How To: Bubble Science Party

For 3-5 year olds

Equipment:
Book about bubbles, such as Pop! A book about bubbles Kimberley Brubaker Bradley, 10-50ml syringes, 5-8' table, chopsticks, tray, giant bubble wand (2' sticks, cotton twine, weight), markers, goggles, magnify glasses, water jug, small cooler, large sealable plastic tub

Supplies:
3 oz plastic cups, 16 oz plastic cups, roll of paper towels, distilled water, dishwashing soap, glycerin, dry ice, milk, straws, disposable tablecloth, nametags

I'm a Scientist:
goggles, magnify glass, touch, smell, ask questions. Prompt observation behavior at each bubble stage.

Order of Events:
Welcome, names, nametags
Story
Blow bubbles in tap water and milk
Make soap bubble mix
Blow bubbles with bubble wands
Blow bubbles by straw
Dry ice inflated bubbles
Giant bubble demonstration
Clean up
Snack

Hints:
Dry ice doesn't last very long, buy it the morning of your party
Cover your supplies with a cloth or have them on a tray on the side table so kids aren't distracted during the story. Try to resist preschoolers' curiosity about everything and keep the various activities a surprise until they happen
A semi-enclosed outdoor space is ideal, something that is ok to get messy, can be hosed down afterwards, but is out of the wind and even small breezes
Blowing milk bubbles will overspill quickly. Do this with a tiny amount of milk and/or in large cups
Pour soap into small cups for kids to suck up with a syringe. Teach how to use a syringe with two hands. Limit the number of syringes to the number of adults, and give one-on-one assistance putting glycerin and soap into their mixing cups.
Stir mix with sticks, not with straws, or they will blow bubbles into their soap mixture, making it much harder to get a good film on a bubble wand
Premake or buy a guaranteed-to-work bubble solution. The Exploratorium's page on bubbles has some hints, including make it the day before and let it off gas some of the volatiles in the dishwashing soap. Particularly to use with giant bubble demo
Dry ice can be picked up by chopsticks. Break it into pieces by dropping the bag on the floor, stomping on the block, or hitting it with a hammer. Bouncy ball sized pieces work well in a 16 oz cup of bubble fluid. Don't let the kids touch it. It will eventually freeze the surrounding water at the bottom of their cups. Don't touch that ice block either, it has a dry ice core that is still dangerously cold.
PRACTICE making giant bubbles. There's a bit of technique to it, particularly in closing off the bubbles before the film pops. Up, Out, Air, Close, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. Luckily it is addictively fun.
Too much dripped/spilled bubble mix on the floor can become slippery.
Don't try to explain too much. Science for this age is about experiencing the wonders and variation of the natural world, building up a personal catalog of observations.
Milk and cookies makes a nice snack. You have the milk on hand already.
1:2:5 glycerin:soap:distilled water. You can skip the glycerin if you can't find it. This may be too thick, but it is much easier to add more water in a controlled way than more glycerin or soap.
Don't fill any cup more than half way at any point. They'll spill over anyway.
Collect all liquids for sink disposal in the water jug
Toss everything in the sealable tub and bring it home to sort out and wash later

Today's menu:
chocolate chip pancakes
leftover tarragon chicken, garlic potatoes, and asparagus
beet greens and mushroom frittata, green salad with white beans and avocado, matzo

Cutie Pies

End of the road, start of the new: The Genderist

For further reading, please go to my new blog, The Genderist, a blog about men talking to men about feminism.

Recommended Organizations

Here are a few great Los Angeles organizations I've become involved with or otherwise come to admire:

Iridescent - Engineering outreach connecting engineering students and professionals with underserved youth and their families. I'm a particular fan of their Family Science program, which puts their engineer-educators into schools in the early evening to facilitate science activities for the entire family.

ReDiscover - Take trash, make art, locally. In a tiny storefront and expansive shed out back, this neighborhood arts center reuses the castoffs of local architecture firms, artists, and manufacturers into crafting activities, support to school art programs.

Trash for Teaching - Take trash, make art, on an industrial scale. Like ReDiscover with much more of an industry/manufacturing focus, TFT is in the midst of inventing a science and engineering outlet for their awesome industrial materials, with a goal of serving the entire LA area.

Treepeople - Environmental awareness and advocacy for the watersheds and ecosystems overlaid on this great metropolis.

Skirball Cultural Center - While they have an eclectically wide range of programs for different ages and interests within the context of their theme of Jewish culture, my favorite (and Miriam's) is the Noah's Ark exhibit, a great and beautifully staffed and maintained children's museum of stuffed animals, toys, daily activities and performances, and fascinating animal sculptures made of recycled materials.

