HS Comments on the Fly

Amazon.com has a rating system based on 5 stars. I know you probably already know that, but just in case one reader out there doesn’t, I mention it.

It’s not often that a book can maintain a 5-star rating through 14 reviews. But I found one!

It’s a really cool book because, if a parent reads it, they’ll be able to answer all those pesky science questions that little kids come up with about the world we live in. Okay, it probably doesn’t have all the answers, but it sure has a load of them. And it’s got helpful illustrations to go with the explanations. It’s a fun book for higher levels, too, because the questions seem easy to answer, but often aren’t. Truly cool.

What book am I referring to? Thinking Physics.

We’ve had our copy for about five years now and thoroughly enjoy it. I wish I’d had it when the children were little so that I could have laid a better foundation for them for higher-level science, but, oh well. Anyway, even through all the book purges we’ve had, we’ve kept this book and will continue to do so because the information in it doesn’t go out of style or become stale. It’s not a textbook; it’s a real book and worth hanging on to.

And 5 stars! No one has given this book a 4-star rating yet; it’s that good! Go on … go read about it and see what others are saying. I’m surprised some “homeschooling expert” somewhere isn’t already extolling the virtues of this book … and hawking it. Be the first homeschooler on your block to have your own copy!

And if I can’t figure out who squirrelled away our copy, I’ll have to buy another!

UPDATE: Hey, look at this … a professor at St. Andrews (Prince William’s alma mater) uses some material from Thinking Physics in his optics lectures (passing mention in syllabus). Interesting.

So who invented the radio? I learned it was Marconi when I was in school, but some folks say it was Tesla.

Wikipedia states:

In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited [Nikola Tesla] as being the inventor of the radio.

I have no idea where my husband learned about Nikola Tesla. The Cheney book has been seen around this house for some time, with both my husband and son reading it — and discussing it in front of me. The book is supposedly the definitive biography of the inventor.

Tesla got a little, dare I say, kooky at the end of his life, and he seems to have been expunged from books about inventors. It’s almost like a cover up or something. It’s truly a shame, though, because if you’re studying electricity you can’t just skip Tesla and pretend he didn’t exist.

When we watched The Prestige, we were surprised to see that a character named Tesla was in it. We also figured that without a prior knowledge of Tesla, we’d be a little confused by the portions of the movie that involved Tesla.

After searching a little, I found a couple of videos about him. I’ll see if I can find the titles. I got them through Blockbuster’s online program; Netflix doesn’t have them — or at least that was the status a few months ago.

Movie about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla

Documentary about Tesla by some Serbians: Nikola Tesla: The Genius Who Lit the World

If you have a high-school student interested in electricity, I think both of these shows would be fascinating. The first DVD has a quality issue, but the value of the content makes up for it, I think, but then I rented them instead of buying.

Do I recommend The Prestige? Sure, with some reservations. I found it intriguing and wanted to watch it again as soon as I had finished. But I went to bed instead. Yes, I am a party girl.

I remember while growing up thinking after a certain age that it just wasn’t cool to color anymore. But that was in the olden days. Now we’ve got these coloring books that claim to be “… suitable for both the college and health professional students….”

I’m talking about the The Anatomy Coloring Book and The Physiology Coloring Book. There are other topics covered by these coloring books. I’ll see if I can find some others.

Yeah, I found these:

• Gross Anatomy
• Gray’s Anatomy (see inside the book)
• Botany (see inside the book)
• Zoology (see inside the book)
• Biology
• Microbiology

I’m not sure if I agree with the pedagogy supporting this form of learning. That much coloring would fry my brain. I don’t think I’d suddenly understand the function of the rods and cones in the eye by coloring a picture of all of them.

However! That’s just me. My daughter can’t believe she’s getting credit for coloring and seems to enjoy it. Plus she’s able to give me a reasonably well formed explanation of what she has colored when she’s done. So … Re Sult!

For the curious, she will not be coloring either of the books in their entirety. That would be overkill. She’ll color until interest lags or she’s not able to pass my tough, but not obvious, evaluation procedure.

