Two Dishes But To One Table

Review: Henry James

I'm toting a dumpster-enhanced paperback of "Washington Square" lately.  This is the kind of 180 page novel that takes me over a month to finish. It's wittier than I expected.  After a 30 page acclimation period the dialogue really started to come alive.

Written in 1880, WS takes a look back to an earlier 1840 New York.  Manhattan real estate was expanding north then.  One of the earliest events of the book has the main character leaving the neighborhood near City Hall and moving so far north that they won't have to ever move again, north of, in fact, Houston Street!

Henry James philosophy of humanity seems influenced by Montaigne's idea of types.  One of the characters gives a little speech explaining how, once you create a system of personality types all it takes is a few minutes of observation to categorize a new acquaintance into a type. 

1)  The father, Dr. Sloper, is himself a type: ultra-rational, focused, and dispassionate in the way that only a fictional character can be.  His main role in the plot is to be defensive of his daughter.  He delivers all of the intellectual content, sometimes in conversation with his equally intelligent cousin, a Mrs. Almond.

2)The nearest thing to a villain is Morris Townsend, 30 year old suitor of Dr Sloper's daughter.  Morris is an idler, born to aristocracy but spent of his own fortune and seemingly needing to marry into the wealth of the Sloper family.  The reader of Washington Square is constantly reevaluating his opinion of this nominal villian.  He is a genuinely nice guy, likes everyone to like him, but definitely not attracted in any meaningfully way to Catherine.

3) Lavinia Penniman, a spinster with an enormous capacity for romantic imagination, a meddling nursemaid to the heroine.   Handsome suitor Morris Townsend regards the widow Penniman as "fantastic" (in the literal sense)  and thinks she is a "dessicated matron".

4)  Catherine Sloper, 21, the heroine, is sympathetic if you like guileless simplicity.  Catherine is repeatedly described as both plain and simple.  But she is sincere, extremely filial, and experiencing young love for the first time.  How this dull but utterly good person reacts is, I gradually realized, heroic. 

I'm just a bit halfway through and trying to predict how it will turn out.  Will the suitor ennoble himself somehow?  Or will he turn out to not be the brother of the 5 member family on "the 2nd Avenue", but rather the father of it, the woman of that household being revealed to be not his sister but rather his wife?   I'm just guessing.   More to come.

(My paperback copy of this is made precious by having been fished out of a steamy bag that fell behind a dumpster at the vegetable market on 181st Street.  I could see it through the clear plastic garbage bag.  I poked through the plastic and rescued it, making sure it smelled okay before bringing it into the house.  Some struggling teen reader, Yulisa Gutierrez, managed to put her name in the cover of the paperback and then heavily mark entire series of paragraphs from beginning to end with an orange highlighter, finally giving up around page 17, only to reappear as the book's owner one last time on page 105 to make a big orange asterisk in the scene where Morris tells Catherine that he would love her even if she were disinherited.  I have sympathy both for the teen reader and for  the teacher who failed to excite her about this excellent book with its story that offers much portrayal of how to deal with exciting 'bad boy' suitors, a situation more current than the oil painting on this book's cover. )

Looking to Raise a Farewell Mug in Federalist Era New York This Thursday

When I had to choose a meeting place for a drink this week I focused on something that would match the Henry James novel I'm reading.  The action of the novel takes place in 1840s New York and I was pleased to suggest to my friends that we meet in a building from the Henry James era.

The 1820's structure shown below was built by a black war veteran who ran a tobacco importing business from the first floor.  It is now the home of the Ear Inn, so named by some fellows who wanted to avoid the tax fee of registering a new business name and so simply painted over part of the letter B in the neon BAR sign out front in the 1970s.

The entire structure was condemned in 1906 but somehow it all survived and I'm meeting two friends for a "goodbye to New York" drink at the Ear Inn on the first floor this week before moving to Madison, Wisconsin.   Look in the photo at how the poor building  cowers amidst the new construction (it's the smaller building, behind the tree). 

