The Farmers' Market Goes Cerebal

4:30 AM
"Get up. It's time to get ready to go."

Every weekend, seven year-old No. 1, and five year-old No. 2 get up with me at midnight. That's what they call it: Midnight. Since it's the middle of the night, it's clearly midnight! We bundle up if we need to and we feel like it; we find out which by stepping out the front door to check. Then we head out on the mile long trek to the bus stop with our backpacks and shopping bags. Usually our walk down the hill to Lisbon and Silver where we catch the 44 involves skipping, running, skunk-spotting, and racing down the last block.

Today though, with the clouds blowing across the starry sky in air so chill that my fingers aren't quite awake typing this, today, things took a more academic turn. I spotted the Big Dipper so we took a moment to look at that. 2, who I didn't think knew the word dipper, but who's visual acuity is through the roof, looked at it, and said, "Oh yeah, it looks like a cup."

2 wanted to time how long our walk took, so we noted that we were starting at 4:48. Motion detectors kept flashing on to take pictures of us. 2 asked how they worked, so we talked about light detectors and sonic rangers. (NOTE: We need to pick up some Cadmium Sulfide photo-resistors this week.)

Before making our turn down Lisbon to Silver, inspired by 2's new found love of reading, we stopped to look at the letters L-I-S-B-O-N etched into the sidewalk. We talked briefly about each of the letters and the sounds they make. 1, who's been reading for a couple of years, noted that o can make a short or a long sound. Then she recalled that two o's make an oooo sound like in room and cool. That brought us to what sound o makes in words like 'down'. 2 said, "It's like in Nǐ hǎo!"

你好 Wow! (No phonic pun intended there.) We've worked on and off on Mandarin for the lat few years. 2 was picking it up all along! Then, he started the game 1 and I usually play on the way back: calling out house flavors based on their colors. "Blueberry house!" 2 called out, immediately after flooring me with his off-hand Nǐ hǎo comment.

We sauntered down the last block to the bus stop. I said "We have 9 minutes for the bus."

2 asked, "How long did it take us to get here?"

We worked through the 12 minutes from 4:48 to 5:00 on my fingers and then added in the 13 minutes to 5:13. Drawing the numbers in the air, we added them up to get 25 minutes. "Is that a long time or a short time?" 2 asked. (As an aside, I spent the first year of my life living in Hotevilla, a Hopi pueblo surrounded by the Navajo nation. The story I was always told is that the Navajo concept of time differs from the European one. e.g. being late for a meeting has a different connotation. I love that the gang is growing up, so far, with little concept of time spans.) (By the way, fact checking the time concept comment led down a fun rabbit hole.)

Walpi near Hotevilla (photo by Ansel Adams 1941)

1 answered, "That's a short time."

We hopped onto the 44, which we'd ride over the hill to San Bruno where we'd walk the rest of the way in to the market. At the market, I asked 1 for the prices of raisins.

"Four dollars a pound."

"How much can you get for a dollar?"

"I don't know."

"How many dollars in four dollars?"

"Four."

"How many pounds can you get?"

"A quarter pound!"

And so our years old fractions narrative continued. It occurred to me a few weeks ago when I tried to host our first math workshop that 1 and I do almost all of our learning/teaching/sharing verbally. It makes for a different environment when other kids are involved, but it might work out in the end.

Well, that's our Saturday morning spent in a typical unschooling way, goofing off, learning, getting things done, and playing. How'd you spend yours? Oh, and what's your favorite information delivery method? Verbal? Written? Some other cool way?

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog