Galois moved downtown last week. I love it! Our new space is gorgeous, and conducive to both concentration and collaboration. Downtown is just so alive...it's invigorating.
On the trivial side of things, this sign is outside our window, and it's made me think...
Am I alone in parsing this sign as saying "Think Bank, Big Smart"? Maybe this was intentional: I kind of like it - bad translations from, say, Japanese are hip, edgy even. Is this what U.S. Bank had in mind? Nahh, that's over-thinking it...it's probably just incompetent design.
In the past few months, the seriousness of my "coffee hobby" has escalated. I bought a coffee roaster, a "Gene Cafe," and I installed a PID-controller, which is a computer-controlled thermostat. While I don't think that everyone I know should follow these footsteps, I certainly am getting mighty-fine coffee out of my setup.
A couple weeks ago, Heidi and I collaborated with our friend and neighbor David Griswold, founder of Sustainable Harvest coffee company, on an auction item for our children's school, Sunnyside Environmental. We hosted a coffee seminar: David described the origins of coffee, growing, harvesting, processing and importing. Heidi lead a cupping of coffee's from around the world, as well as a comparison of different roasts. Finally, I described brewing techniques, culminating in making espresso drinks for everyone. It was a blast.
Sometime soon I'll add photos of my PID controller and roaster at work...
Simplify Media is a tool that lets you listen to your home iTunes library from work (my "killer app") and it also lets you choose up to 30 people to share with as well.
You might think the RIAA will be all over these guys to shut it down, but they've done a couple clever things that I think will keep the RIAA at bay (even though I think it's going the way of the dinosaur soon anyway): first, the music is only streamed to your friends, they can't copy the files via the tool. Second, the 30-person-limit keeps you from sharing all of your music with everybody in the world (a-la Napster).
One concern I have is that it will saturate the uplink direction of my DSL connection if multiple people are listening to my library at once. Hopefully, someday, DSL bandwidth in the U.S. will start improving past 1.5MB/s, as it has done everywhere else in the world.
It makes me happy because this was the feature of TrueDisk* that I missed the most. It's also heartening because Simplify Media has a better interface than TrueDisk had, and it's a free service -- they're having "issues" with their business model, just as we were at TrueDisk.
* TrueDisk was a startup I spent an exciting three years working on with a great group of people...
I grew up admiring David Byrne and Brian Eno. From the great music they've made to the incisive social commentary to being consistently ahead of the curve in both technology and cultural trends (the good ones).
I found the audio clips attached to this Wired article charming -- you get to listen in on a casual lunch between them. This both brought them down from the stratosphere in terms of approachability, as well as bolstered my preconception that their signal-to-noise ration is higher than 99% of us achieve.
Great stuff. See the sidebar 1/3rd down, titled "David Byrne in Conversation with Brian Eno"
Oh, and it's not news, but I'm ever more convinced after listening to these guys that record companies, as we know them, are doomed.
It's been too long since I updated the blog with math circle news...quite a lot has happened:
Binary arithmetic
We did two days on binary numbers. Five students sat at the front of the room, each holding a card with dots. From the right, moving left, the first card had one dot, the second two dots, the third four dots, and so on.
I asked the students how to make the number Ten by selecting cards. I told them that the new way to say the number Ten was to name the students who were holding up cards. To make things clear, we said the names from left to right, and if a card was being left out, we said "blank" instead of the name.
We named a bunch of numbers in English, and translated them to "math circle-ese". This was great.
We then took turns adding one to different numbers, which was also great. Then we ran out of time.
The next week, a few students showed up who hadn't been there the week before, so we reviewed the activity, then we moved on to adding two different binary numbers. The big trick here is carrying, but quite a few students got it. Unfortunately, I think we went too fast for some, and I wasn't able to take the time to bring them back into the fold.
Probability
The next week I brought two dice for each student, and sheets of paper with number grids from 1-6 and 2-12. We all rolled first one die, then two dice, filling in a square each time a number (or sum) was rolled. I was amazed at the distributions. Finally we all reported our 2-12 sums to the front of the room and added those up. 8 won by a landslide, but 7 & 6 came in 2nd and 3rd. Interesting! Everybody enjoyed the activity, but I think the summing felt "forced", so the learning wasn't as effective. This could have easily been spread out over two or three sessions with lots of discussion and less dice-rolling.
Snowflakes
The next week we made paper snowflakes, and discussed the math of the activity. We talked about reflection, as well as "how many diamonds will my snowflake have if I fold my paper X many times and cut one diamond?" Some of the students delighted in the fact that this pattern brought back our binary numbers (woohoo!). If we had more time, and enthusiasm, it would have been good to bring everybody along for this, but the energy in the room was very scattered.
