Digging Math

MATHS:  I'm still plugging away on my 8-week "How to Learn Math" class via Stanford and EdX. It's really about how to teach math. Professor Jo Boaler leads the class. She's British, and there, math = maths.  However you say it, the course is fantastic.  The lectures I listened to today were about number sense (looking at problems and thinking about ways to change or 'deconstruct' them to make them easier to solve) and having "math talks," where problems are solved via group discussion and comparing how students in a classroom got the answer - it's interesting hearing how many ways there are to get from A to Z.  And what it really demonstrates is how creative and dynamic math can be. It's not just about formulas and flash cards!

Part of my homework was figuring out three fun math problems. Of course, I employed the kids' in the process.  They were:

1) A man is on a diet and goes into a shop to buy some turkey slices. He is given 3 slices which together weigh 1/3 of a pound, but his diet allows ¼ of a pound. How much of the 3 slices can he eat while staying true to his diet? Give an answer and briefly explain your reasoning.
2) Charmaine and Tesha each have a number of cards, in the ratio 2:3. Tesha and Holly have a number of cards in the ratio 2:1. If Tesha has 4 more cards than Charmaine, how many cards does Holly have? Give an answer and briefly explain your reasoning.
3) If Jo takes 3 hours to paint a house and Sam takes 5 hours, how long do they take if they paint it together? Give an answer and briefly explain your reasoning.

We had fun solving them, drawing pictures and talking about potential answers, and made fairly short work of them. Then we watched professor Jo Boaler's explanation of each and instantly realized before she gave us the right answer that we completely, stupidly blew question number 3! Doh! But it was a 'good' mistake. Dr. Boaler would be the first to say that when you make mistakes, you're learning (atop the blog today is a graphic I designed as homework for the class a couple weeks back).  Anyway, on #3, we made the completely lame error of having our answer be more than 3 (I know, right?! LAME!). But after talking about it, I bet it's a mistake that none of us would make again (at least not anytime soon).
A couple of days ago I read a story in the Seattle Times that instantly made me think, "Fun math problem!"
The headline read: "Huge tunneling machine off to painfully slow start" and the subhead reported the Highway 99 tunnel machine has traveled only 24 feet since the drilling began a month ago.
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021696892_99tunnelxml.html


I had the kids read the story on the Times' site, and then asked them, "At the current progress rate that Bertha is digging, how long would it take the tunnel to be completed?"


They first gleaned numbers from the story they could use to solve the problem, such as what day Bertha started digging, what the date of the story was, and how much progress she's made over that time span.  They could then calculate the number of feet per day.

They also gleaned that when done, the tunnel is 1.7 miles long, and converted that into feet.  Then, since they knew how many feet (or fraction of a foot) Bertha digs each day on average, they were able to calculate when she'd be done.


Prior to starting the dig, Bertha was projected to be done digging by fall of 2014. That is significantly shorter than the 30.7 years they calculated she'll take. ;)


Of course, as the story says, they expected this first part to be slow going. Only time will tell how this turns out.  In the meantime, it's a mess down there.

Here's CJ's solution.

Annabelle had more illustrations, so she took up two pages.

UPHILL BATTLE: It's one week until we leave for NYC, and we are in Serious Training for our Statue of Liberty climb. Today, we trekked from our house straight up the 'face' of 'mount' Magnolia (our steep neighborhood). It's a vertical gain of about 213 feet, so it's a good challenge. (The climb we'll make in the Statue of Liberty is 354 stairs, and about 20 stories, so about 240 feet, so that's good training.)

There was a little moaning on the kids' part, but I told them they were wasting their precious oxygen and that made them button their lips. ;)

It was a lovely morning for a walk. We saw some pretty flowers ...

and stopped at the park on our way home.

Buckets

WILD ONE: CrAzY weather day here. After sunny skies and trace amounts of precipitation for the past couple of months, today the skies opened up and poured. And, apparently Seattleites have forgotten how to drive in the rain because sirens could be heard from dawn until nightfall, responding to one wreck after another.

