enrichment classes at her day care, none of which are explicitly science. I was, however, thrilled to discover that they were doing actual science in her computer class though. The "Featured Image" at the top of this post (sorry, RSS readers, you'll need to click through) is a cell-phone picture of the worksheet she brought home the other day. Apparently, they made a computer-controlled Lego robot to kick a ball, and measured its performance, as recorded in the table in the picture (keep in mind, she's 4.75 years old, so some letters and numbers occasionally undergo…