Code
Finally, yesterday I brought in a code (with key) for the students to decode. This was wonderful. The energy was subdued but interested. (Interestingly, a number of the students proposed they read instead of do math circle. I said that's fine, please do it at a table behind the others. Very quickly that whole table was engrossed in decoding the message. Neat!) Once the students finished this, I suggested they encode messages, and a number of them wrote long messages and handed them to me to decode. I showed them a quick way of decoding using a tree (left is ".", right is "-"). None of them thought it was faster (hmmmm.) I was flattered by the messages they sent me. Thanks! :) I finally told them this was Morse code, but not before Madi called it "binary code". Cool.
What's next?
I'm going to ask the parents to send me frank evaluations of what went well, and what didn't (both from their perspective and to ask the students). I'm planning on doing something in the Winter or at least by Spring, but it won't be exactly the same. I'd like to have fewer students per group, but figure out how to do multiple groups. So my work moving forward will probably be more volunteer coordination than direct student interaction. This is both sad and happy for me (less directly fun, but more impact).
We've had two more math circle sessions, and I (at least) enjoyed both of them quite a bit. The second session (which was really the first official session), I slightly repurposed an activity from "computer science unplugged". We took turns being, and then programming, "Drawbots". Initially we started with blank paper, and had the drawbot face away from the whiteboard, and the programmers face toward the whiteboard (but sitting on their hands). Then I drew various figures on the board, and the programmers described to the drawbots how to reproduce the figures using only words.
It was a hoot. I started with simple drawings: a rectangle with an inset square with an inset circle, and similar arrangements. Then (warning them I was doing to do something difficult), I drew two parallel wavy lines. Hilarity and mayhem ensued. One student was so frustrated, she started to cry. I assured them all that mistakes and frustration were the point of the exercise - that made her smile and she quickly recovered. (whew!)
Next I brought out some numbered graph paper, and had them draw points at specific coordinates and connect the dots to draw shapes. We did a triangle, then a simple face. I made a mistake transcribing the numbers to the whiteboard, which cracked the kids up.
The following Monday, as Heidi was dropping Audra off to class, a number of parents said how much fun their child had in Math Circle, and how they were disappointed there was no homework over the weekend. (woohoo!) So I drew one up and sent it out. As part of it, I wrote a program that plotted the homework to make sure I didn't make any mistakes (actually, so I knew where the mistakes were).
There was a week off, followed by this most recent meeting on Nov. 2nd. I decided to finally do some non-robot, mathlike exercises. I read the activity name "function machine" in the math circles book by Bob and Ellen Kaplan, and decided to design what it would be myself: I brought some empty cereal boxes and cut slots in them, and labeled one "input", the other "output". Once the group had settled down, I told them that this "number machine" took slips of paper with numbers on them, did something to the paper, and spits it out the output slot.
I started by being f(x)=x+2, then f(x)=2x. It was hilarious! The kids were really excited at first just to go through the process, shortly after when they realized the output was related to the input, and finally when they figured out the relationship between the input and the output. Next I tried f(x)=x/2. I knew I was out on a limb with this one...I got a 2, a 4, a 3 (1 1/2!), and at 10, everyone guessed correctly using different language than I'd have guessed - "Takes away half!"
Then we broke into groups of 4 or fewer, each with a parent volunteer (thanks!!). They first decorated their own number machines (this was a good break in the pace), then took turns being functions. The kids did great. It was amazing to see the excitement when they thought they had the answer, and sent in a number to test their hypothesis. When it was my turn, I did f(x) = 2x+1, and they were vexed. I could tell when they were frustrated with something when the numbers I got were over 20. 10,000 isn't going to tell you much about a number machine's function that 0 or 5 wouldn't. At that point, I suggested thinking about what a "doubler" machine would return. After four more tries, one girl got it, and was thrilled when she turned out to be right. I hope that wasn't too much of a hint. Given the chaos of the moment, I don't think a subtler hint would have gotten through.
For homework, I'm going to try doing some number machine activities around the breakfast routine for a while. Colin (our 4-year-old) likes participating just to see the machine do things. Generally his numbers have four or more digits. Awww.
Anyway, this has turned out to be a wonderful experience for me -- all of the kids seem to truly light up. I've got two weeks to come up with a good follow-on activity.
As I say on my web page, I really care about education. In addition to thinking about how to fix things nationwide, I've decided to do something at my daughter's elementary school. I'm starting a "math circle" that meets after school once a week through the end of the year.
We had our first meeting on October 5th -- it was a blast! I originally planned the meeting to be a parent/volunteer orientation, but decided to have it be a parent/volunteer/kid "kick-off". To really get things off to a good start, I decided to do a really fun activity I'd done with Audra last summer: programming robots. Not lego robots, not erector-set robots, but instead, the most sophisticated robots known to mankind: people! We talked about what programs were (kind of like recipes, but for doing things besides cooking), and talked about how hard it is to describe, in detail, how to do things, like play soccer or dance, or whatever.
