Wow, I really like the tutorial at "Learn Python in Ten Minutes".
I told a student I would tutor him after school in Python, so I installed it at home and am using it now. I am good with other languages but I think Python is a trending script for a 16 year old to get a start with so I am learning Python to teach him. I think I am enjoying it as much as he is.
I now take it for granted that there is more life in the desert than in any lusher greener place I call home. My sister managed this shot in her backyard last week.
She describes the scene:
"Not only this one was in the garden, but another swooped in to try to overtake him. They duked it out for the briefest of moments. I wasn't able to capture that. But I did get this little drink at the fountain."
The Bad Plus is passing a few artists in my queue lately.
Scrobbling by LastFM has counted this many artist plays since 2008 on my iPod.
The bedrock underlying Manhattan is tenacious enough that many streets north of Harlem and far into the Bronx end in stairways. The precipitous topography outlived efforts to dynamite it.
My block has a few flights of cement pedestrian steps where Pinehurst Street gets too steep to be a road. This stretch of stairs is dominated each April by a large 15 year old Wisteria vine. The Garden club put a sign up to describe it:
"This beautiful wisteria vine came from a 6" plant grown from seed by the late Sona Kunter. It survived the 2001-2002 reconstruction of the steps and garden because Sona stopped by every day to remind the workers to take care of it. Please don't pick the flowers -- they don't survive off the vine!"
Downtown has a rich assortment of venerable vines too, e.g. the vine photo at Matthew Schiavello blog.
There's an organization, Ethisphere, that rates companies for ethical behavior. Their site claims that ethical companies outperform the market average:
I ran across it while we were considering options for what bank to do business with. The Ethisphere people endorse only "Old National Bank" of Evansville, Indiana, among US Banks as rating ethically high. ONB's banking website had zero listings for interest rates so we are holding off on further investigations of that particular bank.
I'm still enough choked up about last year's Chrysler Super Bowl Commercial that I made an MP3 file of it to listen to on my iPod.
The city in the commercial is not quite demographically right: mostly white, a few Aftrican Americans, but in a pleasant nod to one group of people, an Arab seems to be in the background of an ice skating shot.
There are plenty of scenes in the commercial to put a lump in a Detroiter's throat. For his part, the spokesman, Eminem, looks a little grizzled and overly hard in this still, getting out of the Chrysler, but in motion for the video it works fine. The article in the business section of the New York Times made it sound like Em was a tough sell for the Chrysler CEO to propose to his board of directors so he didn't tell them until just a few days before shooting!
If you want to listen to the commercial, here is the MP3 file I made, free to you to stream or download and save:
If you need some sheet music for conch shells you might try looking around at the New York Public Library John Cage shrine:
Roger Ebert describes a scene in the documentary Bully:
"There's only one bully actually identified in the film. A clueless teacher has pulled together two kids who got in a fight and insists they shake hands. One kid is as friendly as an insurance salesman and sticks out his paw with a friendly smile.
The other kid refuses. The teacher sends the friendly kid away and lectures the other one. Of course it's the “nice kid” who is the bully. He probably gets away with more stuff than a con man." (Roger Ebert's review of Bully)
I have been a cluesless teacher myself.
I was a teacher who was on guard for some cartoon of a sluggo type fellow, taking a youngster's lunch money:
That's completely unrealistic and misguided. In reality, the cruelty of students that has gone on under my nose is probably more like this girl with the cell phone.
I don't think I'm the only clueless adult, because when I searched at Google Images just now I saw a pretty heavy bias towards depicting bullies as overt, buffoonish stereotypes of Butch from the Our Gang movies. There were few image depictions of the opportunistic clique leaders, the abusive class clowns, that get insufficent scrutiny from teachers.
I'm going to the library now to see if I can find Barbara Coloroso's The Bully, The Bullied, and The Bystander , a book that even has Jiu-Jitsu instructions listed in the table of contents, but also has a large section assessing the people who stand by during bullying, and the people who don't recognize bullying when they see it.
There's a 3 minute video where a 300 student organic chemistry lecture is interrupted by an elaborately rehearsed student sword fight. I was rooting of course for the chemistry teacher, who, at the end, not missing a beat, has the presence of mind to step back in and make Zorro's signature "Z" into a Beta-saccharide. Video here.
