Nov 30, 2013

Happy Turkey day, Mini.

We had a good Thanksgiving with my friend Kevin and his family.  Smoked turkey, great caseroles, and good community.

Last night we watched the parade in Tempe.  We took light rail from our neighborhood to downtown tempe.  There were a ton of people.  You and mom went and sat near the first red tree on the other side of the street from the station.  I went and got a grilled chese (with mayo, and tomato) for you and split a grinder with your mathmommy.  All sorts of be-lighted people and floats and loud music went on.  Some people from floats threw candy and you collected some.  You shared - that was nice.

After we went to the Tempe town lake.  There is a boat-based light parade there in a few weeks.  After strolling a bit, and trying to figure out if there was a boat-based event, we went back to light rail, and took it back to the part-and-ride, and went back home.

Mommy has a stomach cold.  She is not feeling good.  Micro, your baby sister is all snotty-nosed with a nose cold of some sort.  For now, kiddo, you and I do not have colds, but that isn't going to last forever.

You were sharing your candy.  You gave some to a little hispanic girl who was sitting near you.  Her father saw that and thanked me.  You were being generous - one of the characteristics of princess-hood.  You are working on being a princess, of the order of Twilight Sparkle, and she is a good role-model.

Work is work.  I'm about to, God willing, redefine our approach to measurement and warpage. It is hard work, but it is good value.  I want to make sure to deliver good value.

I love you and admire you.  Your sister is just starting to talk so I don't know her person, her character, or her growth yet.  I will need to add letters to her in here as part of the process. We should figure out how to do that.


Those bunglers in washington are doing what they have done for 4 years - sing "the recession is over" when it isn't.  If they sing it long enough are they going to be accidentally right?  It is, sadly, the only tool they have in the toolbox to attempt to fix what they broke.  This is what we get for having lawyers make a government - something complex with loopholes but doesn't do the job.  We should get control system engineers in on it - they would guarantee stability in things like growth using their control policies.  Watson perhaps?  Someday maybe. 

Work is calling, and I have miles to go before I sleep.

October 1st Log

Hey there Mathgirl.

Its 7am and I'm at work.  I'm struggling because I feel like I'm failing at the important things.

You see, I have too many things that I have to do and not enough me to get them done before they are due and if I fail at any one of them then it could be pretty bad.

How do keep you and our family so we have home, food, and opportunity?
How do I give you a daddy who is home and can play?

Those sound like simple questions, don't they?  They are, but they are sneaky.  Sometimes simple questions have very complex answers.  What is value?  What is success?

Daddy's work is complex.  People are giving mixed messages, like "things are good" and "things are horrible".  So I have to worry about job security.  That is a lot of pressure.

I need to get in shape.  I am obese and it makes me slow, and out of breath.  The weight affects my brain and makes me feel sad more than I should.  It makes it hard to have energy at home.  It makes it hard to do things that I need to do there.  As an adult this is a hard thing - how do I get the margin to invest well in my family and make sure they have their emotional needs met?  This is extra hard with the job stress.

I am praying for you a lot.  I get a thought of despair and I know that nothing in my strength can overcome this so I pray.  God is good.  God is big and I have seen many many many answered prayers - God hears.  May God give you a good hope and a future.  May he give you an excellent heart, healthy and appropriate training in mind, heart and action.  May you also get a healthy childhood, teenagehood, tweenagehood, and a good family of your own when you are an adult.

Silly people call kids between 10 and 12 as "tweens".  They forget the history of the word.  It is for hobbits that were in their 20's who were treated as not fully adult - they were "tweenagers".  Instead of saying that you aren't done at 20, the language abusers of today have re-engineered it to tell infants that they are teenagers.  It gives them a larger market - more people to exploit.

Gotta go.  Hard work calls.

Short link for programming article

Hey there big girl,

I saw this on slashdot.  (link) Slashdot is a good news aggregator.

The article says "teach programming earlier".  I read it that way, anyway.  My take on it is "they just mastered walking intentionally and language - so they are crazy-smart and perfectly capable.  They just need a way to make vocabulary easier."

This is the actual article, something I would read:
http://www-public.int-evry.fr/~gibson/Research/Publications/E-Copies/Gibson12.pdf

Here is a more official publication reference:
Teaching Graph Algorithms To Children Of All Ages, J. Paul Gibson. Presented at the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2012), Haifa, Israel, 3-5 July, pages 34 - 39, ISBN = 978-1-4503-1246-2

The conclusion was:

I want you to be able to succeed.

Love you much, MathGirl.

-mathdad

Aug 8th, 2013

You are such fun, mathgirl.

While driving home from an 11 hour trip to a wedding in Colorado, you made the following:

... dangit.  blogspot won't allow audio here.  dangit...

