Do you remember Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years? If you're male and about my age, there's a 50% chance you had a crush on her in the 80s. There's also a chance you have kids by now. If you do have a daughter (or a really young girlfriend) and she's old enough to be learning fractions or starting pre-algebra and (this is the tough one for my crowd) likes teen magazines, then Winnie Cooper has a book for you. Make that two.

After The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar took some time off to get a BS in mathematics (suma cum laude even) from UCLA. She's continued with acting in shows like The West Wing and How I Met Your Mother, but she's also done something to help the girls of the world get comfortable with math.

Last year, she released Math Doesn't Suck. This is the first book, to my knowledge, that is targeted directly toward middle-school girls who are having a hard time coming to grips with not only who they are, but what math has to do with them. This year, she released Kiss My Math, aimed at slightly older girls going into pre-algebra. Now I have to admit that I haven't read this book, or Teen Magazine, or Elle Girl, and there's a fair chance I won't but, from what I've heard, she has done an excellent job engaging young girls and even young boys in everyday math.

Her message is pretty simple and is a little beyond the title. Sure, her message starts with "math doesn't suck", but she also covers "you use math every day" and "you don't have to dumb yourself down to make boys feel good about themselves." And honestly, if a young girls role in life is anything, isn't it making boys feel good about themselves?

But seriously, the books are aimed at an age group where kids are just starting to look at the opposite sex as fun rather than icky. Since boys are clueless, girls will often use a tactic of making boys feel good around them to subliminally gain favor with the boys. One common way is to ask question, about math or whatever else, that they already know the answer to in order to make a boy get that "alpha" feeling. Danica's point on this is that, if you're going to ask a boy a question, make it one you don't know the answer to and make that boy work for the answer, that way, he'll feel even better about coming up with an answer and he'll feel even better about you because you didn't ask a stupid question.

More along the lines of math, she asks practical questions like "if that prada purse is $64.00 but it's on sale for 30% off, how much does it cost?" This gets to the root of societal feers about math. We use it every day to make change, make sure we have enough cash in our savings accounts, and make sure the government is getting their fair share. You're already used to using math, how can you be afraid of it?

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This is the final update on my drawing class, since it's over. Though I'll probably upload some more pictures.

I learned many things in that class. One is that 18 to 25 year old girls are inherently attractive. Okay, I kind of knew that already. The most important things I learned were techniques for mark-making. With that, I'm now more able to translate what I want to draw into what I have drawn. I also learned that I can draw reasonably well and that the reason I could never draw people is that I've never had on sit in front of me for long enough. Maybe my drawings aren't as realistic as my photos, but that's okay and I can live with it.

For the last couple projects, I wanted to break with my pattern of trying for photo-realistic drawings. This one was an assignment to create a drawing inspired by song lyrics or a poem we printed out for class. Once I heard the details of the assignment and how they related to content and subject, I thought maybe Soul Coughing wasn't the best choice of bands. At one point, M. Doughty, the lead vocalist, said "Don't listen to our lyrics, they're just there because they sound good."[citation needed] Their lyrics are mostly stream-of-consciousness poetry with meaning mostly imparted by the listener.

The lyrics I brought in were from one of my favorite Soul Coughing tracks, Screenwriter's Blues. Here are some excerpts from the song that were instrumental in creating my drawing.

Exits to freeways
twisted like knots on
the fingers
jewels cleaving
skin between
breasts.

Your Cadillac breathes
four hundred horses
over blue lines
you are going
to Reseda
to make love
to a model
from Ohio
whose real name
you don't
know

...

And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there!
And the radioman says
Rock and Roll lives!
And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there
in Los Angeles
you live
in Los Angeles
and you are going to
Reseda; we are all
in some way or
another going to
Reseda someday
to die
and the radioman
laughs because
the radioman fucks
a model too

...

as the radioman says
it is 5 am
and the sun has charred
the other side of
the world and come
back to us
and painted the smoke
over our heads
an imperial violet

it is 5 am
and you are listening
to Los Angeles.

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Ever since the first Terminator movie predicted the rise of the machines, some of us have been awaiting our robot overlords. Now that the UK has finished launching Skynet (what were they thinking?) our robotic conquest may not be too far off.

Of course, Skynet is going to need a lot of infrastructure to collect data. It's got sattleites in place and it's got millions of webcams to tap into, but what about areas that aren't always online? Many companies don't have a CCTV network like the UK has. There's also the question of learning about and interpereting the actions of all those pesky humans that escaped the first wave of nukes. Enter more Britts with the Hexapod Emotional Spider Robot.

