08.25.06
Looking back
The Eldest also uses a Moleskine (mol-a-skeen’-a) notebook, and in it, among other things, she keeps lists—e.g., lists of things to take to the beach for the annual trip to North Carolina. She was making the new trip list, and got to looking back over the lists for the previous years, and realized that this was the first trip list in a long time that didn’t include diapers.
Besides her trip lists, there are the back-to-school lists, the Xmas lists, party lists, etc.: a nice little history of events and activity.
G. Krug & Son, Baltimore
The Son-in-Law’s brother manages operations at G. Krug & Son in Baltimore, and so we were able to get a tour. I forgot my camera, so these photos were made with my cellphone and thus are not all they should be. But it was such an interesting place that I wanted to tell about it.
Above is a model of a gate, made completely from hand-wrought iron. The gate is automatic: the carriage is steered so that a wheel rolls over the upright bar of the two-way control. (There’s a control mechanism is on each side of the gate.) When the control bar is thus forced down, it shifts the gate’s hinge posts to their “other” position, and the gates swing open (if they were shut) or swing closed (if they were open) simply due to gravity. Alas, the control bar requires more travel than is possible with the small wheels of modern cars—it was designed with carriages in mind—so the gate is not now made. Read the rest of this entry »
My Go Congress results
I won two games of the six I played in the Open, though I had a solid chance of a win in two other games—and, since one tends to learn more from a loss than a victory, it was a great learning experience. I also had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know other Go players, including one who recognized me from my blog. :blush:
One of the needless losses went like this: I invaded my opponent’s moyo (sketched-out territory) at two places along the side. One place had plenty of room for me to live, and that went fine. The other place was too small, but I struggled—and after I had put enough stones into the group, I had to make it live: losing it would totally tip the game.
He had to decide early whether to attack my weak group and make territory while it struggled to live, or to try to kill it outright. He chose the latter course, and we had a terrific struggle. Finally I managed to squeak out through an opening and make a couple of one-point jumps to connect to a live group, which meant that my stones would live. Read the rest of this entry »
Wei-qi and Go
Wei-qi is the Chinese name for Go—or, perhaps more properly, is the Chinese version of Go. The differences are not great: the Chinese often use stones flat on one side, somewhat like a small cookie, whereas the Japanese favor biconvex stones; and the Chinese scoring system is slightly different. First, the stones:
The Japanese stones are shown on top, the Chinese stones on bottom. (Click photos to enlarge; you can perhaps also enlarge the image by clicking again.)
This particular set of Chinese stones I bought from Yutopian when I was at the Go Congress; the Japanese stones come from Kuroki Goishi Co. Chinese flat-sided Go stones are also available from Yellow Mountain Imports.
Initially, I didn’t like the idea of the Chinese stones, but I listened to a guy talk about them at the Congress: how you can sort of snap them down (they are played flat side down, as shown) and how, when replaying a game, you can play out a variation placing the stones upside down—so that when you’ve played through the variation, you know exactly which stones to remove.
Moreover, the stones don’t tremble and they’re very slightly smaller than the Japanese stones, which are sized so that they are just a tiny bit too large, making the lines of stones not quite straight. Read the rest of this entry »
Disciplining children
I had the chance on my trip to think about and observe disciplining young children. The Younger Grandson, at age 3, is interesting in testing rules and seeing what happens if he breaks the rules and refuses to obey. So: what is a parent to do?
One approach is physical punishment: “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is the slogan for this approach. Of course, hitting a disobedient child can also satisfy an angry parent.
But, in the case of young children, discipline is teaching, and the lessons the child learns are not always what the parent intends. The child generally takes the parent’s behavior as the model, so a child who is physically punished tends to learn not only to obey that particular rule (and to fear the parent) but also, “If someone displeases you, hit them or otherwise take physical revenge—especially if they’re smaller than you.”
What I observed was not physical punishment, but instead methodically teaching The Younger Grandson to empathize: to feel for himself how his actions and behavior affect those around him, and in particular how his behavior affects those he loves. Good behavior makes them feel happy and pleased, and bad behavior makes them feel hurt and sad. Once he has learned empathy, he can navigate social relations on his own. Read the rest of this entry »
Be prepared
As you know, that’s the Boy Scouts marching song: Be prepared. So as through life you march along, take thought of what might go wrong. One thing, as my friend in Ohio pointed out, is that at some point you can expect to be laid off.
Being laid off is to some degree worse than being fired. If you’re fired, you usually know it’s coming, whether it’s awareness that you are not meeting the job requirements (for example, a sales person or sales manager who can’t make the number) or you and your boss are completely incompatible. But a layoff can hit you out of the blue.
There are signs, of course: lots of talk of a re-organization, and you are not hearing anything about how it’s going to work. Or being in a “special projects” unit that is vulnerable to trimming. But, generally, if you are doing a good job and feel a part of the company, the layoff can be a painful surprise. Read the rest of this entry »
A few more Van Allen stories
I got a call (via Skype, natch) from my Ohio friend, and he passed along his own memories of James Van Allen, about whom I blogged earlier.
One memory concerns time competition for the IBM 7070 at the University of Iowa. My friend had the computer from midnight to 6:00 a.m. to run grade predictions for ACT, and Van Allen and his research assistants had it from 6:00 p.m. to midnight, so they would meet at the handoff. My friend says that Van Allen would often mount a telemetry tape and say that he couldn’t stop the run until they finished the tape, so my friend would get a late start—sometimes waiting for an hour to an hour and a half. That was not so pleasing.
OTOH, Van Allen realized that the planets, going at different speeds in the various orbits, were approaching a configuration that would allow a rocket launched from the Earth to fly past each of the outer planets in turn—and that the configuration would not occur again for 26,000 years. He informed NASA, NASA put together a mission and, to reward Van Allen, allowed him to include a radiation detector on-board the rocket.
When the NASA guy came to Iowa City to pick up the detector in a little ceremony, he had to leave the room for a call, and Van Allen, on impulse, picked up the detector and wrote his signature on the bottom, then put it back. As he said, his signature is the only one that is leaving the Solar System.
