Orange Brains and Pink Blood

This doesn't look right...

I was at the Red Cross blood donor center yesterday and took this photo of my arm. Something's off - shouldn't blood be red? And what's with the orange brain in my hand? 

Ordinarily, I'd make a joke about the grapefruit diet being the cause of this very light-colored blood, or say I'm a robot and this is a picture of me getting an oil change, or mention that I was at a picnic and the host was providing pink lemonade intravenously. But it's not as exciting as that. This is the second stage of a "Power Red" donation, where they take a pint of blood out, extract the red blood cells, then put the remainder back in. The remainder is clear-ish. It also feels funny when it goes back in, as that is not a sensation most of us are familiar with. 

The orange brain is a foam toy they give you to squeeze while you're donating - it helps keep the blood moving. The nurses there tell me they have a box full of all kinds of squeezy toys, and that people regularly drop off new ones. I have a squeezy pig and frog back at the office, and if I return there, I may drop them off for a future blood donor to use. 

Science Olympiad and Muddy Pipes

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Finally!
First, what you've all been waiting for: the boys playing their recital pieces. They had their recital a few weeks ago, so they dusted off their pieces and made a special recording.


Clementi's "Sonatina" Op. 36 No. 6, played by M


Schumann's "Winter-time (II)" by K

Drainage Update
I know you're itching to hear the update on the French drain that runs between our yard and our neighbor's. It's been backed up for a while, and we hired someone to put a camera in the tube and see what was in the way. They identified an area where silt and roots had pretty much blocked off the pipe, so we opened it up and cleaned it out. I just cut the tube in one place, pulled the ends up one by one and cleaned them up as far down as I could reach (yes, it was gross.) That was a few weeks ago. I have been waiting for a break in my schedule to finally put in a clean-out PVC "T" in the problem area. Here are a few pictures of today's muddy adventure.


The french drain before the repair. It was cut open a few weeks ago to clear out a blockage.


This is after the first of two cuts. Mud Pies for all.


The full repair. The drainage tile is connected to the PVC with a rubber connector and hose clamps, and PVC part is a "T" shape with a screw-in top, so I can dig it up a little bit next time it gets clogged and clean it out from there.

Science Olympiad
This year's Science Olympiad had a new schedule: 3 hours each for grades 2-5. This gave us a 12-hour tournament day, with a few hours surrounding that schedule, so many of us were there for a solid fourteen or fifteen hours. Add on the 6 hours for setup the evening before, and that was a lot of standing and walking. I enjoyed a lot of sitting the following day.

The tournament went very well. We had a completely revamped schedule, a brand new computer programming event, and over 2000 Washtenaw County students participating. Things went so smoothly, in fact, it would be easy to forget we're an all-volunteer organization, from top to bottom.


I have six Honorable Mention medals lined up and ready to present. Those went to two different teams with three team members each. If you don't split them up like this, they're easy to get tangled. I'm not wearing my glasses in this picture because it was the end of the day, and we had been loading the truck in the rain, and I took off my glasses so they wouldn't get all rainy.


Here's me giving some students Honorable Mention medals at the third grade awards ceremony. The colorful, tie-dye shirt is our uniform of sorts - it makes it easy for people to find us if they need something.

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Happy Mother's Day!

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A few cranes have returned to the pond near our house. I’ll post pictures of them when I get a good one. In the meantime, here’s a picture from Mattias Adolffson.

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Happy Mother's Day!

Speaking of famous women, a common lament in the science community is that the question “who is your favorite female scientist?” is usually answered with “Marie Curie”. Was that your response? I have a different one. Among my favorite female scientists is a computer science instructor I had at MSU named Helen Spence. She was programming computers in the 1940’s, and teaching Physics and Computer Science at MSU starting in the 1950’s. She retired shortly after the second of two classes I took from her – the first was CPS311, where we learned two languages: C, and a Motorola chip’s assembly language. The second class was a continuation of that class, in which we dived into the details of the PDP-11 machine language.

Her ability to plainly explain the topics, and her no-nonsense approach to exercises and exams, made her one of my favorite instructors/professors of my college years.

Mrs. Spence passed away last year.

On this site, there are sound files that capture a series of interviews with her. . I haven’t been able to get to all of them yet, but I like the MSU project that produced these recordings.

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A Jacquard loom at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI.

Speaking of female scientists (and engineers), I’m reading a biography of Ada Lovelace, a friend and collaborator of Charles Babbage, who invented (but wasn’t able to build) a computer that was run by perforated cards, which we would now refer to as “punch cards”. It was based on the input cards that drove the Jacquard Loom.