There was a three hour long dramatic reading last night sponsored by The
Poets Corner at Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. They read from The Inferno, by Dante.(16 Cantos, 4 in the original Italian). Each canto had two readers. There seemed to be over 400 people in the audience.
Fans entering for the poetry reading were confused and quickly hushed when we realized our entrance for the 9pm Inferno performance was intruding on a still ongoing church service. St Johns was in near darkness following the stripping of the author and extinguishing of sacrament candles. We filed in as the parishioners filed out, a cloud of incense filling the air.
It started at 9pm and I only made it to the midpoint at 10:30 before begging off. Meg did it without coffee but I drank a 16 oz at 7pm and another at 8pm to brace myself for the 32 readers, approaching the lectern one at a time, in the largest stone space in New York, or perhaps America.
The variety of delivery styles kept things lively, even when I occasionally lost the plot of the narrative. [I have no idea what Beatrice did on Dante's behalf, for example. Nor am I sure of the actions of Adam, Moses, and Elijah, who, shockingly, were conceived of by Dante to dwell in the second circle of hell, with the rest of the unbaptized (!!!)]
Being New York the readers were all academics and professional actors. There was much to like in their varied delivery. I liked readers that used hand gestures. I liked readers that had memorized their entire portion and needed no cue. I liked that some had obvious Shakesperean chops while others, equally effective, read Dante like they were onstage at The Moth. I even liked the one terrible reader because it made me fantasize that maybe someday I could get up there to sling a verse or two.
I kept track of my six favorite readers at last Nights 'Inferno'
James A Kowalski Doug Anderson Jean Hollander Lorna Blake
and David Landon & Daniel Hoffman (no pics found)
I think I had an original idea.
But how to capitalize on this new concept?
Dr Rajanbabu, my mentor at Ohio State is doing well. I see he got a second publication into SCIENCE.
For an organic chemist, Science or Nature are the non plus ultra place to publsh. Getting research into that journal twice in a lifetime is an accomplishment.
Dr. Rajanbabu's site still has a link to the molecule that bedeviled me in Columbus Ohio. Everything in the picture below I accomplished between 1996 to 1998. This is me cooking with chemicals:
Each of those arrows, a, b, c, and d, represents several weeks (for a slowpoke like me) of finding the method in the published literature, trying to tweek the conditions, doing it wrong, going back and re-doing it, getting it clean enough to make an NMR spectrum, and then going back and repeating it. It was slow work, not entirely pleasant or interesting although it looks blithe and innocent in the above diagram. There are many personal memories crammed into every letter, every detail of the above figure has significance for me the cook:
The Bad Plus make their twice-a-year homestand, this time at The Blue Note. Two shows a night for the week of April24 - 29.
Last time through they had a vocalist in tow. Wendy Lewis changed up the all-dude, no words aesthetic, providing many surprising, often languid, sometimes ironic, always respectful interpretations of FM rock staples, filtered through a stand up bass, capricious drums, and time shifting piano. Highlights of that show were LOng Distance Runaround (a Yes cover) and Lithium (Kurt Cobain on half-speed).
This time through it's back to just the guys. I think Meg is good for coming to one show with me. I'll try to find a friend for the other. If you're reading this and going to be in New York that week drop me a line!
Last year around this time I came close to riding a bus to Toronto to catch TB+ so I am greatly relieved and taking advantage of one of my last chances to see them in New York before I move to Wisconsin.
If you don't know them and want to stream some Bad Plus at Last.fm , iTunes preview, or Grooveshark, try Physical Cities, Lithium, or Silence is the Reason!
Here's something that bears following up -- in a survey of 17,000 elections, the actual result and the poll result were compared by The 538 Blog. It's not a surprise that the polls are barely more accurate than a Farmer's Almanac weather prediction, but the actual numbers are interesting.
Forty percent of the time, the actual result was more than two standard deviations outside of the survey prediction! Recall from Statistics Class that a result two standeard deviations should only happen 5% of the time.
