SJSU Master's Program

I have unofficially started my master's in science education at SJSU. I figured I would probably want to get another degree some day and SJSU is nice enough to let me transfer a bunch of credits from my credential program, so although I wouldn't have minded a little time away from school, I jumped right back into the pool this fall and took another class.

Lest you think it is all sunshine and roses here at the tommenkate household, it basically took all my willpower to make it through this course. The professor was incredibly confrontational - it seemed like she took every opportunity to antagonize each of the four students (myself included). She routinely wrote comments on our papers along the lines of "No one cares what you think", and "why bother?" One of the women in the class broke down crying a couple of times.

At any rate, it's over now and I passed the class, which is a relief. I did learn a few things along the way, and picked up a bunch of pointers about how not to teach. And all four of us provided plenty of constructive feedback on the evaluation forms, so hopefully this class will improve in future semesters...

SDO has a launch date!

  Old news for those that follow this sort of thing, but it's exciting that the Solar Dynamics Observatory (the satellite that holds the instruments I worked on) has a "definite" launch date now after a year-plus of delays and schedule shuffling!  It's supposed to blast off on Feb. 3rd from Florida.  Hopefully I will get to go see it in person.

There's a neat video of the project with sound bytes from a lot of the NASA people I worked with over the last couple years on the SDO website.  Look at the right under "SDO Engineers Create What Never Was" because I guess that's what we do. (?)  The video direct link is here.  Bonus points for anyone who can spot the 2-3 occurrences of yours truly in the video.  I think I'm pretty obscured in a couple of them (ie @ 0:53 I'm behind the red metal piece).

Here's a cool picture of SDO's ride (an Atlas-V) arriving at the launch pad for vertical integration.  I'm just keeping my fingers crossed the thing doesn't blow up while getting the thing up to 7,000 mph...

New Party Games

We learned a few fun new party games. You all probably know that we play a lot of board games, but every now and again we like to shake it up by playing something a little less competitive. Thanks to Cara and Alex for these two suggestions…

1) The Telephone-Meets-Pictionary Game

Everyone sits around in a circle and gets a blank piece of paper and a pen. Each person writes a sentence on the top of their paper, and then passes it to the person on their left. The new person “illustrates” this sentence, then folds the paper so the original sentence can’t be seen and passes it on. The third person writes a new sentence based on what they see in the drawing, folds the paper again, and passes it on. This continues until the paper gets back to where it started, by which point it is probably unrecognizeable. Much laughter ensues when the paper are unfolded.

2) “Babbies” 

This game is kind of like a group-think version of Taboo. Before the game starts, each person writes 5 objects on small slips of paper and puts them in a hat. Then, people divide into two teams. On each turn, one team nominates a “guesser” who will have 2 minutes to guess as many of the clues as possible. The rest of the team collaborates to give a clue. This is the tricky part - each person on the team can only say one word at a time, and the team must create a complete, gramatically-correct question for which the answer is the object on the slip. So one person will start with "What", the next person will say "animal", then the next person says "smells", then "the", then "worst", then "Question Mark" to end the sentence. After the sentence has ended, the guesser can guess "skunk", of course. The challenging part of this game is coming up with a cohesive sentence - usually different group members will have different ideas of how the clue should go, so it gets derailed several times.

Anyway, we've had a great time playing these games in the last couple of months and thought we would share them in case anyone is looking for a fun evening activity with a large group!

Birthday Photo Scavenger Hunt Redux

Last year was the first annual Tom's Birthday Photo Scavenger Hunt. It was so successful that we expanded this year and made it the 1st annual Tom and Dustin and Adam and Mikey's Birthday Photo Scavenger Hunt, since all four of those guys have birthdays within a couple of weeks of each other. The rules are simple - each group has 3 hours to come up with a photo entry for each of 15 open-ended categories. This year we had four groups competing, and each group submitted some gems. Without further ado, the winners* in each category were as follows:
1) Best interpretation of a song title
2) Best Oxymoron
3) Most unusual Perspective
4) Do something naughty
5) Best use of a balloon animal
6) A wild critter
7) Spell something (and no, we don't have any announcements... we just thought this photo would terrify our respective spouses)
8) I can't believe we all fit in here
9) Most likely to be picked up hitchiking
10) Can you find us (and no, the person in the middle isn't the one hiding...)
11) Best use of a beer
12) Best re-creation of an Olympic sport
13) Friendliest stranger (I believe some monetary funds were involved in this transaction)
14) Most Holiday Spirit

15) Freestyle!And so, a good time was had by all! Looking forward to round 3 next year!