You quoted the entire episode from memory at 9pm at night to entertain yourself.

Here is the original, I think.  (link)  I hope that Hasbro keeps it up so the link is not damaged.

You can see that you get 90% of the words right, and what you get wrong is also insightful.

You are an amazing kiddo.

August 2013 (updated)

You and your math-mommy are at dance class.  Your baby sister is with you.  Three weeks ago she took her first unaided steps.  Now she is walking up a storm.  Climbing staircases too.

We had a daddy-daughter date to Home Depot in early July and we made a toy car together.

You also had a fun face-painting.

You love "Rise of the Guardians" and wanted to look like The queen of the tooth fairies, Toothiana.  I think her name is meant to be a reference to Titania from A Midsummer Nights Dream, by Shakespeare, but am not sure.

Here is all of our math-family just outside the gown room at work.  It is quite cute.

Disney

Here is a picture of your little sis.  (If you look at the floor and background, this pic is also from work).

So we got to spend a day at Disneyland.  You met a bunch of princesses. First family vacation since 2003.  Lots of work.  Spent half my conscious time driving from point A to point B.  Crazy.

We first rode the train from the front to the back.  This enables us to miss crowds and get quickly to our destinations.  Here is a pic of  "micro" looking out the train window.  If you look out the window you can see the lines of thousands of people entering the park through dozens of gates.

Here is a picture of you and your sis looking out the window.  You spent a lot of the ride looking out - which is why the train has such big windows.  Things are meant to be seen.

You met princess Merida.  Asked her if she was real.  She told you that she told her story to a writer, then disney came and drew her.  The idea was that she was real before she was a cartoon.

I must say that I would like to enable scrubbing of metadata from pictures posted in the blog.  That is my paranoid self talking, though.

You went to the bibbity bobbity boutique and got pink hair and makeup.  You loved it.  You have longed for pink hair since you saw A Mermaids Tale.  You would NOT stop moving for the camera.  Too excited, I guess. This is the only not-motion-blurry picture that I have of you.

Mommy, however has the picture of when you first found you could get pink hair.

Snow whites mother was an amazing actress, and I sincerely wish I had the pictures to post of her here.  She deserves a raise.  She was off to the side, no official hubub, and what a character.  Telling gang-banger looking folks that they are trying to look more sinister than her.  Brassy and an incisive wit.  I admire her - surprisingly.  Her first question was "Is that a magic wand??"

To the yes she said "We don't want her having one of those." with a smile.  She then asked if you would like to look "regal" in the photo.  She asked if you fed micro apple juice, and when you said yes, she approved.

We went to submarines and the lines were waay long.  Data was getting "burn out" and a wonderful man said "this is a time for a magical moment" and moved us to the front of the line.  I don't think I am ever going to forget that.  What a wonderful gift - it really made the difference of that stay and like is the reason we are considering trying to go back toward the end of the year.

We tried to go to Pixie Hollow but the lines were over an hour.  When we got back later it was closed.  It should have been an early morning visit for us.

Here is a picture of you and Micro at a wall.

We met Mickey and Minie Mouse, and Woody and Jessie from toy story.

The lady in charge of the USS Victory sailing ship, when asked who was Captain, answered that you were.  You took it seriously and spent most of the trip driving the wheel of the ship.

Mommy got a pick of mathdad and girls on the deck of the ship.

We had a delicious dinner and got fairy LED straw light things.  You also got tired of the appliance in your hair and asked for it to be let down.  There was a LOT of hair-spray in that hair.

Micro had a ton of fun playing with Napkins.

You also enjoyed Tarzan's tree house quite a bit.  You and your math-mommy went twice through it.

I think we left the Disney card with links to the Disney pictures at my grandmothers house, so we may or may not ever see it.  It is easy to lose a card.

Lessons for next time:

• going around back to avoid lines is good
• see pixie hollow and princesses early
• try to visit toontown.
• the "natives" know good food.  Ask a princess or one of their courtiers where they eat in the park.
• magical moments are the best and I should look for opportunities to grant them to others.
• the disney app for android - I found it afterwards.  Will try to use it next time.  
• the fairytale boat ride (with Monstro) was a much shorter wait than it looked like, and a good deal.

• get the fastpass.  you don't have to pay more money for it.  get to the fastpass machine early is good.
• next time we make sure to see tinker bell, ride the carousel, and maybe try driving the cars.

I deeply and sincerely wish that Disney had a "picture search" where I could put in a picture of you and get the pictures we likely are not going to find that are in their systems.

Update: Disney has an "I lost my photopass" website.  I sent them our information and was able to access it.  Now I wait for next payday when I can spend ~$1/picture to get the pics from the pass.

