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.
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.
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).
It's been too long since I updated the blog with math circle news...quite a lot has happened:
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.
When the Portland area Max trains opened up between Portland and Hillsboro, I became a frequent rail commuter.
So Heidi's reading the Harry Potter book our USPS guy dropped off today (man, that must have been some serious logistics...).
And of course, it's soy-based. How awesomely Portlandian :-) read more
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