Walking to school the other morning:
Elder offspring: What’s that smell? Is that smoke?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yep. Someone has a fire in the fireplace. Look, there’s the smoke curling out of the chimney. To me it smells good on a cold morning, but when enough people do it, all the little particles in that smoke hurt the air quality.
Younger offspring: I bet it’s nice and warm in front of that fireplace.
Elder offspring: [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] says that if you stare at a fire — or even a candle flame — long enough, you could be hypnotized.
Category Archives: Kids and science
Sprog commerce.
The Free-Ride offspring have put the wheels in motion to achieve financial independence from their parental units. They intend to make their fortune on T-shirt sales.
Poor deluded kids!
Anyway, they would like you to know that you can score your own copy of this artwork:
on a T-shirt, mug, or totebag, at CafePress.
I would like you to know that we value you as readers whether or not you buy any merchandise.
Holiday chemistry shopping on a budget.
I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It’s pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don’t have fume-hoods either.)
The glassware in the pictures is so bright and shiny. (Flashback to the “breakage book” in my high school chemistry class. Also to the hours upon hours of washing glassware in grad school. Still: shiny!) The kids in the pictures from vintage chemistry sets and manuals look so happy and alert. (Also, white and mostly male. And where the hell are their safety goggles?!) The bunsen burners and alcohol lamps look like they could really get something started. (Fire!) The pretty solutions in the pictures (mostly blue, but some yellow and orange) present aqueous-phase chemistry as a wonderland in Technicolor.
Friday Sprog Blogging: Louis Pasteur and Pasteurization.
This summer, I had the pleasure of having coffee in Palo Alto with Eva. She had been to the Exploratorium the day before, where, in the gift shop, she picked up a couple cool science books for the sprogs. “Of course, you’ll have to blog them!” she said.
Of course!
Today, we look at one of those books.
Louis Pasteur and Pasteurization
Written by Jennifer Fandel
Illustrated by Keith Wilson, Rodney Ramos, and Charles Barnett III
This book isn’t a biography of Louis Pasteur. Instead, it’s a discussion of what he discovered and (more importantly, from the point of view of the Free-Ride offspring) how he discovered it.
We start with a glimpse of life in the mid-1800s, when the guy who milks the cow coughs into his hands and then sets about the task of milking without stopping to wash those hands.
Hands which the sprogs would call “germy” but which people at the time would not, since no one knew that germs caused disease.
Friday Sprog Blogging: dog days.
I’m still trying to get out from under the monstrous head cold given to me by the younger Free-Ride offsrping just in time for last week’s trip to Pittsburgh. The sprogs have actually given me wide berth this week, as if they expect me to mutate the germs and give them back.
How well they know me.
In the meantime, there’s been some idle chatter about dogs. For instance, in recounting the adventures of the young Border Collie that lives next door (whose human says, “For a member of a really smart breed, she’s pretty dumb”), the sprogs have puzzled over whether canine intelligence (or lack thereof) is primarily a heritable trait, and whether a good mutt might be smarter than your average representative of even a “smart” breed.
They’ve also been drawn into the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam. What could be better than live video of six puppies, with occasional glimpses of their mom (who looks ready to wean them) and of the tattooed arm that takes care of them?
Walking to school this morning after “checking in” on the Shiba Inu puppies, the sprogs also mentioned an item from the news that I seem to have missed while I was traveling.
Friday Sprog Blogging: practical thermodynamics.
A conversation last Thursday, amid rain and wind, as we watched the elder Free-Ride offspring’s soccer game:
Dr. Free-Ride: How are you doing?
Younger offspring: Brrr!
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, why don’t you zip up both your warm layer and your raincoat?
Younger offspring: OK. Why does zipping them up keep you warmer?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, what do you think?
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: last day.
This is the last day of Blogger Challenge 2008.
You have mere hours left to give to our challenges and get in on Seed’s prize drawing (which includes that spiffy iPod Touch).
Friday Sprog Blogging: ghosts.
Elder offspring: I read about a house where the 17th stair on the staircase creaks because a man who was shot died on that stair.
Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, really?
Younger offspring: Why did it creak?
Elder offspring: Because the house is haunted.
Blogger Challenge 2008 thank-you poem: ethics.
Reader Patrick made a generous donation to my challenge, and wrote:
I want to thank you for the posts on Ethics. It is a subject that I feel is mostly neglected during a scientist’s formal education. We end up learning by example (not always good), but it should be a required course for everyone with an advanced degree.
Patrick requested a haiku on ethics … but so far, I’ve been having trouble putting something meaningful into 17 syllables. So, I am hopeful that a villanelle about ethics will suffice.
Blogger Challenge 2008 sprog thank-you art + poem: chemistry.
Regular reader Duke (who this blogger knows as “Dad”) made a generous contribution to my challenge and requested sprog art and a limerick on the subject of chemistry. (Like my mom, he indicated that this donation was to go to the “NO TATTOO” fundraising total.)