And on a lighter note … did you see where The Foil Hat Chick called the Bluedorns “kind of insane” yesterday? I am amused.

My daughter’s reading The Mystery of the Periodic Table. She’s been doing textbooks for science the past few years, so I decided it was time to give her the option of reading living science books for the year. She enjoyed Archimedes and the Door of Science and also Christine Bennet, Chemist, which is an older book about about a teen girl who makes perfume, sells the formula, and heads off to college to become a chemist, which is a big surprise … unless you actually read the title.

I’m reading Andalucia in preparation for our big pretend trip to Spain. I’m thinking of staying in Salobrena, but I can’t figure out if we can actually walk to the beach from there or if we have to take a bus. I’m also trying to figure out how much it will cost to take the train up to Madrid to see Las Meninas by Velazquez (you know, the artist in I, Juan de Pareja). Of course, we’re going to see The Alhambra (you know, that place that Washington Irving wrote stories about) in Granada because it’s right there about an hour away from Salobrena by bus. Yes, I waste a lot of energy planning a big maybe trip, but pipe dreaming is fun.

My son is reading something. I can’t tell which book; he’s got a few strewn about. He’s at work, so I can’t ask him.

I can’t figure out what my husband’s reading either. The last novel he read was last month and took place in Bologna, Italy, but I can’t remember the title. Last night he picked up a book I had been making fun of titled, The Consumer Survival Book: How to Fight Inflation by Bittinger. It was published in 1976! The part I found rather ridiculous was the part about how to find quality furniture:

The best stuffing is horsehair. Curled pig bristles are just about as good.

Eeeewwww! No offense to horsehair-stuffed furniture lovers, but YUCK!

And let’s not forget this derision-worthy comment about another “good” material to stuff a couch with:

Rubberized hair is a new development which is of good quality. (Cow hair mixed with latex.)

I think the 70s were weird. Very weird.

My daughter and I are reading For the Love of Venice together separately. I got it just for the Venice info, but it has some info on the MOSE project, which is a bonus.

In case you don’t happen to be familiar with the MOSE project (which I wasn’t until we recently saw a Discovery Channel show), it has as its goal the saving of the lagoon that surrounds Venice, Italy, by the strategic placement of barrier walls and floodgates. I think this paper, in .pdf format, probably explains the problem and the proposed solution the best — and with some illustrations.

I’m on page 72 of For the Love of Venice and so far we’ve got

• a main character who is high school boy (a senior) w/younger brother, mom, dad
• a main character who is a U.S. citizen visiting Venice for summer
• a dad who is a civil engineer working on the MOSE project
• a mother who is spacey artist
• a short discussion of subsidence of Venice and floodgates
• a short discussion of pollution of the lagoon
• description of life in Venice
• a girl in ice cream store who is probable romantic interest
• some graffiti and intrigue

So far, I think For the Love of Venice is fairly good. If you’ve got a trip to Venice in your future or you need an interesting novel to help with geography class, your children might enjoy it. It definitely gives the reader a feel for the place, and if you have a guidebook handy, you can look the places up on a map.

I’m sure you’ve already heard the big news.

Yes, Senegalese chimps are sharpening sticks with their teeth and then hunting bush babies and eating them.

I think this is the funniest article about it. Best sentence:

I saw “Planet of the Apes” and know where this is going.

Another, more serious article tells us that human beings and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA. Most baffling sentence:

Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and fish for termites.

Sure, I know that most people wouldn’t find it befuddling, but I did the first time I read it. After reading it, I thought, “But there aren’t any termites in fish.”

I would have understood it more easily if it read:

Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and to fish for termites.

Or maybe I just needed labels over the nouns and verbs in the sentence like all good grammar textbooks provide.

Don’t miss the article from the Scotsman which tells us that the female chimp’s name was Tumbo. Snidest comment after the article:

So what were saying here is females can be cold blooded killers when they want to be……….what a Revelation

Ha.

The National Geographic article has links to video footage showing the hunting chimp. This article probably gives the most details. You know, stuff like:

The tools, on average, are about 24 inches (60 centimeters) long and 0.4 inch (11 millimeters) around.

