In At The Deep End

One fewer excuse to be rubbish at pool (video - see the responses too).

GeekDad on home education / schooling.

A small article on nanobots tickled me. As well as the title, it included this quote:

Among the nanosoccer drills that will be demonstrated in Pittsburgh are the two-millimeter dash in which nanobots seek fast times for a goal-to-goal sprint across the playing field

An excellent TED video about the biggest geological feature on the planet (and other things), plus the Jason Project (looks like lots of stuff for free).

Typhoons looking like galaxies.
Flying over another planet.
Circular rainbows caused by ice crystals.

Just tell yourself they’re being Elizabethan. Rather fluid and weird spelling is in evidence in e.g. the letters of William Herle, passing intelligence back to Elizabeth’s court.

A Tudor remark that Katy passed on after the Kentwell open day (something like): Unfortunate the man who can only spell his name one way. Bob. Bobb. Bobbe (not pronounced Bobby, thank you). Qkbob (silent Q and k).

Apart from not blogging all that much, and not putting photos on Flickr… (Camera is in London, so few photos until we are reunited with it.)

A is being demanding, but also starting to make cute identifiable sounds for things. As lions always go RAAAAAAGH! her sound for lion is ra, or sometimes just ar. Giraffes don’t have an obvious noise, so they are rar (subtly different - short for giraffe), and zebra is bbbbbrrrr (this is where I ought to break out my imphlabet, but I’m far too rusty). Beardie: it’s a bi-labial thing part-way between a b and a v. L came with me and A to vote yesterday and we had a nice chat about what voting is, and how 100 years ago Mummy couldn’t have voted, and saw the local swan on her nest. Last night she was sick - twice - which led to sense of humour failure on my part and two changes of bedding. Fortunately she’s better now and so will be back to normal food tomorrow.

K lost his first tooth tonight, and is immensely proud of his gap. There will be a poor quality mobile phone picture of that on Flickr soon. He swallowed it at tea time, having had a hard time with its wobbliness interfering with eating. Fortunately there was no blood and it didn’t scratch. J is reading the next Invisible Friend book, and I subjected him to an excellent TED video about the Large Hadron Collider that’s going to be turned on this summer and either help find the God particle or swallow the entire planet and kill us all.

thought-provoking

ridiculous but clever

Updated by Bob: and useful.

here
Always reassuring to know they’re normal!

Three little linguistic nuggets, not really related other than they all cropped up this weekend.

Yesterday we went down to London to the baptism of Xavier. He was utterly well-behaved and cute throughout, and the church was lovely - a holy place. We had only met X through photos and email and, because of his mum’s linguistic background, I thought his name was pronounced in the French way i.e. zavvy-ay. Actually it isn’t, it’s pronounced zay-vee-er (rhymes with saviour), which I think is the way that Saint Xavier is pronounced at least in the UK. Any way his name is said, it was lovely to finally meet him and to spend time with his family again.

The second is with my grateful thanks to Mr. Portico who sent me this link - a work (video) of genius.

The last is a quote from Le Ton beau de Marot. I was inspired by the recent visit of the Off The Path crowd (among many others) at Easter to dust off the bits of my brain I stopped using when I finished university. I’ve had Gödel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton beau de Marot on my shelf for ages and only ever managed a few pages before my brain over-heated. I’m trying Le Ton beau de Marot again, and came across this passage:

Indeed, let us consider how they say “brassiere” or “bra” in German: Büstenhalter. To the German ear, this word busts apart naturally, yielding its meaning as “bustholder”. To my American ear, that sounds awful. I admit that it’s not just the fact that it’s a compound, but also its blunt consonants and vowels. Büstenhalter strikes me as just about as gawky as “blockbuster”. I’m not saying “bra” is a beautiful word, but at least it doesn’t sound like a harsh warning that a Communist border guard might have yelled out to stop some desperate would-be escapee from scaling the Berlin Wall.

I have German colleagues and customers whom I respect and like, but I still find German the language of engineering and precision whereas English and French are the languages of conveying meaning smoothly. (I’m very glad that all my dealings with German and French colleagues and partners have been in English - I’m amazed that they can cope with intense discussions of the details of entity-relationship diagrams and subtle meanings of requirements while speaking a foreign language.)

Some videos

• While my guitar gently weeps / while I rock out on the ukulele
• That’s not a writing tuition centre, it’s a supply store for the working buccaneer - excellent TED video.
• I’m too busy to have a stroke, but I’ll use it to help with my neuro-anatomy research - another TED excellent video.

Some simple but excellent web grooviness (which I think need you to be able to download things onto your web host)

• Sortable tables
• Lots of tools for drag and drop (like Flickr), effects

Singapore maths is or isn’t too hard to teach (depending on whether you home educate or not?).