How great to have a landmark place to satisfy a dual historical appetite for both gritty Koch Era / Taxi Driver era NYC and also Henry James era NYC at the same time!

There is more info on the Wikipedia page for the James Brown House.

Book Review -- Planets: A Very Short Introduction

David A Rothery's book is part of the Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press.  Rothery's book is just bigger than a smart phone and in 100 pages creates a very authoritative survey derived from his first hand knowledge designing planetary probes.  He is a real physicist's physicist but the book is readable.

Here are some Planet Facts that Rothery's helpful book has summarized :

1. viewed from above the north pole, looking down, all of the planets in this solar system revolve counterclockwise.
2. what I always considered the intrinsic color of Jupiter is just a thin skin of colored bands made by clouds of solidified ammonia.   The dark bands are sinking and the lighter bands are upwellings.
3. if you could peak under this opaque striped outer skin, Jupiter's atmosphere is transparent! 
4. the transparent stuff is 10 to 1 ratio of very boring hydrogen gas and helium gas, like most of the universe is.  
5. at high altitudes the hydrogen gas is molecules of H2, same as on Earth, but lower down something crazy happens.  The hard-to-imagine intense pressure pushes the atoms together to form one big planet wide molecule of hydrogen that is so compressed that the electrons just wander around, delocalized, like in a metal.
6. and then, finally, yes, there is a rocky planet down in there, estimated to be just triple the size of Earth in Jupiter and Saturn, and just one Earth mass inside Uranus and Neptune.
7. the interior of Jupiter is very hot, just like Earth, but unlike Earth, Jupiter's heat does not come just from radioactive decay.  Models of the gas giant imply that some heat is left over from the formation of the solar system -- Jupiter is so darn big relative to its amount of surface area that the heat from its birth still hasn't leaked out all the way.  
8. on top of that, some heat, strangely, is still being emitted from latent sources (there's a real chemistry topic) as the phases seperate out and chang their state.  for example, there is probably a 'rain' of helium droplets falling out of the hydrogen atmosphere, accumulating ias a layer of helium at the bottom of the atmosphere, releasing heat as it settles.
9.  without directly seeing the pieces of the ring around Saturn or Jupiter   scientists did a clever, indirect measurement of the particle size.  Saturn's rings are made of particles up to 5 meters in size but Jupiter's rings are made of particles about 1 millionth of a meter in size.  This was determined by watching the ring when it was in direct sunlight and then how fast it cooled off when it passed into the shadow of the planet.
10. if the entire ring of Saturn were gathered and mushed into one single ball of stuff it would only be about as big as the city of Detroit

In case you don't know this book series, there are hundreds of titles from Oxford Press that begin with the words A Short Introduction To...  Besides publishing excellent primers on common subjects  they make short introductions to things like a 100 page summary of The Book of Mormon.  Also, summaries on things that are problematic to summarize: one tiny book is a summary of  Happiness and another is simply titled History.

Results From Carrot Top Experiment

Here is a picture of two butts that I cut off of carrots that we ate Thursday. 

 

 The carrot stubs have been sitting in water on our windowsill for two days. The one you see on the left has failed to revive but the butt on the right is showing growth in two places, the lower growth is distinctly leaflike but the top one is merely extending a stem.  This is really weird to me.  On a cellular level what would explain cell division that produces leaves in one piece of tissue but a stem in the other tissue?

I think that stem cells have been created to form the leafy differentiated tissues on the left but that for some reason normal, non-stem cells, cells that are switched to making vertical divisions in a stem, are turned on in the right side protruberance.    Does this sound right?

Make Your Own DIY Stereogram, Version #1

I took two pictures of our living room, one from each from the left eye perspective and right eye perspective.  I laid them side by side (using MS Word, actually, not exactly a graphics program). 

If you look at the photo, you can get a Magic Eye effect by either allowing your eyes to drift apart so the images overlap or by crossing your eyes so the images overlap.  