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Spring Happenings
Now that spring and summer have both arrived, basically at the same time, the boys’ activities have moved outside. M is back playing with the Ultimate Frisbee team (he did play some cold games, though), and K is playing outdoor tennis, after having been inside all winter. K tried out a few different new racquets at his last practice – as kids get older, they sometimes need to get a new racquet that’s heavier and helps them produce more power. K’s current racquet is very light, and won’t work well for most older teens or adults.

Since I’m now one of the people in charge of making sure the Science Olympiad runs like a clock, I have been occupied with formatting schedules, drawing maps, and staying in close contact with the others who are responsible for other parts of the tournament. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it. May 30 is the big day.

Links
You might find this site useful: if you want to make a poster out of an image or document you’ve created, you upload it to their website. You tell it how wide you want it to be, and it creates a PDF file that contains pages you print at home. Then you tape them all together and you have a poster. h

You probably knew there were some WWII Japanese subs that actually carried airplanes with them, and the planes could be launched into the air from the sub itself.

Christmas is only 7 months away. Maybe you should buy me one of these lockpicking practice sets now, just in case.

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Happy Mother’s Day! And safe travels to Mom and Mary! Take lots of pictures!

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Slauson Science Olympiad at the State Competition

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Science Olympiad: State Competition

The awards ceremony in the Auditorium. The entire main floor was filled with middle- and high-school teams and their head coaches. The rest of us sat in the upper level.

Yesterday, M took a road trip to Michigan State University (on the banks of the Red Cedar!) to participate in the State Science Olympiad competition, along with 15 of his classmates, parents, coaches, and friends.

M competed in Mission Possible (Rube Goldberg machine), Boomilever (structural building), and Metric Mastery (math problems).

He and his friend Michael won a 5th place medal in Metric Mastery, and they got to go up on the big stage at the MSU Auditorium to receive the medals. A number of his teammates were called to the stage through the night, and we cheered and clapped every time the school name was called.

Slauson Middle School earned a trophy as the 9th overall finisher, a tremendous accomplishment in a field of 48 schools.

Congratulations, M and Slauson!

Pictures

M and his teammate, Tony, show off their Boomilevers. A bucket is hung from the narrow end, and filled with sand until the structure breaks.


The inside of the Mission Possible "machine". A quarter is dropped into a slot to start it running, then various switches, motors, chutes, balls, BBs, pulleys, and other devices deploy/run/roll/bounce/etc. until the process is complete.


From left, M, Aditya, and EmJ prepare the final run of their Mission Possible contraption.

Don vs. Electronics: This Time It's Personal (and Educational)

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I've been working on putting together a soldered version of the elevator project I recently completed (to my own satisfaction, that is) using breadboards.

I spent quite a while drawing the circuit, resulting in the following diagram. I used the Fritzing program to draw this. It gives you a blank circuit area to work with, and you can put breadboards into the drawing space and wire your components together.



From there, I drew up a circuit diagram on graph paper, and tried to identify the inputs, outputs, and location of the chips. I wanted to have some ribbon cables connecting the Arduino to the circuit board.

Unfortunately, I didn't lay things out very well - I had one of the ribbons going to two different places, and the connectors I bought don't "stick" into the ports on the Arduino - they just fall out. I'll have to do some more investigation into the right kind of connectors before I can continue.

Here are a few pictures of the board - it's super ugly, but these things often are. It's the first one I've done from scratch, so I may be able to improve on it if I go another round with the soldering iron.


Some notes - the circuit diagram and a mock layout on graph paper. The mock layout looked good on paper, as they say, but it didn't work out when I was ready to connect the ribbon cables to the board. Oops!


The beginnings of the board. I have soldered a few components in place, and am in the process of drilling the holes for the buttons.


Same as before, but with the ribbon cables that I want to use to connect the board to the Arduino and power supplies.


The front of the board, with the chips in their sockets and the wires snaking around however I could make them fit. Presumably, there would be a cover over this board so you could only see the buttons and LED display, although on further inspection, most of the other components, and some wires, were almost as tall as those components.


The back of the board, where the ugly happens. The red wire is the positive "bus", and you'll note a few places the insulation was scraped off the wire so I could hook a component directly to it. This, and many other tricks I tried, were found on the internet by other people who can do this and make it look pretty. The black wire, and the associated blobs of solder that form solid lines, is the ground "bus". There are quite a few places in the wiring where components are wired to one or both of the positive/negative buses that I felt it was necessary to run those wires all over the place. The bottoms of the buttons, and some of the chip connections to the buses, were made with leads clipped off of spare components.