Then we broke into teams of 4-5 kids (3 groups!) and each group decided what they were going to do, and who would be the robot. After about 30 minutes of wonderfully noisy hilarity, we showed each other our programming prowess, and the results were very gratifying. Kid-robots were walking around the room, picking things up, drawing on the whiteboard, and so on. Different groups chose different levels of abstraction for the instructions, but that's just fine: this math circle thing allows the kids to set the rules. The adult facilitators are there mostly to make sure the kids follow the rules they've set for themselves.
Next week we may delve a bit deeper into this topic again (loops, if/then/else, and procedures for sure, maybe (just maybe) recursion, etc. And after that we'll move towards things that seem more classically like math. I think we have their attention, though!
When the iPod touch was announced, I preordered one immediately -- I didn't jump on the iPhone bandwagon because I didn't hate my cell provider, and I disliked the idea of being bound to ATT -- I thought I wanted an iPhone without the phone. They said the touch would ship in late September, so I preordered and thought I had a few weeks to think about it.
Last Thursday I decided to cancel the order - the thing that most excited me about the iPod Touch was the ability to install 3rd party applications, not the 16 megabytes of storage, which is the only advantage over the iPhone, on the other side, it lacks a camera, speaker and microphone. Then, thinking more, I thought that the iPhone's "hacking scene" was going to stay more vibrant than the iPod touch's, mostly due to the challenge of carrier lock-in. The final straw was when I thought of a way to get a cheaper plan than the $110/month "family plan" that was the minimum one Apple or ATT offered with the iPhone: which is to get a normal cheap AT&T family plan, then, as an existing customer, add an iPhone for $20. So, for $10 more per month than we were paying T-Mobile, I get unlimited data with my iPhone.
I picked up the phone at the AT&T store, then went to the Apple store to check out the accessories. What do I see there on the counter of the genius bar? A stack of iPod Touches! Boy am I glad I canceled my order -- they were probably about to ship mine! Worse still (or better, given my decision), it would seem the "jailbreak" operation that allows you to install 3rd party applications on the iPhone does not just work on the Touch. Zoinks would I have been frustrated.
On the other hand, doing the jailbreak on my iPod wasn't a walk in the park. I found couldn't just do it by following directions -- John L. could plug mine into his machine and do it, so I knew I had a shot, but it took a while. I finally had to delete iTunes and reinstall it from the .dmg file to reset the weird state my machine was in.
Now I'm a happy 3rd-party-application-running iPhone owner.
My favorites so far:
AppTapp installer (the bootstrapping operation to get stuff on, and a very nice package manager)
Lights off - a gorgeous logic game. Apple could have designed it.
FiveDice - a very nice implementation of Yahtzee.
Term-vt100 - the best terminal app, silly, but also very cool.
NES - an NES emulator. Not perfect, and the touch-screen controls are tricky, but shows lots of promise. M.U.L.E.! Solar Jetman doesn't work on it yet -- I'll donate something to the project.
Summerboard - once you have this many applications, summerboard lets you flick through your applications.
There's a lot of not so good things out there too -- proof of concepts, and "gee, look what I can do" -- kind of like the early Macintosh games. But the above titles give me hope that this platform will last for a while.
When the Portland area Max trains opened up between Portland and Hillsboro, I became a frequent rail commuter.
Just past the Sunset stop, I remember being amused by a water sprinkler system that came on just as trains passed. "why?" I thought.
Then, at another turn in the track, I heard the train squealing loudly.
Why do trains squeal around corners? After thinking about it, I decided it's because they don't have differentials which would allow the inside wheel to turn more slowly than the outside wheel. So they go the same speed around the corner, and the squealing is the sound of metal-on-metal friction, which is inefficient, noisy, and bad for the wheels and tracks (I imagine).
Later, I noticed the sprinklers had been disconnected. "Hmmm. They must have figured something else out"
This week, at the Beaverton Central stop (where I work), I noticed an industrial white tub being used as a trashcan. It was labeled "SoyTrack Rail Curve Lubricant". It made me smile.
So Heidi's reading the Harry Potter book our USPS guy dropped off today (man, that must have been some serious logistics...).
I'm surfing the web, and thanks to metafilter, found these amazing videos of the Talking Heads, doing a concert in Rome in 1980.
What an amazing band. In 1980 they had a following, but not nearly the recognition the deserved (and later got, once they took the hint and stopped writing songs that made sense)...but their confidence and energy on the stage in 1980 is phenomenal. They knew they were that good, and it didn't matter whether the world had caught on or not.
This is more or less a preview of the wonderful things to come in Johnathan Demme's wonderful movie. More raw, some of the songs are better here...some not as polished. Adrian Belew is quite a character in many of the songs. What an amazing show.
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