Changes

Obviously posting has been slow lately.  It’s about to get slower.

I’m retiring this blog.

The kids are doing well, learning a lot, and all of that.  We are traveling, trying to sell our house,and dealing with other tedium.  I’m appalled at the way our government is handling the economic situation.  And so on and  yadda yadda.

I’ve just gotten tired of writing about it.

I’d like to spend my time writing better researched posts, polishing them more carefully, and tying them together more coherently.  I also want to spend some time thinking about how we can use technology to improve the education process, and start building tools and content directly targeted at students and teachers.

Of course I can do much of this by just making this a better blog, but I’m choosing not to do that.  “Coherent” and “polished” would ruin the spirit of this blog anyway.  This blog is about picking fights over homeschooling, calling people on their hypocrisy, and cute little “kids say the darndest things” posts.

It is also about learning — both me and the boys.  The Mathematics posts are still my favorites, especially the ones collected here and the little series about the Riemann zeta function (which I really should continue).

So what is in the future for the Schmidt family?

We’re moving to Seattle where I will start working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science at UW.  I am excited about getting started, and once I get established there I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about it.  In the meantime, we’ll be on the road most of the next four months, we’ll have spotty internet access, and I will squander much of that access on facebook and runsaturday.  I’ll still pester some of you with my comments too, and do my best to keep up with your posts in my reader.

I do want to thank all of you who read this blog and all of you who left a comment or two or twenty.  I had a lot of fun with some of the discussions and was genuinely surprised at the response I got.

BTW, if you want to buy a house in Texas, I’ll give you a good deal

Tschüss!

Time for substance, not rhetoric

I’m busy and I don’t have time to fisk Obama’s whole speech.  That would just leave me irritable anyway.  But there was one little section that jumped out at me:

The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.

Oh really?  So that’s why we are giving trillions to bankers and letting the laboratories and universities, fields and factories, entrepreneurs and hardworking people rejoice over a few crumbs from the ’stimulus’ package?  Just imagine the good jobs that would be created, the innovation we would see, the wealth that would be created if we actually funneled all these banker giveaways into science, the arts, and education.

But no, it is more important to preserve the status quo, preserve income inequality, and do what we can to make debt slaves out of our populace.

He goes on to say

What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.

I’ll pull together when you start putting your money where your mouth is.

By the way, our health insurance premiums went up 44% this year.  I feel lucky that I even have my lousy coverage.  I’m still waiting for that ‘change’.

Introducing binary numbers: part I.I

In my first post about binary numbers, I mentioned that I wanted to teach my kids how 0’s and 1’s could be used to represent colors.  Instead of talking about it too much, I just built a little web page so they could explore it on their own.

Try it here.

It is pretty bare-bones, but seems to get the point across pretty well.  My kids have already given me a long list of requested improvements: sliders, preset colors, mixing arbitrary colors, and more.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions!

This little web page did lead to some interesting discussions.  It let us start talking about how a computer would store a picture, one block of color at a time.  Then we noticed that if we just changed one “unimportant” 0 to a 1 or 1 to a 0, we couldn’t notice the change in colors.  This means that we an send secret messages in pictures:

1. Take a picture
2. Write your message in binary (using a code like the one we made up in my last post)
3. Change every fourth bit in the picture to match the next bit in your message
4. Now you have a picture that looks just like the original, but contains a secret message.

Gunnar really liked this idea. Of course we didn’t talk about file formats or any of that stuff yet, so he doesn’t really understand how to do it.  But we’ll get there.  And we’ll send secret messages.

Carny

For the first time, I’ve submitted a post to the Carnival of Mathematics over at jd2718.

I’ve been busy entertaining company for the last few days and haven’t had much time to sort through all of the posts, but I do want to recommend this one: a puzzle equivalent to factoring a quadratic.

Introducing binary numbers: part I

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve started introducing the boys to binary numbers. This wasn’t really my idea, it was Gunnar’s. He was playing with the electricity set he got for his birthday and when he learned how the transistor worked I mentioned something to him about how important transistors are for computers “because it is an electronically controlled switch and everything computers do, they do by looking at whether switches are on or off. Off is like a 0 and on is like a 1.”

I thought I gave a lousy shallow explanation, but it seemed to pique his interest because a few days later I saw him staring at the bottom of one of our DVDs with a magnifying glass. I asked him what he was doing and he said “I’m looking for the 0’s and 1’s.”

I promised him I’d explain it to him in more detail later.  This is going to be a long process, but we’re off to a good start.  In this post I’ll talk about what we’ve done to date and where a plan to go with it. 

What happened to those Daily Math Drills?

We’re still doing them, but posting them got a little tedious.  Mostly we’re working on single and double digit arithmetic lately because they need to master it and they haven’t gotten bored with it.

I have thrown in a couple of new problem types that seem to work well.  Here are some examples:

Example 1 (areas and scaling): Draw a

1X1 Square

2X2 Square

4X4 square

 

 

 

 

 

How many 1X1 squares fit inside the 2X2 square?

How many 2X2 squares fit inside the 4X4 square?

Example 2 (introducing base-2)

Here are all of the 2-digit numbers I can write using only 0’s and 1’s:

00, 01, 10, 11

Write all of the 3-digit numbers you can using only 0’s and 1’s:

 

 

 

 

A word about the examples

All I’m trying to do with these problems is expose the boys to some important concepts they will need later on.  They make them think, and then they lead us into good discussions. I can’t ask for much more than that.

Hooked

Hoa and I ran the Bandera 50k trail race last weekend, and it was great.  We took it slowly — Hoa has only been running for 6 weeks and this was her first race — but we moved steadily and finished it.