 

If you have trouble seeing this sort of thing there is further advice here.

Blogger: Type 2 Clydesdale Cyclist

You may wonder what it would look like if you tried to exercise a sled dog team by making it pull guys on a tandem bicyle.  Well that is discussed here.  

Elsewhere on that same blog, Clydesdale Cyclist mentioned the 1337 alphabet, which I had never heard of before.  The first six letters of this hacker/texter alphabet are as follows:

A = @ or |\ or 4 or ^ or /-\

B = |3 or ]3 or 8 or ß

C = ( or ©

D = |) or ]) or Ð

E = 3 or £

F = # or |=

For the complete alphabet try this site:  1337.net

Warts Are Interesting!

Both Meg and I fear getting warts.  We don't have them now but we both had them when young. 

Meg fears them more apparently since she usually wears flip flops in the locker room.  I am wondering whether I should start doing the same so I checked around online for info on warts.    I learned several things:

1.     The virus that causes a foot (plantar) wart is a completely distinct species from the one that causes a hand (palmar) wart! Shown above is the phylogenetic tree.  The branch labeled HPV1 is the Plantar wart and HPV2 is the Palmar wart.
2. For you to catch a wart virus (HPV) the virus has to enter through the stem cells of a skin lesion.  This is easier than it sounds; a plucked hair reveals stem cells in the torn follicle.
3. The HPV doesn't go berzerk -- its DNA hangs out in the healthy lowest layer of your skin, dividing with the healthy cells as an episome (an episome is similar to a plasmid - I had to look that up).
4. As the skin cells migrate to outer layers, the virus gets activated.  Those episomes of viral DNA switch over the skin cell chemical machinery, telling your skin cell to make as many HPV DNA copies as possible and make them protein coats (like cozy little pajamas).
5. When the wart skin flakes off, the wart virus inside is protected enough that it remains virulant for several months.   If you step on the skin flake and your skin has any lesion, crack, break, athletes foot fissure -- BAM! the HPV virus might get access to one of your stem cells under your skin.   
6. Since HPV is a virus, you might have some immunity after exposure, according to a health insurance company site. I don't take this as an authoritative site.  
7. Treatments for the wart include "Placebo" which in one study had a 27% success rate.

Myh conclusion:  unless I learn otherwise, warts seem to be contagious.  Meg is right.  I should protect my feet in the locker room.

An okay link explaining the weird life cycle of the papilloma DNA is

here.

 

Two good, long Wikipedia links are:

Papillomaviridae  [for great info on the virus life cycle]  and 

Wart   [for an explanation of what you see and what the doctor will do]

A Cop Caught Us Running a Red Light on Our Bicycles

Did I mention that we got a ticket while riding our bicycles on West Side Drive in Manhattan?  We ran a stop light on our bikes and got a ticket for $280!    When I went to the precinct to pay the fine the clerk said they get LOTS of bike riders paying tickets, so I shouldn't feel too special.    Only running a light gets that high of a fine.  All the other New York bike tickets, for things like biking on a sidewalk, running a stop sign, etcetera, are around $100 each.

Above: Meg looking repentent.

Blogger A Walk In the Park notes that bikers in Prospect Park have been ticketed 188 times this year, seemingly in response to some bloody crashes with pedestrians.   A similar crackdown in Central Park in 2011 included cops writing tickets for things like "speeding bicycles" (over 25 mph).  

 

Caught On Camera: Black Hole Eating Part of Our Galaxy

The next 18 years will be exciting times if you have the patience to watch a cloud of space gas get devoured by the all-but-proven supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.   This gas has been headed for the center of our galaxy for a few years now.  Here are direct images from the ESO Southern Observatory in Chile:

 

You may have been resigned to thinking of the center of our galaxy as a featureless thing resembling the yolk on a fried egg.  But the new telescopes, like Chile-ESO, can peer inside this opaque egg yolk.  The images above are all images of massive stars orbiting inside this previously secret place in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.   The stars' motion makes more sense when viewed as an animated video from the European Space Observatory.  

