Neil recently came up with some puzzles (and art) for Gary Antonick’s Numberplay column in the New York Times. It was really cool and as part of it, Antonick includes a picture of Neil with one of his heroes, Stephen Wolfram, whose book The Art of Science, introduced Neil to cellular automata, the Game of [...]
I was working in the office yesterday when in Guido from the city came in, asking to see our business license. Guido is not his real name, but he had the air of a low-end mafioso. I had no trouble showing him our license, since it’s prominently posted in the break room, and we’d recently [...]
I have an entire blog about the upcoming, er, proposed, closure of selected California State Parks, but it is out of context without a rant about the cynicism, demagoguery, and manipulation of the members of the California State Legislature. We have, after all, been at this point before. In 2009, our then-governor vowed to close [...]
We just sent video to the San Jose police department, showing the footage our video cameras captured of a skeezy guy in a hoodie casing our cars and breaking into mine and taking some stuff. Normally, the police simply take a report, but this was an exception. Since the guy in the video looks an [...]
In October, a skeezy white guy named Andrew Clark Bergman was caught red-handed in Peter’s PT Cruiser, which had been stolen 6 weeks early. I called him Mr. Skeezebag in my posting, assuming he would be quickly convicted and sentenced, but not wanting to have anything skew the case. This morning, after finding security tapes [...]
A few years ago, when we first started homeschooling, Neil and I wrote persuasive essays with opposing points of view, and I posted them here. Neil is an excellent writer, though he sometimes loses sight of this fact. So as part of his final test on the World War II unit we’ve just completed, I [...]
Recently, I took my children to park day at Lincoln Glen Park in the middle of San Jose, a neighborhood between cute old small Willow Glen homes which house both upscale families who love the character of old neighborhoods and immigrants who look for affordable housing. It’s a fairly busy park with a regular traffic [...]
Neil and I were juggling with the San Jose State juggling club when one of the members mentioned that the math department (from which two of the regular jugglers come) was having its Pi day celebration on Monday. No kidding? Neil loves pi more than pie! I emailed both our mathematical jugglers and wrangled an [...]
Kelly and I (and briefly, Neil) have come down with some nasty respiratory bug. Maybe it’s influenza, maybe bronchitis, maybe pneumonia, but whatever it is, it is keeping us down, exhausted, and coughing like seals. My anti-sicknessroutine have consisted of raw garlic; hot water with lemon, honey, and fenugreek; zinc mouthspray; loads of orange juice; [...]
Thanks to this book, Neil and I watched the 1994 movie Speed for his physics lesson today. As a physics lesson, the movie is absurdly amusing. If you don’t know the movie, the general premise is that a madman, unhappy with his pension plan, has placed a bomb on a public transit bus, and once [...]