The secret of great salad

The secret of great salad, as conveyed to me by Marcella Hazan: toss the greens with the dressing (or just oil) for much longer than you think necessary, to get an even sheen of oil on every face of every leaf.

Magnetic awesomeness

I did a series of workshops on nanomaterials at Iridescent a few weeks ago, which were a lot of fun to put together and teach. One of the best materials we were able to give the kids to experiment with was ferrofluid, which is composed of nano-sized magnets suspended in oil.

Pitagora Suichi

As in so many things, the Japanese version of a Rube Goldberg machines is cute, small, exact, and wonderful. Also, exceedingly plentiful, as You Tube can attest.

Great guide to making coffee in a french press

I'm not really a coffee drinker, historically just drinking diner coffee and sometimes when I go out for donuts. In the past year my coffee consumption has shot up, and I am now the proud owner of a french press. Here's how to use it.

So that's about a year

I started this blog a year ago tomorrow. I was in the midst of leaving my job at MIT and heading into a vast unknown territory west of the Mississippi and beyond the office environment and thought, correctly as it turned out, that having a practice of writing would help to anchor me. It hasn't quite been a daily practice, but I've averaged a little less than every other day of practice writing, poems, mini essays, observations, reviews, and the occasional photo. It's been a good year for writing for me, which is after all something I intensely enjoy and find satisfaction from. I haven't put this many of my ideas to page since the year or two out of college before my epistolary habits degraded into mere logistics and planning.

That said, its time for a change. My goals for this blog floated around for the first month or two and settled on giving myself space to write, to think in a more sustained way than Miriamcare regularly allows, and to keep myself in the practice of adult communication. In the past few months, an uptick in my professional work has helped to cover my need for adult communication and extended writing, at least professional writing. So I think I have space to play around with the blog. Over the summer, expect a little more experimentation in its format and focus. I hope at the end of the summer to settle into something new and more finely tuned than the at times unedited random musings I've sometimes posted here. Depending on where things go, there even may be a wholesale overhaul and a new blog, complete with new name, look, and tone to replace this one. As Ira Glass likes to say, stay tuned.

Every driver, every officer, every hero a woman

Big Machines
a board book

In which a pair of children and their dog go out for a walk and see a sequence of large machines, such as bulldozers, fire engines, cherry pickers, cranes, airplanes, and boats. Every character in the book is female, from the little girls to the drivers of the trucks to the firefighters to the pilot to the police officer directing traffic around a construction site. The art is in a brightly colored cartoony style with a simplified cityscape background, bright sunny day, and focus on the machines. Text to emphasize the machines and teach about what each is or does. Story ends with girls returning home and playing with toy trucks, machines, planes, etc.

Everything from this point forward is a bonus

I feel there's a trope in American literature and culture about the walking dead inhabiting a living afterlife. Think of a person or character who has had a near-death experience: been saved from suicide, or a walked away from a plane crash, or outlived a too short prognosis for certain death by cancer, who afterwards thinks of life as a bonus period, unexpected, blessed and unworldly. In my work as an engineering and science educator I teach kids to follow their curiosity and imagination and immense abilities to build and discover. The materials used in this are often cast-off toys and tools of other, better funded projects, or reused styrofoam trays, or decade-old computers, or the durable packaging and scraps from a construction site. These are things destined for the landfill and the recycling center, and I am able to pluck them out of their journey for a short living afterlife in a child's hands and mind's eye. Being already dead and not quite knowing it, such material doesn't mind if we cut through half a dozen pieces before getting the right shape. It is perfect stuff to hot glue together into little sculptures, whittle to become a shim or strut, be crushed under a pile of books carefully stacked up to see how much force it can take before cracking. And it call be swept into the dumpster without more than a twinge of guilt on the part of this particular recycling citizen.

Curvilinear Cardboard Construction

We have a big box in the living room this week as a little house and playroom for the toddler among us. With each passing day it gets a bit more decoration and gains new architectural feathers. There's a window cut high on one side, the french double doors on the other end and lots and lots of drawings, inside, outside, on ceiling and floor and walls. Becca devised a folding table in the corner out of two curves of cardboard, which when up help strengthen a substantially weakened structural integrity. The leftover material of the french doors forms a beautifully curved support to a little cantilevered roof.