More at 538., an innovative statistics site that was originally focused on a crucial number of Congress seats, 538, and, like all good blogs, went from being one man's dream to being part of the big media scene: Nate Silver now blogs at the New York Times!
I think I just got 99 times better at finding things on my computer thanks to Indexed Tags and Preview Pane.
To get Preview Pane click the blue and white square in the upper right corner of Explorer (the name of the program Windows uses as a file browser window). Now every time you highlight a file, you see the first page of the file. For example I was trying to remember which test had a stern warning against cheating on the first page. Looks like it's not this one:
Preview pane is not cutting edge - my mom's old Windows 2000 computer uses it. I just didn't know where it was in Windows 7 for some reasons. My other discovery, tags with indexing is more profound.
Putting tags on my files will be enormously useful. In teaching I have increased my amount of spiral curriculum , which helps students learn but it has also increased the difficulty of finding all the mentions of a given topic. For example since I teach density in multiple chapters, I need to be able to go back later and see when I first mentioned density, what level I have tested density at, which homework examples I've recycled from the last time I taught density, etcetera. By tagging density throughout the year in every file that has it I make this easier. I make it more portable for when I teach a different version of chemistry too (New York State Regents, SAT, A.P., etc).
Windows won't find tags if you don't tell it to fully "Index" those parts of the drive. To do that, hit the blue "?" while you are in Explorer and look up Index FAQ's.
Then to tag, the Explorer file window has a space to add tags at the bottom every time you highlight a file.
One way to
Imagine the mutual thrill: I bumped into a woman at the church potluck who turned out to be a retired career librarian from the Mid-Manhattan NYPL branch, a veteran of one of the world's great libraries and an enthusiastic patron of that library. She was happy to talk and I was happy to listen; she had lots to lament and I had lots to ask.
Bitter at her forced retirement, one of this librarian's vindications was that The Nation published a critique last month of the NYPL's modernization strategy.
The trend at our library here, as elsewhere, is toward's "efficiency", a term which seems to mean hiring expensive conusultants who recommend firing the best staff members and comoebsating the CEO to the tune of $800,000 a year, plus perks, such as a Park Avenue apartment and scholarships for his children. There is a push at the NYPL to dissolve the rare and unique parts and turn it into a series of small, ordinary neighborhood lending libraries. The main building, the landmark structure built in the era of Carnegie philanthropy, is to be maintained as a visual tourist attraction but cleansed of its collections.
The Nation article is a little long. I plan to read it on the train home from the Riverside NYPL branch now.
Really interesting Korea images from 2010 at Bag News Notes.
The readers of BNN noted, regarding Clinton: "Exhausted and bored. One of the toughest and most unrewarding jobs on the planet and it's all about school boy bullies." and regarding the two soldiers, one from each country: "How these two can be inches apart while military tensions are high like this is mind-blowing."
My year end music list is from my iPod: the most played artists from 2011:
Last FM keeps track of my iPod stats at http://www.last.fm/user/atom_box If you are on Last.FM too drop me a line and we can be friends.
A close inspection of the hood reveals that Reed Richards is driving a Dodge in outer space in the second Fantastic Four movie.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a nice article debunking the use of college reputations.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell
One interesting thing about field trips at a New York City School is that we don't get anywhere on a school bus. Every trip I've ever gone on here has involved marching a big mass of tenth graders across the field and down to the subway.
Here we are last week, on our way to enjoy a day of ice skating at Bryant Park on 42nd Street in Manhattan. To get there we had to take two different rush hour trains, standing-room-only, including transferring at the very busy 6th Avenue stop on the L Train.
I really enjoyed teaching the fingerprint unit in Forensics Class recently.
There were many hands on things we were able to do, including one that I had always wondered about, how to 'dust' for a hidden fingerprint around a smooth surface like a doorknob or cookie jar. [That one it turns out is super easy to do at home and anyone with a child and time to spend should show the child how to do that because it's very satisfying. The only trick is you need a make up brush, borrowed from the lady of the house. Search on You Tube for any of their examples of how to do the dusting.]
(Thanks to Juan in my first period class for the fingerprint image at right, obtained by rubbing his finger with a pencil and then touching that to Scotch Tape.)
