Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
It’s Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we’ve come down to my parents’ for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa’s house where they can bask in the warmth of… Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa’s Netflix subscription. (I’d say “Kids these days,” but if […]
SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day […]
Today is SteelyKid’s seventh birthday, which she’s been counting down to for a good while. It’s a little hard to believe it’s seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy. She’s become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and […]
Act I: STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father’s Day, Daddy! DADDY: Aww, that’s sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast? STEELYKID and THE PIP: What? DADDY: It’s father’s day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me. STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!! THE PIP: We can’t cook breakfast for […]
Back in October or so, SteelyKid’s first-grade class started a weekly journaling exercise. Every Monday, we were supposed to send in a sheet with some prompts on it– words about something interesting that happened over the weekend, and the kids started the day writing about… whatever it was. I was a little dubious about having […]
A week or so ago, this statistical analysis of listening trends in pop music got a bunch of play on Twitter and Facebook, but I was too busy to do anything with it. The headline result, reported with all the accuracy you should expect of such things is people stop listening to popular music at […]
“Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode.” “It’s five or six billion years, with a ‘b.’” “Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun’s going to explode.” “Well, a star like our Sun won’t really explode. It’ll swell up really big, probably swallow […]
I was thinking about writing something about the 2015 Hugo Award nominations train wreck, but you know what? Life’s too short. So here’s a couple of cute-kid photos from this morning’s trip to the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology over in Troy. They have these awesome construction toys, consisting of wooden rods with holes […]
Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday: born on this date in 1925 in the Bronx, the seventh of eight kids. She moved out to Long Island circa WWII, and has lived there ever since. Many of my favorite childhood memories involve visiting her in Mineola. Back in the 70’s, she used to host me and […]
SteelyKid’s school does a “March Math Madness” thing, and this year all the kids in her class are being asked to practice “Math Facts” for ten minutes a night. This appears to be motivated by some requirement that students be able to rattle off basic addition problems at high speed. So there are flash cards […]