I've learned a ton from this experience. My first diagram had the wires on the right side of the LED display one space lower than they should have been, and I had all but the final wire soldered before I realized it. Lots of lessons learned, and my soldering skills are better now, too.

Now - back to researching circuits some more, and then to find some better header connectors to replace the ones I bought. Eventually, I'd like to make one of these:


I don't actually want to make one of these. Just kidding. Dad, recognize this?

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Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year

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Make Way for the Olympians

I’ve been busy with Science Olympiad lately – pretty much every night the last few weeks I’ve had something or other to do. That should end pretty soon for several weeks, and I’m looking forward to a little break.

K is starting indoor soccer (aka “futsal”). It’s soccer played in a gym with a half-size soccer ball. If it sounds like a loud sport, that’s because it is.

M is now sporting braces on his top and bottom teeth, and the orthodontist says he’ll be done this year. We’ll be paying until he’s out of high school, but can you put a price on straight teeth? Yes, you can. It's rather high.

Mesko and Rigby are doing fine. Why wouldn’t they be doing fine?

Links, Pictures, Neat Stuff
A lot of miscellaneous items today...

Some old owners manuals. I had higher hopes for this gallery than I should have, but they’re fun to look at.

I’ll take one of these.

Great picture of a red-tailed hawk.

I love this tiny house built on a rock in the middle of a river.

Owl!

I like looking at these boats. I don’t have a good reason, I just like them.

M and I are going to do this for his locker. The problem is the LED light strips the person suggests are really expensive. I’m sure we can modify this plan to make something bright enough to help him see his books, but that will still run on a battery.

Looking for a project? Try this site.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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I hope everyone has a chance to see family and friends this weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing the many people I only see once or twice a year.

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Innards

We just had our piano tuned, and it was worth it to take a picture of the insides. What a feat of engineering. When you look at it, though, you have to wonder if there isn't an easier way to do it.

It doesn't matter though - it's beautiful.

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From last week - a 5:45 am picture of the moon. I'm surprised the picture came out at all, I gave it a low probability.

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The Science Fair is over for this year. It's my favorite event of the year, and it gives me hope that the next generation is going to be smart enough to keep the world working and the earth spinning.


Some of these kids are smarter than I am.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Elevator Circuit using Arduino

This is a diagram of the elevator circuit. So far, it's not working, but I am trying to find some help online to see what I can do to solve the problem.

Science Olympiad and Flag Football

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K triumphantly holds his school's trophy aloft triumphantly*

Science Olympiad
The 2012 Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad was held yesterday at Pioneer High School, and, usual, K and his fellow competitors from Lawton did very well. K earned two gold medals. His first was for Straw Towers, in which straws and straight pins are used to build a structure that is both tall and able to support a certain amount of weight. His second was for Write It, Build It. In that event, two students write a detailed description of an object, and two other students build the object with only the writing to guide them. The objects are typically collages of foam, paper, and other materials, with no particular order or pattern.

Lawton, for which I am a co-head coach, received the overall second place trophy for the 2nd and 3rd grade events, and the overall first place trophy for the 4th and 5th grade events.

I'm so proud of K and his teammates, who studied and practiced very hard, and I am really grateful to be a parent at a school where so many parents devote huge chunks of their free time to coach and volunteer.

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M's flag football season has come to an end. His team did well, finishing 4-2, although their last game was a loss in the playoffs. Mark had an outstanding year on offense and defense, and he (and I) liked the coaches and the other players. It was another good experience for flag football.


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Now that Science Olympiad is complete, I have to figure out how I'll spend some of my free time. K's soccer season has already started, so I know I'll be spending Thursdays and Saturdays at practices and games.

We're going to do some work in the basement one of these days. Some painting is in order.

It's also time to get back to the small-scale elevator project, as I've neglected it long enough.

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I hope everyone is having a great spring so far - our lawn almost needs to be mowed again. I'll put that off for a while. Maybe it will stop growing.

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* Yes, I know I wrote "triumphantly" twice.

Science Olympiad! Soccer! Grillin'! Exhaustion!

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We had an incredibly busy weekend June 11-12. I'm not sure how we're all still standing, but we are.

Science Olympiad

Before Science Olympiad

After Science Olympiad


Saturday was the annual Science Olympiad competition at Pioneer High school. M competed in Circuit Wizardry, an electronics circuits-based event, and Write It Build It, where two students write about an object made of multiple odd parts, and another two students have to build that object based on those instructions. He trained hard for both events, and he and his teammates won a second-place medal for Circuit Wizardry.