I invite you to try out below one of the questions I wrote for their exam. I was worried whether I had worded it clear and unambiguously {always tough when addressing to a mixed group of teens} but there were zero issues with wording. I will put the answers down in a post below this one. . .
Question #19.
In each blank write looks the SAME or looks DIFFERENT
It's time for vacation homework. My advanced chemistry class is going to have to do chemistry but they will also read and respond to Chapter 2 of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers', titled 'The 10,000 Hour Rule'. Hard work as a road to success is a great theme for a tenth grader and has been my theme in chemistry since the first day of September this school year.
Gladwell points out that the Beatles hit America in 1964. But they began playing in 1957! And they went through a period as the house band in a Hamburg caberet where they worked (brace yourself) 8 hours of playing onstage (brace again) for 7 days a week. For weeks at a time.
By the time the Beatles had their first burst of success they had played on stage an estimated 1200 times.
There are a few dozen periodic tables at this Ohio school's site.
Some are historic, others are modern and strange.
How should I clean my bathroom? Meg is a conservationist who permits only Bon Ami into the house but I want a clean white tub at home and believe that only Ajax-style bleach with cleanser can do the job. Can this marriage be saved?
enter OxyClean laundry supplement :
As a chemist I was skeptical that a bleach alternative would do the job in the bathroom but I tried it anyway: poke a hole in the cardboard side of the Bon Ami cannister, dump in Oxy Clean (sodium carbonate & sodium percarbonate), enough so that it is half an inch deep on the cleanser pile. Shake it all to mix it up. Now use the Bon Ami and a scrubbie to clean your sink, tub, or toiliet.
I did this yesterday, mixed up some 10:1 Bon Ami Cleanser andOxy Clean and I, The Skeptical Chemist, am pleased to announce that it worked! My tub is whiter even than Ajax makes it! Caveat: I would assume that sodium percarbonate probably decomposes when exposed to air so the cleanser will probably poop out before you finish the can. Either add more bleach alternative every 5 months or store it airtight somehow.
I've been busy this semester with a new class: Forensic science. The science of crime solving is my new strategy for spreading the good news of science to the portion of the student body who previously didn't want to buy what I'm selling.
So far it seems to be working; parents and other teachers report positive chatter about forensics outside of class.
I like forensics as a science class because it allows me to go broad, touching on all the different disciplines I like to teach. In a typical week I teach them biology, a little chemistry, a little physics, a LOT of math [a great achievement for this particular student audience], and even English and history.
Thursday and Friday we spent two days on the microscope looking at $35 worth of pollen bearing flowers that I bought in the neighborhood. Fairly cheap student light microscopes gave decent views for them to sketch the pollen of Lillies, daisies, gladiolas, and a few flowers that I haven't gotten the correct name for. If we had more time there are routes of inquiry I wish we could follow on this, because the flowers that DIDN'T yield viewable pollen interest me as much as the ones that did. (One of the main things they taught us in research at Ohio State is that a negative research result can be exploited just as well as a positive one if you're clever and curious.)
I didn't take any pollen pictures under the microscope yet but here is a picture of my own skin cells that I took Tuesday with a hand held camera and the microscope at 400x power:
A computer programmer and a painter both with the same understanding of abstraction!
That's abstractionist Georgia OKeefe on the right. Her great quote about abstraction is "Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. "
Edsger Dijkstra quote on left is from Linfo. For the photo on the right, I meant to put an example of GOK doing her abstract painting but how great was it to find an abstraction of the woman herself that proves the sentiment of her quote, above. So we have instead Stiglitz taking the photo of her abstracted neck (from here). A painting by O'Keefe at her abstract extreme is here inspired by a view from her window.
Because I have NYC in my tag-cloud at the right of this page Two Dishes got a huge traffic spike on September 11th:
I have no secrets from the web server at www.last.fm; it uploads my iPod usage each week. So I was amused but not surprised when the web page for Last serenaded me with a 3 minute clip of Nixon's Vietnam is Over speech from 1973. Here's the web page, suggesting I might also enjoy similar artists, like Spiro Agnew for example, and asking me whether I would like to start a radio station called Richard Nixon Radio.
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