Learn like a fox, teach like a hedgehog

As Isaiah Berlin playfully quoted, "The fox knows many little things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Originally talking about history and Tolstoy the sorting out of historians and philosophers, his quote has since been applied to all sorts of things. At least in my circle of college friends, since one of them is now (and probably was at the time) one of the world's leading scholars on Isaiah Berlin.

I did a bit of teaching this week and struggled a little to remember how to be a good teacher. I have not been in front of a class of students for about a year except in the most informal of settings. I tried to slow down, not just make my points and move to the next but to watch to see how each idea was absorbed. To emulate what each of the students, fourth graders or middle schoolers depending on the day, was thinking as I spoke and showed images and gave them materials to touch and manipulate. I tried to think of myself as the learner and to see all of the extraneous details in the room and in my room and examples that distracted from the big messages I wrote up at the top of the lesson plan. In a Montessori way, I wanted, though mostly failed, to give the core message and just that message. To talk about nanomaterials required talking about chemistry and plastics and consumer decision making and scientific notation and changing diapers and how oil can stain fabric and constant little details besides the day's big idea that materials' properties can change dependent on the scale of its composition, from macro to micro to nano.

Thinking as a learner, there were dozens of little tangents I could go out on, squirreling away knowledge bit by bit. Or putting it in my fox hole, as the case may be.

Actually enjoying poetry

I have rarely been much of a fan of poetry. But right now I have as bedtime reading The Poet's Corner, edited by John Lithgow. I looked it up after hearing his awesome rendition of Gertrude Stein's "If I told him" on Selected Shorts. The poets are quite familiar, Frost and Auden and Keats and Sandburg and such, and most of the poems are recognizable too. Mostly what makes them appealing is reading them outloud. I tend to skim when I read, which is fine for news (the fast is over) and novels but not so good for poetry. Saying each word means I read each word and I hear each word as I perform each word and make its meaning clear, both for my "audience," who are mostly asleep, and for myself. Also, perhaps, I'm older and wiser than in high school and college when last I read poetry.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: leftover Ezra chickpea dish with alphabet pasta
dinner: homemade fettucini with broccoli, chicken thigh cutlets, spinach salad (Did I mention that I bought a folly's worth of baby spinach because the five pound bag was only five bucks? Luckily most of that is in the freezer now.

Children can help, really

I'm in the midst of a bit of reading about Maria Montessori's educational philosophy, partially inspired by recent discussions about Miriam's potential future at a preschool of some sort or another, mostly out of an interest in making full time parenting as rigorous and intellectually engaging for me as possible. Her focus on physical action as educational method, the hand teaches the brain, seems at least as well fitted for a child in the home as in a classroom.

Today Miriam took an extra long nap and I found myself making fresh pasta. She woke up at the very end of the preparations, as I was about to run the flattened dough through the fettucini cutter. So after a little break for cooking to welcome her to the waking world and give her a snack of milk and cheese and cucumbers (upon her request), I asked her to help make the pasta. She turned the crank beautifully, only occasionally reversing direction and sending the half-cut pasta back up out of the cutter. Though it started as just a way to engage her while I finished the prep, it turned out three hands were quite useful to feeding the sheets in smoothly and removing the completed fettucini without having the strands overlap and stick to each other. Go teamwork!

Movie recommendation: Inside Job

I first heard of Inside Job when it won the 2010 Oscar for feature-length documentary. At which point I ordered it from the library and was less than surprised to learn that I was 63 places down the line, which means I get it until June.

It is a thriller-style telling of the origins and effects of the financial crisis of 2008, laying blame on deregulation of banking from the 1980s onward, particularly of derivatives, the outsized compensation offered to financial services executives, enormous lobbying power of that industry, and capture of economics academics via consulting and board positions. With most of the bad guys off stage and interviews with some of the leading doomsayers of the 2000s, it makes its point forcefully and without much nuance. Given the complexity of the subject matter, nuance may have made the movie too dense, but there is a bit of manichean thinking that could have been softened by making a stronger point of what the present and future of the economy looked like from, say, 2002.

I think of myself as a pretty well informed reader of business news (except not this week, sez the man on the media fast) and there weren't too many surprises in here, but there also was basically nothing that contradicted what I already know about recent financial and economic history. It was refreshing to have the story brought together and I recommend it for anyone who is curious about the financial crisis and worried about future crises, which the filmmakers, and I, think are all too likely, given the absence of reform.