The programmers have created a system for tracking faces, interpereting emotional content, and reacting to that content. This thing is already advanced enough to be on exhibit at a science museum and it's just a little really quite freaky. Check out this video of it on display at the London Science Museum.

And to think people are giving them weapons too!

-- via io9

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Looks like a video blogwatch today.

Gizmodo has a slow motion lightening video. Wow!

Garage419 has a track test comparing the Dinolicious iPhone app to a commercial accellerometer-based dynomometer.

Greg Laden's Blog has a humorous retort from Paris Hilton regarding John McCain's recent campaign ad.

And Strobist.com has a video from Chase Jarvis giving a 3-minute overview of a commercial photoshoot from contract to delivery.

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The common conception is that women go to the restroom in groups and that the lines are extremely long. Men don't know about that kind of thing so I assume that women don't know what goes on in the men's room. Here's a short public service announcement to help cross-gender understanding.

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Annalee over at io9 linked to an article in New Scientist about an accidental discovery of a screen saver as a test for synesthesia. Since one of the commenters is a color/shape synesthete, we had a unique opportunity to ask some interesting questions.

 5128902158920581920589251298512905
 5892058190285901689508129058901289
 5821595829851920855908519128592085
 8519258920528605189429510289502189
 1020591285202899128951205989028191
 5819108195482901592850621120520895
 5819205890258902125820851925012819
 5812085659402420659600455452810592
 0951228058950198503928190289585208
 8502958102958921029508920195821095

Do you see a random string of numbers? A synesthete may not.

 

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There's a Turkish desert known as "stretchy ice cream" that behaves much like a tank of cornstarch-laden water, only it's frozen and sweet. One of the ingredients is colloquially known as "fox testicles". ScienceFriday.com has video from a meeting of the Experimental Cuisine Collective where they discussed this phenomenon.

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Despite your opinion about whether George W. Bush is a good president or not, you have to admit that he's not a very good speaker. I admire the fact that he improvises a little with his speeches rather than reading everything off cards like we did in High School or like most people do with their PowerPoint presentations, but I think he should spend a little time practicing.

Despite your opinion about whether Steve Jobs is a good manager or not, you have to admit that he's a great speaker. He spends hours during the weeks before an event working on his talk. His keynotes always come across as natural, not forced, and he always gets exactly the reactions he's looking for.

I heard a quote from President Bush this morning on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me that I decided had to be my whiteboard quote of the day:

You're making the choices about whether you want to drive a little extra more or not drive extra more.

This is exactly an example of the little things that make the Liberal Elite feel that they deserve a president that is smarter than they are and that they don't have one. When I went searching on Google to find the quote, I ended up at the Whitehouse.gov press release site where, among other things, they have transcripts of speeches. I know there would be issues with revisionism if these speeches were edited, but there was the statement right in plain text. The other quote I heard was in there too. It's not as much a miss-statement as it is a duh-statement:

The feed stock for gasoline is oil. So when you hear "my gasoline prices are going up," you got to understand the main reason why is because oil prices are going up

I don't know if it makes me an elitist, but I think I deserve better.

 

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I don't know if anyone in the room is a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but if you've got tickets, be prepared to clear a new date for the show. I know when I was traveling and working a lot, it tended to wipe me out pretty good so I guess I'm not to surprised that a couple dates might get rearranged. I would have liked an official statement on their web page rather than marking the Minneapolis date as "just added", but I'll help get the word out by printing the press release here:

Minneapolis, MN – (Friday, August 1)  JAM Productions have just announced that the Nine Inch Nails/Crystal Castles concert originally scheduled for Saturday, August 2 at Target Center has just been postponed due to illness.   The band is sincerely sorry for the last minute announcement, but after receiving doctor’s orders not to perform Trent Reznor has reluctantly agreed to the postponement.
 
The concert is being rescheduled for Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at Target Center.  All tickets purchased for the August 2 concert will be honored on the new date. For those unable to attend the rescheduled date of November 25, a refund will be available at original point of purchase.

Looks like some people's Thanksgiving week just got a little busier. Here's a map of all the US and Canadian tour dates.

 

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Everybody else seems to be jumping this meme, so I guess I will too. I suppose it will tell my stalker what to get me for my birthday.

The following is a list of books that came from the internet. I can't find a source. Supposedly, the average american has read 6 of them. Titles in bold are books I've read, underscored titles are books I've partially read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

This isn't really a good list, but it's not a bad list either. Note that both The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Hamlet are listed as well as The Chronicles of Narnia and Prince Caspian. Many of these books can be found in High School Curricula or at least could be when I was in High School back in the rotary dial days.

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