I liked running before, but other runners always irritated me.  Now I realize I was just running with the wrong crowd.

At Bandera I did not see a single inspirational T-shirt.  Nobody was fundraising.  Nobody seemed to think that what they were doing was terribly impressive.  They were there because they wanted to run over rocks and hills into the night.  There were all sorts of people there:  Lean and not-so-lean, well-to-do and not-so-well-to-do.  But they all seemed very friendly and unpretentious.

From about mile 15 to mile 25, we kept company with a man who had recently moved to Texas.  I wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd as an ultramarathoner, he looked like a regular guy, maybe 6′ tall, 200 pounds.  He was doing this because he wanted to “get in shape”.  He almost persuaded me to run a 50 miler he’ll be in next month.  I thought I needed to train for years to do something like that, but he said “Oh, you’ll have no problem.  If you can finish this course, then 50 miles on flat shady trails will be fine.”  I still may do it.

Some people we ate with almost convinced me to run the Lean Horse 100 mile race in South Dakota this summer.  I still may do that.

After spending some time with these people, even Hoa thought she could do the 100K.  After running her last 25 miles on blisters she changed her mind, but my point is these people really were inspirational and fun to be around.

I guess it helped that there were more people running the 100K race that day.  The 50K seemed sort of like the “fun run”.

But now I’m hooked, so it won’t be long before I run a real ultra.

Ice cream hill, about 8 miles into the Bandera 50K course (image from the Tejas Trails website)

What would Jesus do?

This fall, our government decided that the time was right to act to solve a big problem. Congress authorized an astounding $700,000,000,000 to solve the problem, and did it so urgently they didn’t have time for oversight or controls. What could be so pressing? What big problems could we solve with that kind of money?

Here are a few I could think of:

1. End world hunger.  OK, I know it is not this simple, but at Heifer International you can buy a heifer, a goat, a flock of chicks, and a trio of rabbits for $700.  So if my Math is correct, you could buy one billion of these bundles for $700 billion.  This much money could have an incredible impact on billions of lives.
2. Bring back nature. If we paid $1300 an acre (not a bad price for farm and ranch land in many parts), we could create a national park the size of the Louisiana Purchase for less than $700 Billion dollars.  Is there something you want to preserve?  We could preserve it.
3. Fight global warming. Use some of the money to buy vast tracks of land in Brazil, Indonesia, and other places where trees will grow, and we have a simple, low-tech carbon sink.  Use the rest of the money to develop local economies in those countries so they don’t have to deforest their way to success the way we did.
4. Educate our kids.  Imagine what schools could do with this money.  Every American kid could be sent on an all-expense-paid field trip anywhere they wanted to go.
5. Take a vacation.  Or why not just squander it, and send every American on an all-expense paid jaunt to Europe? We’d each have a $2000 budget, so you first-classers will need to supplement.
6. Prop up a bunch of banks that need to fail.  And make sure their staff get bonuses so they don’t quit.

Wow, those are some great options.  I’d love to hear more ideas if you have them!

I’m sure you know what Bush, Paulson, Pelosi, and Obama decided to do with the money.  They’ve actually put over $8 trillion of taxpayer money on the line to bail out our Wall Street incompetentsia, so our $700 billion is pocket change. While some of our leaders seem to think that they are in office to “do God’s will”, I have a feeling that Jesus wouldn’t do what they did.

What would you do?

Still here, just programming

Posting has been light and probably will be for a while.  I have been putting together a web application to generate and analyze math exercises for the boys and it has led me down one trail after another.  I never realized how fascinating Arithmetic could be:  there are so many ways to solve problems, the standard ones are reliable but slow and boring, the tricks can be impressive but usually fail when someone asks the right question.

I will write more about this project as it matures, but for now I have more code to write.

I started implementing this in Ruby — I love the language, it is concise yet clear, a pleasure to work with — but today I came across LOLCODE.  I may have to toss the Ruby and start over.  I’ve never seen such an eloquent, readable language.  Almost any teenager with a cell phone will be able to pick it up instantly.  Have a look at this sample program that counts to 10:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
	UP VAR!!1
	VISIBLE VAR
	IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP

KTHXBYE

What could be more natural?

Santa Claus is Dead

We are really feeling the holiday spirit chez Schmidt.  We put up the Christmas tree (sorry, no Festivus pole), the boys are making ornaments and decorating, we hung the stockings by the chimney with care.  We even sing Christmas carols and watch TV specials whenever we can point the rabbit ears just right to get reception.

It is neat to see how our Christmas cheer spills out to the rest of the world. When we were at the library the other day for their free sign language class, one of the librarians told us that Santa Claus was going to come visit in a couple of weeks.

In front of all the other kids and their parents, Gunnar told her  “No he isn’t.  Santa Claus is dead.”

Eyebrows were raised, conversations stopped, heads turned.  Gunnar sensed that something wasn’t quite right, so he added.

“I know that because my dad told me.”

Suddenly a bunch of people were looking at me.  I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and kept my mouth shut. So now I don’t think I’ll win the neighborhood parent of the year award.

Of course, he was telling the truth.  I did tell him that Santa Claus was dead.  I even blogged about it:

I told him that there really was a St. Nicholas, but he’s not alive now, he never went to the North Pole, doesn’t fly a sled, and probably wasn’t fat. But he was kind and generous, and he might have had a beard. I told a version of the story of the three sisters who hung their stockings out to dry and found gold for their dowries in it the next day. He liked the story, and seemed happy that his doubts were cleared and the world was not full of crazy flying fat men.

Somehow I thought it sounded nicer when I said it.  Still, I have to say I’m proud of my boy.