* Note that some of the winning pictures cannot be shown on this 'family' blog... although they may make an appearance as blackmail at some point in the future

Fizziks Projects

I let my Physics students design their own final semester projects. It was a pretty open ended assignment, which meant I got a wide variety of products. Some memorable ones included a discussion of how medieval armor was designed to absorb impact, an analysis of a Korean badminton player fracturing a watermelon with a 300 km/hr birdie, a video of two kids towing a truck (in park) with a rope, a "rap-off" between five kids (with the whole class joining in on the refrains), an amazing yoyo demonstration, and a trebuchet (although not this one).

Several groups made some pretty amazing/hysterical videos for their projects, as well. It really makes me feel old when I see how adroit they are at manipulating digital media - I shudder to think how long these videos would have taken me to make. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

The Giant Orange



The Physics Rappers

Happy Christmakah

Four of the greatest Judeo-Christian themed holiday traditions are celebrated each year at Dustin, Cara, and Karen's annual Christmakah party: gingerbread houses, potato latkes, garish displays of Christmas lights, and the game of dreidel.  This year we had a big group and made 5 houses, with only one burn from the scalding molten sugar used to structurally bond the house pieces together (ask Kate to show you her blister).

After building the houses and attaching them to boxes, we spread out about 90,000,000 calories worth of candy on the table and started to decorate.  The 5 boxes took different themes: a gingerbread dog-house, a fashion show runway complete with gingerbread models, a holiday horror-show, a ramp for santa on his sled, and ours, which was a farmhouse theme.  Here's some pictures from the action.

The candy carnage during mid-decoration.  You'll also notice people wearing the festive"yarmuclaus."  And Banjo, who was ever searching for dropped bits.  I think he gained 2 lbs that night.

 

Our house!  Check out Kate's farmer and tractor, and the rooster on the roof!  I also liked Mikey's hay bales.

 Some of Bailey's particularly morbid handiwork, part of the "garden of mutilated gingerbread men."

 The finished products.

The dreidel action, and...

The two winners with their prizes.

Catching up on Thanksgiving

Yes, it's almost Christmas and everyone is busy hanging their stockings by the chimney with care, but I never posted about the nice visit we had with my parents over Thanksgiving.  So, before it officially loses its status as most recent holiday, let's get caught up.

Banjo celebrates Thanksgiving too!  He even ate his green bean this year.

Since we are only going to be attending the Denver family gathering over Christmas, my parents were nice enough to come out for a Thanksgiving visit.  We had a great time, great weather, great food, and some good laughs.  I think mom checked off nearly of all the activities on her "to-do" list, which took up most of a sheet of paper!  Aside from having a standardly delicous and plentiful Thanksgiving feast, we:

• Went on a good long hike in with Banjo, followed by a period of tick removal (despite the preventative medicine he gets)
• Played lots of frisbee in the field
• Mass-produced some delicious biscotti and homemade granola - yum!
  

• Took a rain-soaked day-after-Thanksgiving trip to get our traditional, misshapen discounted Christmas tree, followed by some festive decorating (we like to get our tree early so we can enjoy it all month before we go away for the holidays

• Went up to San Francisco where we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and along Crissy Beach, then North Beach for some yummy Italian lunch, and finally a stop atop Twin Peaks to take advantage of the clear skies for the sweeping city views.

• Played a variety of board games, always a Nichols favorite
• Went to the Stanford Art Museum and especially enjoyed the piece there by Duane Hanson
  
• Had some quality time with Banjo on the sofa

We were all sad when they finally had to go!  Thanks for the visit!

On the first day of Tomandkatemakus

We made a resolution to get somewhat caught up on this blog. Stay tuned for some major blogging action over the next 11 days!