The chaos turned our weekly trip to Winco into a four hour odyssey. Not fun. And during the p.m. rush hour, the National Weather Service issued a severe weather advisory for the Seattle area, and the warning was spot on, as thunder and lightning put on quite a show.

The bright spot today was this a pretty rainbow stretching from Ballard to east Queen Anne around 4 this afternoon.

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE: I took lots o' photos yesterday in and around Safeco Field.  Here are a few that didn't make it into last night's blog.

Naturally, we had to go out and check out Ken Griffey Jr.'s newly-installed plaque in the Mariners' Hall of Fame.

 IMHO, it's not a great likeness of him, at all. The kids weren't too impressed by it, either.

Here's Griffey's actual locker from the Kingdome.  Oh, so many fond memories in that ol' concrete edifice.

And here's a shot from centerfield yesterday afternoon, in about the fourth inning. Felix was long gone by then, unfortunately.

I took a number of photos outside the stadium, as well.  King Street Station sure is picturesque.

We found a blackberry patch on the east side of the stadium.  We tried some of the berries, and were surprised to find that they are sweeter than the berries growing in our alley. The definitely get more sun than the ones in our alley.

Below is a shot of Century Link, the Seahawks' stadium. I'm sure it looks different tonight, as the Seahawks are playing their last pre-season game, against the Raiders.

By the lack of other foot traffic in this photo and the one below, you'd never guess there was a game at Safeco. It looks like a ghost town in the stadium district.

BOUNTY:  Between rainstorms, the kids harvested a boatload (well, at least a bowl-full) of tomatoes today. They are gorgeous and delicious, and we delivered a big bag of them to Rick and Kennedy.

MOHAWK MAN:  Our Mars cake continues its publicity run this week.  Mars, favorited a photo of it.                                                

Today on Twitter, NASA's Mohawk Man Bobak Ferdowsi, who was made famous during the landing of Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity on Mars.

                                         

Book 'em

MATH LESSON:  While many/most kids in the Seattle area are returning to school this week, we decided to return to another 'hall of learning,'  namely, Safeco Field. My oh my, how we love that place. :)
                                          
We caught the bus down to King Street Station, and then walked the few blocks to the field.  

I decided that today the kids were both going to keep books on the game. That was a brilliant move on my part as a) they were both totally into it and b) it required all of their attention to the point where they couldn't eat or drink much. :)

Unfortunately, the game was a tough introduction to keeping book as for some in explicable reason, the Ms ace was pitching batting practice this afternoon. It was painful to watch and hard to score, if you were a rookie.

How bad was it? Well, "King" Felix set a record for his worst ERA performance in a game EVER, that's how bad it was. He was done by the third inning. :/ The poor kids were having a hard time keeping up in the books. It was like a Little League game, scoring wise.

Nonetheless, we managed to have lots of fun.  We abandoned our nosebleed seats around the third inning and walked the concourse. We found lots of action out there.

The offensive highlight of the game was Dustin Ackley's homerun. That's what that looked like, from our poached seats in centerfield.

  I treated the kids to a "Fair Territory" deep fried Twinkie. They thought that was the Best Thing Ever. They might be right. ;)

Of  course, we had to stop by and pay homage to Dave Niehaus.  

 My oh my, miss him as much as ever. :/

 I'm so glad CJ and Annabelle had a chance to get to know him (via the airwaves).

They also spied Captain Plastic and Kid Compost on the concourse

And the Moose, too!

BIG BOY: This morning we kept track of the goings on at launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, where a United Launch Alliance Delta IV-Heavy was set to launch at 11:03 a.m.

Though it's nowhere near the size of a good ol' Saturn V, the Delta IV Heavy is America's largest rocket presently. It's formed by strapping three Common Booster Cores (CBC's) together to form a massive and powerful triple-body launch vehicle. Today, for the first time, the rocket was launched with its three main engines ignited in a staggered sequence.

We aren't sure what the payload was for today's launch, as the National Reconnaissance Office had it classified. Suffice it to say, Big Brother is watching you more and better now. Check out this amazing photo of the launch from Gene Blevins/LA Daily News.

