Middle School Robotics - Perks of the Job

After a long career in medicine I had endured my fill of nonsense bureaucracy.  Meetings, guidelines, The Way Things Are Done.  So do I perhaps take a bit too much delight in thumbing my nose at this sort of thing?  Well. Maybe.

The Voyagers after school program where I run middle school classes provides the students with a snack.  A healthy snack.  Milk. Granola bars.  Ugh.

Years ago when my robotics students succeeded in talking me into starting a Dungeons and Dragons class I went to the school staff and said "Look, I'll do it on one condition. Serious gamers need Mountain Dew and Cheezits.  Make it happen."

It was in some sub rosa fashion, made to happen.  For one year the students and I wallowed in salty caffeinated glory while dispatching trolls and orcs.

The next year somebody musta blabbed to the Carb Police because the kids were back on granola rations.  

But I to this day get a special treat for every class I teach.  Granola? Oh, I think not.  

Do a volunteer job for 17 years and you can get away with a lot.

Manifestly Untrue

Although in this case Nut Free refers to the snacks the kids are issued.  More on this nonsense tomorrow......

Zombie Pirates versus the NFL

I have not commented previously on the latest silly controversy, that involving the NFL.

For perhaps the benefit of my UK readers, a brief explanation.  This season a number of players have refused to stand for the playing of our National Anthem.  League rules actually require them to do so but some have decided not to, opting instead to kneel as some sort of protest.

Exactly what is being protested is not always clear, the initial incident involved a player upset with police shootings of black individuals.  Now it seems a more nebulous expression of broad spectrum disapproval.

Of course the players have First Amendment rights and this is clearly a form of peaceful protest.  It would be more impressive if they were actually facing some consequences for taking an unpopular stand. You know, fines, suspension, loss of endorsement contracts, that sort of thing.

But the team owners, and so far the advertisers, have either been verbally supportive or have by their silence been tacitly supportive.  This is just plain stupid on their part.

Football fans in general lean towards the conservative side of the political spectrum. Players giving offense is bad, but with the frequent scandals those guys generate - domestic abuse, substance abuse, assaults - fans have gotten a bit jaded.

But for the owners to condone this.....its gonna cost 'em.  Ticket sales, overpriced merchandise, bargaining leverage with advertisers....there's gonna be pain.  I don't credit athletes collectively with much in the way of smarts or an understanding of what goes on outside their coddled little bubble lives.  But owners are businessmen.  

Ah well, I'm not a football fan so they won't be out any of my money anyway.  But there is a fan revolt brewing.  When on a recent road trip through southern Wisconsin I saw this little tableau:

The signs say "We stand for the FLAG" and "No NFL here!"

In case the above photo is not clear enough, the skeletal football players are being hotly pursued by:

Pirate Zombie Skeletons with Velociraptors!

Ah, how silly you think.  And besides, its Wisconsin so picking on figures wearing Vikings and Bears jerseys is just good fun.  But the real evidence of a fan base revolt is stage left...

The skeleton player on the left, the one beating the hastiest retreat, is wearing a Green Bay Packers jersey.  And in Wisconsin they love their Packers.  But not as much as they love America.

Worm Hole Aliens

Fall in the air so on a recent weekend it was time to get the "Up North" place ready for winter.  The dock is now in, the firewood stacked neatly, a bit of needed painting attended to.

There was a little time left over for leisure pursuits.  So we harvested hazel nuts.

Usually it takes a bit to get me interested in this sort of Granola/Paleodiet/locovore type nonsense but it was a gloriously sunny day, and besides, I remembered finding hazel nuts in perfect preservation down in the 18 century old anaerobically preserved layers back in my archeology days.

Here's what they look like au naturale.

When you pull off those brownish clumps you get little clusters that look like this:

We ended up with three good sized grocery bags full of these.  The next task is to shuck out the smooth brown nuts and discard the husks.  It was a time consuming process.  Guess I know now what the pioneers did before any sort of modern entertainment technology.

As you sit there automatically husking these things a sort of trance state sets in.  And darn it all I  found myself staring at the pods and thinking....hey, these look familiar. Lemme just take a closer look....

Happily nothing jumped out and grabbed my face, but hazel nuts do have a sort of peculiar Sci Fi connection.  Because not infrequently you encounter:

Yep, a Worm Hole.