 Stills from an animation artist's conception of the upcoming gas carnage, which will last for the next 20 years or so:

 

In both stills shown above the moving stars of our inner galactic center are shown in white while the doomed gas cloud is shown in orange, both before encountering the black hole (left) and after (right). 

 

Pirate Treasure Map (rodent)

One clue for geo-caching would be: "Drive to Rochester Michigan, Little Hill Court, find the tree behind the 4th parking spot.  Find a pair of two inch young trees to the north side.  Dig down 9 inches."

But if you do it before this time next year the skin will still be on the carcass.  Plus you'd wreck my skeleton experiment.

 

Earth Knows a Turtle by Name

Lonely George passed recently, aged 100+ years.  The Galapagan giant tortoise is so famous that when you type his name into Google Earth, the globe does a little half-spin and plops you down near the southern beach, where George lived!    Known by Google Earth!  Many of us could do worse for a legacy. . .

 

Review: Matthew Sweet Show at City Winery

Meg bought tickets for us to see Matthew Sweet for my birthday. 

In the back of my mind I was thinking, poor Mr Sweet.  He has a whole new album of material and all of us will just be there to hear a few brief glimpses of his seminal 1992 'Girlfriend'.

Meg scanned the lineup after we bought our tickets and announced, "Don't get your hopes up, he's not playing his new album."
Oh? What's he doing, covers?
"It says Matthew Sweet will be playing his LP 'Girlfriend'.  In it's entirety. Is that okay?" 

"Um, yes; Girlf5riend is one of the 100 greatest rock LPs ever!"    Yipeee!

We showed up early and stayed late.  Meg noted I was apparently the fifth most enthusiastic patron in the whole audience.

Aside from the opening song, a languid, loping version of  Divine Intervention,  everything moved at an accelerated pace. 

Live I could see that the bass parts on the album are more demanding than I ever realized.  And the drum parts were boring and simple.  

After the first three songs Sweet warned "We're going into the deep cuts now."  His track by track running commentary noted that the original CD has a sound effect of a needle dropping onto an LP at the midpoint to connote the sound of an old vinyl record being flipped over for Side 2. 
"Here's the part where on the original CD we have a needle-in-the-groove sound effect, so imagine that and then we can play the next song."

None of the songs were played in any kind of stretched out  extend-o jam -- that's a good thing.

Sweet encored with Time Capsule and, finally, the very last song of the night, the only material post 2000: She Walks the Night from his current release.   Other than that, two songs from 100% Fun were the only non-Girlfriend Tracks.

The merchandise table had a nice $20 gray t-shirt that was just the album cover art from Girlfriend. 

I didn't know GF had an anti-war song.  Matthew said he wrote it at a time when nobody could have predicted that things were about to get much worse as far as the US jumping into wars cavalierly.  Under his breath he coughed "ahem...Bush!"

I didn't exactly catch the band members' names perfectly.  It sounded like  Paul Chagae was on the bass, Dennis Taylor on guitar (was he a Surf Punk?) and Rick Mink, consigned to the very boring drum parts.  With all the soloing on those songs it ould have sounded bad to have more musical solos.

I very much felt I got my money's worth.  

 

What to do after a journalist dies

Who: Sebastian Junger

Saw a niche: Combat journalists died in Syria recently. One died of a severed femoral artery.  Moderate battlefield first-aid techniques could have probably stemmed his bleeding enough to get him to help and he would be alive today but most combat journalists have no first aid knowledge.

The idea:  Make a non-profit org that trains freelance combat journalists (it turns out that salaried journalists, on corporate insurance, are required to get training but freelancers usually don't have insurance and aren't trained)

Clever Part: There were plenty of media outlets willing to fund the new organization.  The foundation created to memorialize the dead journalists gave funding too.

Python Computer Language

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.