K competed in four events: Rock Hunter, which involved learning about the structure, hardness, and uses for rocks and minerals; What Went By, which required students to identify endangered and extinct animals based on their habitat, location, diet, and other characteristics; Estimania, which is all about math, estimating distances and measurements, and estimating the results of difficult math problems (such as 992 x 4005); and Mystery Architecture, where the participants are given odd materials from which they need to build the tallest possible tower able to support a tennis ball.

K was a last-minute addition to the Mystery Architecture team - one of the participants was unable to compete in it due to a time conflict with another event.

K won two medals, both fourth place: Estimania and What Went By.

We're so proud of the work they did, the time they spent, the patience they had at the competition itself (they were there all day) and their (and their school's) sportsmanship.

Lawton school won the overall trophy for the 2nd/3rd grade events, which took place in the morning, and for the 4th/5th grade events, which took place in the afternoon.

I spent most of the day in the academic check-in area, helping to ensure everyone was on time to their events, answering questions, looking for missing fourth-graders in the Map Reading room, sweating more than should be healthy while neglecting to drink enough water, and enjoying helping about 1500 Ann Arbor-area students from 24 different schools. It was a great day for all, and I am proud of the students from all the schools who worked hard, studied, and showed up ready to compete. It is comforting to know that these kids will be running the country someday. I hope they hurry.

Coach Monty (left), M, and Coach Jim

Soccer Headlines
On Sunday, M had his final soccer game of the year. It is also his final soccer game with the team he has been playing with for the last three years. His coaches for the last two years, Monty and Jim, have done a wonderful job teaching the players about working hard, being mentally tough, using your head as well as your body, as well as the rules and strategies for playing soccer. M is very lucky to have had these coaches as leaders and role models. We've met some coaches from other schools for whom we probably wouldn't want M playing.

K's last soccer game was last weekend (they had a game on Saturday, but K couldn't attend). His team won all but one game this season, and has shown a tremendous improvement. K has played well at defense and offense, and he is also fortunate to be coached by a parent who is, first and foremost, concerned with sportsmanship, athleticism, and fair play. K has learned a lot from his coach, and has grown as a player over the last year.

After M's final soccer game, K went to his piano teacher's awards party (M spent the time winding down from his soccer game and farewell party) and then we all went to our favorite picnic of the year, Food Gatherers' Grillin'. We had a peaceful dinner, walked around a little bit, did some shopping at the silent auction, and had some Zingerman's gelato and brownies for dessert.

It was a relaxing end to a hectic weekend.

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Science, Football, Showers, and Garage Doors

The Science Fair was Thursday. I spent seven hours at school on Wednesday, and was there most of the day between 8:15 am and 9:00 pm on Thursday. We had about 110 projects made by about 150 students, which was a great turnout, although less than last time. I know a few reasons why there were fewer entries this year, so I think there is a reasonable explanation for the drop-off.

For K's project, he measured the voltages produced by various fruits and vegetables. He also created a cell battery out of coins and paper towels. He used a multimeter to read the voltages from each item and recorded it. At the Science Fair, he created a three-lemon battery that powered a watch-sized digital clock.

Lemon battery

For his project, M soldered a burglar alarm from a kit. There are two parts: a transmitter, which uses an infrared LED, and a receiver, which checks for the transmitter's IR signal. When the IR signal is broken, the receiver switches on a circuit connected to whatever you want (audio alarm, flashing light, etc.). M hooked up a "danger light" to the receiver, which would flash when the alarm is tripped.

M soldering the receiver circuit board.


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M has had two flag football games since the last update. He's caught some passes, made a few tackles, and generally performed well for his team. After two wins to start the season, the team has lost two. Next week is the playoff game, and if they win, they'll play in the championship game.

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Our big home improvement this year is refinishing the master bath shower, which has needed attention for some time. We hired a company to cover the old tile walls with acrylic, and we got a new sliding door and glass wall. It didn't go very smoothly; there were a lot of starts and stops, but we're hoping the shower is finally finished. And it looks great.

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Yesterday, we paid a local company to install a new garage door opener for us. I wish I could say that home improvement was planned, but it wasn't. Garage doors are in the category of Machines That Stop Working With No Warning.

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A few months ago, I bought a cheap subscription to Esquire magazine for a fund-raiser at J's school. Each month they have a feature "Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman", in which a beautiful woman tells a joke, accompanied by her picture and short biography. (Oddly enough, she's always very attractive and not dressed for cold weather.) This month's joke cracked up M and K so much, I thought I better pass it on.

From Esquire:

A guy is walking past an insane asylum when he hears the residents inside chanting "Thirteen! Thirteen! Thirteen!" Curious, he finds a hole in the wall and looks in. Immediately he's poked in the eye, then everyone inside starts chanting "Fourteen! Fourteen! Fourteen!"

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