Today I noticed a link on Google Books to this issue of Popular Science from October, 1970. It was fascinating to flip through a few pages. The first thing that struck me was the advertisements: cigarettes, cigars, pipes, guns, razors, and, of course, correspondence schools.
Anyway, this short article about a VideoDisc kind of blew my mind. It stored video at 25 fps on a record with a very fine groove. This is in 1970 — 7 years before VHS was first launched.
Googling a bit, I learned that it wasn’t truly brought to market until 1975, and a single disk would hold only 10 minutes to black-and-white video. TelDec eventually released a 12-disc changer, and even a 50 disc “jukebox” (in 1980).
In short, some researchers in Boston searched 3 years worth of tweets and scored each tweet using the Affective Norms for English Words word-rating system. E.g, words like,
“diamond”, “love” and “paradise” indicate happiness, whereas “funeral”, “rape” and “suicide” are negative. “Dentist” is fairly neutral.
Using geographic information from each Twitter user’s account, they then made color-coded maps of moods in the US over time. This is interesting:
[The validity of the results] is particularly marked when the daily mood maps for the west and east coasts are compared: the west coast mood follows the same pattern as the east, with the 3-hour time-zone delay, indicating that each coast experiences the same time-dependent swings.
I’ve been promising Kaeta some one-on-one girl-time with Mommy, so today I finally got a chance to take her ice skating. We had a blast! She was so excited that on the way there she said, “This is the most fun part of my day.” She had such a great attitude about everything. She wasn’t the least bit scared. We laced up her skates, and she walked easily in them, and she stepped confidently onto the ice. We got almost all the way around before her first fall. She even let go of the wall and my hand a few times. And her smile never left her face the whole time. Later she said, “This is the most fun part…of my WHOLE LIFE!” I love this little girl.
She was a natural on the ice. She fell a few times, of course, but each time she got right back up. Many times we whirled around together, trying to keep our balance and catch each other, and she laughed so hard you’d think I was tickling her.
Afterward we went out for ice cream. On the way there I looked in the rearview mirror and caught her just grinning to herself. She told me she wants to go ice skating again sometime, and to go out for ice cream again. Well duh!
I’m working from home today. A few minutes ago, Kaeta wondered in and asked me (apropos of nothing) what’s at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Naturally, I googled, “top of the eiffel tower,” and I was rewarded with a youtube video taken from up there.
The video’s not all that interesting, but hey, now I know what the view looks like from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Pretty cool so far!
This was immensely satisfying! After looking around Paris for a minute, we decided to watch the youtube video again, but this time, we paused it when we saw something interesting (like the Seine River). Then we’d go to the map and find the same thing there, and learn its name. For example, there’s a beautiful park just south-east of the tower called the Parc du Champs de Mars — Champ de Mars means “Field of Mars”, after Mars the god of war. It was named for its original use of military drills. (thank you, Wikipedia!)
Anyway, we had a good time talking about all that! I love getting unexpected questions from the kids.
One day last week, Kaeta washed her hands in the upstairs bathroom right before leaving the house for lunch, and she forgot to turn off the sink. When Karianne walked into the kitchen an hour later, water was streaming down through the kitchen ceiling!
She sprang into action and… called me to come fix it! While I was busy dealing with that, she took the kids shopping. Ah, another one of my “manly duties.”
I called our insurance co., then The Steam Team. They were at the house in under an hour, and they quickly set up a bunch of fans and dehumidifiers to get things dried out.
All’s well now, although we’re still working on getting some things back to normal. We found a carpenter through The Handyman Connection, and he’s working out well so far. His name is Paul, but due to his thick Irish accent, we usually call him Desmond (after the character from LOST).
Also, on the same day that this happened, I found a huge moth in the bushes in our front yard. I caught him and we ended up buying a butterfly sanctuary thing for him:
That’s the biggest moth I’ve ever seen outside of a butterfly garden.
Because the spots on his wings looked like eyes, we named him Argus (after Argus Panoptes, whose body was covered with 100 eyes). Later, I looked up what kind of moth Argus was, and he’s called a Polyphemus moth — Polyphemus was the name of the cyclops in the Odyssey. I thought that was cool, but I think Argus is a better name, since the moth has more than one “eye”.
Finally, here’s something weird — many moths, Polyphemus moths included, do not have a mouth as adults! Once they metamorphosize, they don’t eat any more. Weird!
Kaeta and Jonah both love to build things. This week, Kaeta noticed this picture on her tub of Legos:
So she studied it carefully and built this:
Another day this week, Jonah and I built this together:
Early on we noticed that Jonah is a “figure-outer.” He really studies things to figure out how they work. This week he figured out how to open a can of soup all by himself.
We were all sitting in the living room hanging out, and Jonah wondered into the kitchen. A few minutes later I heard him jabbering very excitedly, so I got up to see what was going on. In the middle of the floor was an open can of soup!
He had found the can sitting on the counter, dug around in the drawer to find the electric can opener, and figured out how to put the can opener on the can and press the button. It’s an easy can opener to use, but we had never showed him how, so I was pretty impressed. Then I took this video, so you can see how excited he was:
So I posted a short Amazon.com review of that can opener called “So easy my two year old figured it out.”
