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!

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’.

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.

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.

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.  As we keep working on it, I’ll follow up with more posts.

Step 1:  a problem on their daily drill

As I mentioned in my last post, I gave the boys a problem on there daily drill that went something like this:

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:

They didn’t get them all, but they thought about it for a while so they seemed ready to listen when I explained how to answer it.  Here is my explanation:

1. How many 1-digit numbers can you write with just 0 and 1?  That’s easy — 2! All you can write are 0 and 1.
2. Now to write a 2-digit number we can take any 1-digit number and stick something in front of it.  What can we stick in front of it?  Either a 0 or a 1.  So if we start with 0 we can make 00 or 01.  If we start with 1 we can make 01 or 11.  That’s it.  Four altogether.
3. Now for a 3-digit number we can take any of our 4 2-digit numbers and stick something in front of it.  If we stick a 0 in front we can make 000, 001, 010, and 011.  If we stick a 1 in front we can make 100, 101, 110, 111. That’s 8 altogether
4. Of course we can keep going, there will be 2X8 = 16 4-digit numbers, 32 5-digit numbers, and so on…

Step 2: How can we use 0′s and 1′s to write numbers?

With this little exercise under our belt, we had a little talk about how we would write our numbers if all we had were 0′s and 1′s.  It starts off pretty easy:

Q: How would you write 0?
A: 0

Q: How would you write 1?
A: 1

Great.  But now it gets a little trickier.

Q: How would you write 2?
A: Uh oh. We’re out of thinks to write.  So we have to make a longer number.  How about 10?  (I fed them this answer)

Q: And 3?
A: I know, eleven! Gunnar exclaimed

Q: So what about 4?
A: [pause, then a growing smile] It’s one hundred.

And so we carried on up to eight.  I still don’t know whether to call the symbol ’10′ two or ten when we talk about these things, but they seem to be figuring it out.

Step 3: encoding letters

Gunnar was particularly interested in how the computer stored stories and pictures, so arithmetic isn’t our real emphasis.  We needed to talk about other kinds of data, and letters seemed like a good place to start.

I thought about showing him the ASCII code, but decided it was pointless overkill.  Instead we asked this series of questions:

1. How many things can we write with 1-digit binary numbers? We can write 2 things, 0 and 1.
2. Is that enough to write all of the letters?  No.
3. How about with 2-digit numbers? We can write 4 things, still not enough!
4. Carry on like this for 3-digit and 4-digit numbers.  They still don’t give us enough.
5. How about 5-digit numbers? We can write 32 things. This is enough!

So we figured out that if we want to write our 26 letters, we need 5-digit binary numbers.  Then I started writing out this table, and got Gunnar to help me:

Soren wasn’t home at the time, so it was just me and Gunnar.  I told him that this would be our secret code to write messages to each other. Then we did a couple of activities:

1. I wrote down Gunnar’s name and encoded it in binary.
2. I wrote “HELLO” in binary and asked Gunnar to encode it.
3. I had Gunnar write an encoded message to me, and I decoded it.

I expect we’ll be doing a bit of this going forward.  Seeing how easy it is to make mistakes, I almost launched into a panegyric on error correcting codes but I refrained.  Anyway, this is good fun for both of us.

I’m going to make up a new code for Soren.

Where to from here?

At this point, the boys have a decent idea how we can represent numbers and letters in binary.  There are several other things they want to know and a few that they need to know.  Here is what I plan to discuss:

1. Representing colors: gray and RGB
2. Representing pictures: bit maps
3. How do you know if a bunch of 0′s and 1′s is a number, letter, or picture?  Introduce ASCII (to store numbers and letters at the same time), self-describing data, file types and formats.

We’ll try to keep it all pretty simple of course, but I’m optimistic that they’ll get the gist of 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

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.

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)

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?

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?

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.