Progressive traffic tickets based on car value

According to the internet, Switzerland enforces speeding laws with progressive ticketing, in which tickets are made proportional to the driver's income. This is meant to hold wealthy drivers accountable to speeding laws as well as regular folks for whom a $50 or $200 ticket is a reasonable disincentive, for relatively minor infractions that don't quickly add up to a suspended license. Such a thing does not, of course, exist in the US. Among other things, the size of the country and the complexity of overlapping jurisdictions would make it difficult for ticketing police to have easy and secure access to income levels for all drivers.

Here in Santa Monica, there are many, many luxury vehicles on the roads, being driven by what I assume are wealthy drivers. In nearly a year of crossing these streets, I would say that the drivers of luxury cars, particularly sports cars, are more likely to be driving at dangerously high speeds, to breeze through a crosswalk when a pedestrian is in the street, and to weave in and out of traffic, compared to the general population of vehicles.

I propose fining these traffic violations in proportion to the value of the car, either from a quick Kelley's Blue Book value lookup based on model and year, or, should California go back to regular annual vehicle taxes, based on the vehicle tax basis amount. That basis would eliminate the privacy and complexity issues in tracking down a driver's income. And the occasional outrageously high speeding ticket, like the $290,000 ticket in Switzerland , serves both as a reminder to drive safely and how far the wealth of the elite is from that of the middle class.

Media fast

I am going cold turkey on news and media. I'm starting with a one day fast, hoping to stretch it to three and possibly to a week. That means no reading the LA Times at breakfast, which will be the easiest of the various media blockages. Becca serendipitously decided this morning to put us on vacation hold after feeling the weighty heft of the newspaper recycling yesterday. No more online comics (A Multiverse, Freefall, Questionable Content, Girl Genius, and XKCD). No more NYT. I'll just let this week's New Yorker come in and go straight to the magazine bin and won't flip through old issues. No podcasts on the walk to the park (This American Life, Radiolab, Marketplace). No talk radio (KCRW and KPCC are the NPR stations in LA). I haven't decided about music in the car.

Once, before parenting, I decided some Saturday morning when Becca was working to avoid all media completely, not just periodicals but books, music, mechanical reproductions of any kind. I poured myself some cereal and stared out the window for an interminable time, which clocked at around 4 minutes. The light was bright and diffuse, the floors glowed yellow and gold. I could hear every crunch of my cereal, and feel each movement of muscles pulling on bones to move the spoon from bowl to mouth and back again. Each foot was planted firmly on the floor, as in a meditation or yoga pose, as my mind raced for something to occupy it, settling on sensory awareness, of sound, taste, and proprioception.

Then I decided to go for a walk and found myself living again in the world and lost the moment of infinite slowness. I don't imagine I'll have anything like that as part of the current fast, not least because it is a lesser news media fast and not a fast of all printed and recorded language.

Off to read more of The Montessori Method!

How much does an ad-free Sunday Times cost?

How much would it cost to get the Sunday New York Times, printed and delivered, without the advertisements in it? $10? $20? They would save a little on paper, and on ad sales staff, and in return lose all of the advertising revenue. Sales would go down as the price rises, but since the product would be improved with the absence of those distracting ads, they may not go down dramatically.

Another way to ask the question: how much does the New York Times Corporation make off each subscriber in advertising revenue per issue? $5? $10? $20? $50?

Reading The New Yorker while writing a term paper

As her mother did before her, my mother has been paying for my New Yorker subscription for my entire adult life. Starting in college, I read it when I had a chance, and since then, with what seems like more free time for volitional reading, I've had years when I read most issues cover to cover and served as a resource to the rest of my family on what to read and what to skip. Sometimes the articles are so long.

I recall certain seasons of reading those too long articles not just for the pleasure of the stories and information contained but for the form and weft of the writing. Particularly towards the end of college, when I was writing quite a bit, mostly term papers but expansive literary-tinged emails and some short fiction, I recall a particular energy around reading New Yorker articles, while I tracked and processed the writing on two or three levels at once, reading for content, listening for literary allusions, particularly in the reviews, and struggling to see how they held together, and perhaps how I could write to match.

Since then, at least until this past year of blogging, I have written at a far slower pace, in all categories of writing but particularly in the literate and referential style honed by late night electronic conversations with my erudite and highly educated friends. Concomitantly, my reading of the New Yorker is less exciting as well. Perhaps it simply was in a golden period of writing around the turn of the millenium, but more likely as I focus my energy on fields outside of the careful crafting of allusions and pithy phrases, my awareness of such declines. There are compensations, toddler giggle being the one that comes first to mind, but I miss getting the references.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: bean salad
dinner: the end of the potato leek soup