LA County Natural History Museum

We went to the LA county natural history museum.  Your delightful Auntie Mary arranged for us to get in free - what a wonderful gift to the little girl (you) who has all the species of the dinosaur train memorized.

We first saw their butterfly pavilion.  They have a larger number of species than the AZ botanical garden butterfly pavilion, and they try to replicate nature and model sustainability more aggressively as well.

We saw all the dinosaurs (but many pictures are on mommy and auntie cameras).  All the Mammals.

We saw a Stegosaurous

and I am convinced that the plates are thermal, not just color.  I wonder if, given the mass of the dinosaur and the estimated metabolism, the thermal engineering of the plates can tell us about the thermo-fluid properties of the stegosaurus environment.  Is dinosaur informed biomimetic thermal engineering possible?  useful?  It is certainly as marketable as denticles which are primarily thermal as well.

Although not clear what species this is, it certainly looks familiar and a bit fun-loving:

La Brea Tar Pit Museum

We saw the La Brea Tarpits museum.  It is in the middle of downtown and looks like you just drove by a tiny stretch of park - tall buildings all around.  It is very anachronistic, and not very museum of natural history-like.

Here is you near a model of a giant sloth.

Here is your sister there:

Here is you and your mathmommy posing for pictures.

Here is micro looking over a branch.

Here is you looking over that tree

Here is a pic of you near a wooly mammoth.

The official photo didn't account for the green in your shirt or your sisters binkey so they disappeared.  You looked like a floating head.

Here is you and your daddy being stone-age hunters:

Here is your daddy fending off a ferocious mini-moo math-girl-icus:

Yosemite

We went to Yosemite and saw Mariposa grove of Sequoias.  Largest living organisms in the history of the world .  Thousands of years old too, some of them.  The scale of these things is very hard to communicate.  They are phenomenally large.

What are those tiny specs at the bottom of this next tree?  Oh yeah!  They are people.

These things are easily 30 feet across and hundreds of feet tall.  You can drive an S-10 pickup through the gap in the tree pictured below.  It is just immense.

Here is you, me, and micro at a rest break.  You and I are showing a peace sign while the baby is signing "dada", I think.

This is us at a tunnel tree.  Ten people could stand shoulder to shoulder across the width of the square tunnel made in that tree. 

I really think that a good structural engineer in wood should look at the sharp square corners in this giant tree and suggest the radius that will reduce the stress concentration for it.

We saw bridal veil falls.  You tripped and fell on your butt and cried.  It hurt and you didn't want to be there.  I did not relent, and with help got you across the rocks.  I let you sit, and I patted and splashed in the (tiny, summer) stream coming from the falls with Micro.  She had fun and you eventually came to join us.  I want you to learn that sometimes good things hurt at the start, and instead of running in fear if you look at someone who is truly trustable, and who has walked end-to-end that path then maybe you can see something worth seeing that makes enduring that pain worth the effort.

Here is your mathmommy at the entrance to the Yosemite Valley:

There is Half-dome and kaitan - I think that is how it is spelled.

Here is your sister and I looking at the stream from Bridal Veil falls:

Here is me and my girls sitting together.

Here is you and I on a log, on the way out of this park.  We went home after this.

I want to upload your voice telling me about dinosaurs and singing dinosaur train songs.  We also have a video of you describing how you are a super-hero like catwoman and what your name and powers are.  I need to edit the video so we can post it online.

CalTech

On the way home we stopped by CalTech.  I got a picture in a place where one of my heros, Charlie Eppes, walked.

If I was stunningly successful in life, then I would love to attend and study here.  If I became independently wealthy then maybe I could afford a second masters - possibly one in applied computational mathematics, or combinatorics.

And then we drove home.  ~2000 miles with kids in car-seats.  LA traffic going 8 miles per hour (average).  Those folks could learn a thing or two from Phoenix.  We go 80+ not 8+.  Crazy.

Afterward stuff

We should have had many more pictures with your great grandma, your anties and uncles, and more than our nuclear math-selves.  I miss not having that here.

I have to now go help my sis, your auntie B, move.  She is getting stuff from storage for her apartment.  Isaac and Allana are there too.  I wonder who Alan was to my mom.  It is where Allana gets her name.  Mom doesn't talk about him, though.  I suspect Alan was a decision that my mom made as a teen.

Time to go.  I love you so.  I want to empower you.  I hoped the trip would be great, but I don't think it was so valuable to you.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't the good that we hoped.

How am I going to help empower you to make the most and most excellent of your life?  I would very much like to work out a good and appropriate answer to that question.

I love you.  I love your sister and mathmommy too.

-Mathdad.