The researchers refer to the tools as spears. Pruetz said they differ from throwing spears, in the sense that they are jabbed into tree trunks and branches, not tossed.

As for animals using tools, let’s not forget the shrikes! They are like the noisiest birds — at least the ones around here are. They have a good use for barbed wire.

[Shrikes] feed mostly on larger insects, like grasshoppers, but also small vertebrates such as mice and lizards. Some species impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire for later retrieval. Their rapaciousness is legendary.

And cows! Even cows use tools to groom themselves.

He found they spend about 3% of their day grooming and preening themselves….

They mainly use their tongues and hind hooves to groom the rear end of their bodies, Kilgour says.

But they also use inanimate objects like trees, branches, fence posts and stumps to get at areas they can’t reach, he says.

“They’ll walk up to fallen tree limbs which have protruding branches and groom around their eyes,” he says.

So, there ya’ go.

I have no idea how to teach plant care. And there are no tutors. But I wouldn’t pay for one anyway because it’s cheaper to just go out and buy new plants every two months.

I really liked my polka dot plant. It was pretty and pink, but not in a Molly Ringwald sort of way. I bought it last November. Now I pity it. I’m distressed every time I see it and wonder if I should Kevorkian it.

Problem: I torture plants unto death.

Solution: Unknown.

Question: Who do I blame this problem on?

Answer: My K-12 education at the hands of classroom schools paid for by the taxpayer because, of course, this is a skill that someone should have taught me. They should teach plant care starting at age 6. Every classroom could have 10-20 houseplants, you know.

Additional Problem: I am incompetent at teaching houseplant care to my homeschool students. Failed one already and am focusing all my energy on remaining student by modeling desperate plant-torturing behaviors while calling it “feeding and watering.”

Solution: Unknown.

What should lovely polka dot plant (hypoestes) look like? Here’s a bunch of flickr photos for you. The ones with the pink dots on the leaves … that’s the kind I have. Isn’t it the happiest-looking little plant?

Where’s the homeschooling curriculum that teaches plant care? Hmm?

Additionally, why are there no 12-step programs anywhere for the plant torturers?

The local florist and plant store is awfully kind to me and gave me the recipe to get rid of spider mites — mites that they helpfully provide with each plant they sell, it seems. So I have learned that recipe and can pass on that knowledge to my students and can bask in the glow of that smallish sort of accomplishment. But at what cost? I killed eight English ivy plants in the process. One survives in my kitchen on my little shelf by the north window. It’s nearly reached the grand age of one year.

Anyway, if you’ve successfully grown a polka dot plant in your home, have got the time, and want to save a green life, please advise me.

Everyone already saw the frilled shark, right?

Those teeth were the weirdest part, I think.

In case you missed it, I searched YouTube.com for what I thought seemed to be the best video footage as of today. It gives footage of the shark swimming and the teeth up close.

JoJo, homeschooler, actor, and singer, was interviewed. Here’s the homeschooling bit:

Ever dissected a frog?

“I was supposed to last year! But since I’m home schooled, it’s hard. But last year, I had to do Lab Biology so they sent me labs to do — including a dead frog inside a jar! I had to beg off from the project, though, because I was on tour. I told them that much as I’d love to do it, I couldn’t possibly open the jar inside the tour bus because it would stink th [sic] place up! It would smell like somebody died or something.”

UPDATE for NOVEMBER 2007: See EarthSky for directions to view current Comet Holmes.

Just an update to the other day’s comments about the comet …

We saw McNaught! It was so much better than Hale-Bopp, which we remember as a cotton-ball-type mass in the sky. McNaught had a really long tail, surprisingly, and it was rather vertical-looking. The comet and its tail were visible by the naked eye. It looked just like a comet should. Perfect.

I am so jealous of the Southern Hemisphere getting to see it for a few weeks.

Didn’t any other homeschoolers see it? I don’t see much talk about it among homeschoolers online.

UPDATE: No longer visible up north. See Wikipedia article.