Rovers, Clowns and Dinos

HOW TWEET IT IS:  Not every day a NASA rover on Mars sends a message your way, but for us, today was that day. :)

A Twitter user, HomeGeekonomics, had discovered the Mars cake we made a year plus ago, and posted it to their blog, and on Twitter, including @MarsCuriosity (the official NASA account for the Mars Science Laboratory on Mars) in the note.

Someone replied to the Tweet (below), wishing for a similar cake, and I replied to all that Mars is tasty.

A bit later, Curiosity weighed in, writing ...

Pretty darn cool!  (BTW, Valles Marineris is the extra-grande canyon running along the middle of part of Mars. It's 4,000 km (2,500 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) wide and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. On our cake, it's where I joined the two halves of the planet with red frosting!)

The link to the original blog post about how we made the cake is here:  http://magnoliaprep.blogspot.com/2012/08/let-them-eat-cake.html

SEND IN THE CLOWNS:  As I was going through the kids' bookshelves, getting them back-to-school ready, I came across a book I'd forgotten we had, called "How to Draw Clowns." Oh, the horror!  Wait, I mean, oh, that sounds like fun for the kids. ...

They laughed when they saw the book because they know how much I detest clowns.

We flipped through it's pages and decided they'd give drawing a crying clown a go.  Here are their efforts. ...

Next, they were free to use any of the tutorials in the book to draw the clown of their choice.

CJ chose to draw a bear.

Annabelle drew a female clown.

Now, the clown book goes back to the library, and hopefully I never have to see it again.

WORK IT OUT: The last couple of weeks we've gotten back to using some workbooks, specifically one with horribly butchered sentences the kids have to fix (capitalization, punctuation, that kind of thing). One of the sentences today had to do with a kid fixing his mother's answering machine.  "What's an answering machine?" they both asked. When I told them it was like voicemail on my cell phone, they got it.  How quickly some technological gadgets become obsolete.

BOXING DAY: Kennedy's birthday was this weekend, and we gave him a hard case for his guitar as a present.  It came in a nice big cardboard box, which Annabelle and CJ have played with for hours.

Annabelle has dubbed it Adventure Box, and each of the kids has their own ID card to swipe to get in.

Speaking of Kennedy's birthday, here are a few photos of the Jurassic Park cake and Jurassic Park cookies we made.

It was fun.  For the cookies I tried to think of the seminal moments in the movie and represent them in sugar and butter. And I didn't want to do a straight-up dino-body cake, I wanted to do something less obvious. My mind went to the scene where the park visitors are shown the incubator where baby velociraptors are being born and Dr. Grant is mortified that they bred raptors and Dr. Malcom utters his famous "Life finds a way" quote.

The kids were helpful, looking up various scenes and finding good photos from which to work.

They helped sculpt the eggs out of crispy rice treats, and then we covered them in fondant. 

It was fun making the raptor hatchling. 

Annabelle helped with some of the painting (with food coloring)

What a cute little 'raptor ... it can't wait to grow up and go after you!

The cookies were inspired by everything from Dennis Nedry's Hawaiian shirt to the shaving cream can he hid the dino DNA in. 

And speaking of dino DNA, we had to do a cookie featuring 'Bingo,' the narrator of the cartoon about how Jurassic Park dinos are created. We also had to do cookies with a dino-DNA sucking mosquito embedded in amber (or, peach Jolly Rancher, as was our case).

Jet City

JUMBO:  This weekend we made it a point to get to the Museum of Flight for the opportunity to tour a truly one-of-a-kind plane, the world's first jumbo jet.

The very first 747 ever made is in the Museum of Flight's collection, and while we've seen it sitting in their airpark many a time, this summer they opened it up for tours during certain hours. We were happy to climb on board!

This plane is serial number 001.

Its maiden voyage was on Feb. 9, 1969, over western Washington. 

As we ascended the stairs, we could make out the names of the test pilots.

We could also see, up close, some of the components' logos, including the Pratt & Whitney engines and Rolls Royce's Trent 890

The 747 was a radical departure from previous commercial airliners. So much so, in fact, that Boeing couldn't find any backers, and had to go it alone financially on the project.  Clearly, their pioneering paid off. They're still making 747s today.  (In fact, the 747-8 that they make now is 80 feet longer than this bad boy!)