End result of three bags of pods was about 5 quarts of hazel nuts.  Once we crack 'em open and get the actual edible part out I figure we can boil it all down and make one jar of Nutella, stuff I don't actually much care for anyway....

Middle School Robotics - Progress report early October

This year I am trying to make the basic robotics class a little less....basic.  So among other things I am asking each student to design and 3D print one part for their little robot.  Here are a few examples.  

Most of the above items are hubs, little spacers that mate servos to wheels.  The green ones are for a turtle themed robot.  The little triangular "Doom" flag is an interesting choice.  This student decided to spend some time working on a little flag before actually building anything else!

I'm not sure how much fear the name "Sheep" will inspire in its foes but, hey, I let the kids build whatever they want.

A Season that Continued, A Season that Ended

Literary "salons" in general sound awful.  So pretentious.  But I would very much have liked to be around in the era when two of my favorite authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis held forth at a very informal pub based gathering called "The Inklings". 

Pints of ale instead of short rations of an amusing little Cabernet.  Preliminary readings and critical discussion of the manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings and That Hideous Strength.  The company of writers who had all lead fascinating even heroic lives.  Sign me up.

So, quick now, what more modern literary figure would you offer a seat at some hypothetical Inklings group should you be privileged to attend one in the After Life?

My nominee:

Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti was not primarily a writer.  No, like Tolkien and Lewis he was a University professor, specifically in the field of English Renaissance Literature.  He'd fit right in with the Inklings.  But Bart Giamatti was much more.  He did not fight in the trenches of World War One as did Lewis and Tolkien.  But he was President of Harvard University, and quite remarkably.....The Commissioner of Major League Baseball.  

I am biased of course, but I consider baseball to be the most poetic of sports and in Bart Giamatti baseball found its perfect leader.

He will be remembered primarily for the life time ban he imposed on Pete Rose.  It almost seems quaint now.  Rose was a phenomenal player, one of the greatest ever.  But he bet on baseball games.  Giamatti considered the matter carefully....and banned him.  Exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame is an Excommunication from which no penance can restore the state of Grace.  

If something like this came up today I have no doubt that the player involved would hire fierce lawyers and a firm of unctuous consultants.  Veiled threats of legal action would alternate with sobbing excuses of "gambling addiction" or some other dodge to avoid responsibility and consequences.  Such is our modern world.  

But I will always remember Giamatti for something else.  Because he once wrote what I consider to be the most profound musing on the passing of time, and of our own mortality.

On a grey fall day when the Minnesota Twins have been eliminated from the playoffs consider the following:

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

For loyal baseball fans there will of course be another Spring, another Season.  But for Bart Giamatti there would be no new season.  After just five months as Commissioner he died suddenly of a heart attack.  Too soon.  At age 51, far too soon.

He had a lot more to offer the world, more poetry, more leadership.  But I take comfort in the strong suspicion that he has been "called up to the Big Club" and that in some place where the seasons never change, and where the Yankees are elsewhere atoning for their evil, Bart Giamatti holds forth over endless pints in the august company of Tolkien and Lewis and Twain and Suetonius.

Remembering Halsey Hall

Obviously events in baseball have jogged a few old memories, which sends one directly to the great repository of memories, You Tube.

When I was a youngster the radio voice of the Minnesota Twins was the inimitable Halsey Hall.  His was a deep, mirthful voice.  He became the Twins announcer fairly late in life, after a long career of newspaper journalism and of being the play by play announcer for the minor league Minneapolis Millers as well as for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers.*

Rain delays were a delight when Halsey was at the microphone.  He had a lifetime of fascinating and usually humorous anecdotes on all matters sporting.  Most of these stories probably were at the time enhanced by alcohol.  When one of Halsey's younger co-workers was detailed to carry the baggage on road trips he asked Halsey what the heavy bag was.

"My Library", was the response.

It was considered odd that the library made a distinct clinking noise when it was set down.

Here is a vintage clip that seems to be an out take for a commercial Halsey made for Hamm's Beer.  Ray Scott was another local sports broadcaster......

The start of the tape is glitchy....it no doubt came out of a musty archive somewhere. 

Two thoughts:

1. Halsey knew his way around both sides of a bar.  He intentionally poured that glass to overflow just to bedevil Mr. Scott!

2. I considered Mr. Hall to be a most worthy fellow.  One of my kids got the middle name Halsey!
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*If you wonder how ferocious a team name "Gophers" is, well, I wonder that also.