Home Room Field Trip to see "a college"

 

Arizona Bird

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."

Recent iPod Stats Here

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.

Wisterias Line My Manhattan Stair Street

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.

 

 

It Pays to be Ethical

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.

What Do We In Detroit Know About Luxury?

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:

 

Chrysler_eminem

Work for Cello: "Polish It"

If you need some sheet music for conch shells you might try looking around at the New York Public Library John Cage shrine:

Adults Might Not Understand Bullying Very Well

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.

 

Synthetic Sugar Chemistry and the Mark of the Masked Zorro

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.   

Recruiting Women to Computing

Harvey Mudd College in California turned around their undergrad courses and succesfully created a pipeline to pull female undergrads into being computer programmers. They remade Intro to Programming from the least popular freshman course to the MOST popular freshman course with these curricular changes:

1. They replaced Java language with the much more intuitive Python language.
2. They  changed the examples and exercises to things the students found relevant.
3. Finally, the course name was changed from Intro to Programming to Problem Solving with Machines.

More at the New York Times Science Times.

 

Review: The Inferno by Dante, a Maundy Thursday performance.

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)

There Is Something New Under the Sun

I think I had an original idea.   

But how to capitalize on this new concept?

Cooking With Hexagons, circa 1997

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:

• NaH is a grey powder that smokes upon exposure to air.  It's that reactive.
• CCl4 is a proven carcinogen that noone else in the lab ever went near
• MeI is a beautiful little elegant way to add a carbon atom to a nucleophile and it came in a nice tiny brown glass bottle.  The iodine atom made the small bottle surprisingly heavy.
• that little part on step b that says hv   stands for "light".  I have vivid memory of junk picking a dirty white plastic reading lamp from behind the undergrad apartments and just runing that step of the recipe with a regular 100 watt bulb, not even ultraviolet light.
• all of those steps that say "90%" or higher would have been 60% or less in my hands.  They had one of the post-doctoral fellows run the reaction in skillfull hands to create those glowing yields of 90% throughput at each step.

Long Distance Runaround

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!

=pi() - today()

Boy have I enjoyed introducing my detectives to Excel!

Two or three times a month, on a Friday, especially if it's the day after a test or quiz, we give everyone a laptop and they spend an hour trying to write Excel statements.  For the first couple weeks I think 75% of the class had a hard time doing the spreadsheets. They either stumbled through it with me helping them every 5 minutes or they didn't get it at all.    Now, months later, I think everyone can write something like  "=sum(A5:G5)/365.25.   

I like doing a spreadsheet emphasis in our Forensics class because

1. This is my public high schools lower track science class. Less than half of these students will probably finish a 4 year degree succesfully.  They could be standouts in their job with a skill like this.
2. If these forensics students go on to actual police department jobs there must be plentiful opportunity to keep track of arrests, evidence, warrents on the computer.
3. I think once they learn it, the skill will be rather permanent, unlike what I'm teaching them about fingerprint patterns and neutron activation analysis of hair.
4. The logic statements are a foot in the door for REAL computer careers could be a sort of 'gateway drug' to actual scripting or database programming.   I would love to hear someday that a student was able to parlay her understanding of "=IF("A7 <= 18", "Minor", "Adult") into pursuit of a computer science degree at college.  I would really, really love that

 

Download 114_nmr  Right click and select Save-As if you want to see a typical exercise.  This one took my students about 40 minutes to complete.  Feel free to use it if you find it helpful!

 

ItI have been able to find police department statistics on the web for things like arrest warrents

The Tails of the Gaussian Curve

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!

Finding Things Using Microsoft Windows

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

Between the Lions

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.

Peering Soldier

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."

Music Top Ten

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. 

I Just Learned the Cook's Version of Playing With Blocks

Building lasagna.

Antediluvian food.

Food stratigraphy.

 

The Fantasticar is a Dodge

A close inspection of the hood reveals that Reed Richards is driving a Dodge in outer space in the second Fantastic Four movie.