What an amazing aircraft the prototype is. The first 'jumbo jet,' it's taller than a six-story building. Without all the innards (seats, bulkheads, lavatories, galley, etc.), you could see stem to stern, and it really gave us an appreciation for just how big the plane is.

It has enough space inside to carry 13 city buses worth of people, and it's heavier than 10 loaded 18-wheel trucks.

Because it was a test vehicle, RA001 never had the 'plush' interior finishes of subsequent 747s.  However, they did install the groovy spiral staircase and a semi-complete VIP lounge, perhaps to entice potential buyers, I'm imagining.

Upstairs in the VIP lounge were a few vintage seats, including this lovely.

I quipped to Christian that CJ and Annabelle would probably open that ashtray on the arm, looking for a USB port. ;)

Also in the VIP lounge, there was this lovely foiled mirror panel mostly blocking off the plane's attic.  It was fun peering in where a panel was missing, seeing the construct.

The VIP lounge also had a couple of fancy potties, sanitized for your protection.

Back downstairs, we poked around the cockpit, of course.  Oh my, the instrumentation!!!

 I wanted so badly to flip switches and turn knobs!

The photo below was just a fraction of the thingees that would have been to the co-pilot's right.

Note the large, read FUEL JETTISON panel.  Hopefully they never had to use that.

Also, I couldn't help but zero in on these, in the right rear of the cockpit.

Though there were ashtrays all over the plane, somehow, I'm thinking these goggles weren't for protection from, say, Winstons.

This little not black box was of interest, as well.

Its wingspan is 195 feet, 8 inches (58.7 meters), it's 231.3 feet long (69.4 m) and weighs 735,000 lbs fully loaded (330,750 kg).  I took this photo of the kids under its tail to give a little perspective of just how big it is.

The plane has four Pratt & Whitney engines ...

with 43,500 pounds of thrust apiece.

   

 They are B-I-G.

The 747-1's cruising speed was 640 MPH (1,024 km/h). On subsequent flights, it served as a testbed for 747 systems.

The Museum of Flight is planning to restore RA001 to its original appearance and configuration in the future. We look forward to watching the progress.

I had a feeling if I went to YouTube, I'd find video of that first flight. Sure, enough, there were several.  There's a one-minute clip from a person who was there that day and filmed the flight himself.  He doesn't allow embedding, so if you want to check it out, you'll have to click on this link: http://youtu.be/TTaGMN6dz8Q

I also found a video that has video from inside the cockpit of the first flight!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhHUYwB7BPg.  I really do think it might be Keith Jackson narrating it.  It's quite a documentary, so interesting. 

Here's a fun short of the infancy of the 747. Groovy, baby!


STEMMY: Inside the Museum of Flight, there was a back to school event with a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) focus.  There, the kids scored free backpacks and swag from a Honeywell sponsored booth (nice!).  We visited with a nice librarian at the Seattle Public Libraries booth. We chatted with a mentor at the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) booth.  TARC is for kids in grades 7-12, and is about launching rockets with payloads in competitions.  The top teams win a trip to the Farnborough Air Show in France!

We also chatted with some super enthusiastic young men at the Washington FIRST Robotics booth (they had a cool Frisbee-launching robot there!), as well as a dude from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics association.

We spent the most time at the Big-Brained Superheroes Club booth. Per their mission statement, the organization is "On a mission to tap into the hidden strengths that all young people have through the interdisciplinary exploration of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics."  Sweet!

The kids delighted in playing with "squishy circuits."

Annabelle was thrilled to light up this LED.

CJ was more delighted by using the circuit to power a couple of really annoying alarms sounds, as well as a small, rotating engine.

REAL ESTATE MOGULS:  After the Museum of Flight, we headed north to fill up a couple of growlers at one of our favorite spots, Chuck's.  There, we played Seattle-opoly, which was clearly modeled after the classic Monopoly game.  We didn't stay there the requisite 3-4 hours to finish the game, so we called it a draw.

I must say, it was fun buying up places like Pike Place Market, Discovery Park, Safeco Field and the University of Washington.