“Cherish your mothers. The ones who wiped your tears, who were at every ball game or ballet recital. The ones who believed in you, even when nobody else did, even when maybe you didn’t believe in yourself.

Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we’re doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood.

There is no crown more glorious.”

“I actually get this question periodically about almost every major online email service. Google Mail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all go through periodic major updates, and some set of existing users get quite upset.

“In fact, it affects more than email services – just about any site online or even software that we use on our PCs goes through periodic change. When they take on a major update, it’s going to upset some of its user base. It’s a cost of doing business.

“And that, really, is what it all comes down to.

“That service you use is, first and foremost, a business in a highly competitive environment.”

Leo provides a good summary of several reasons why things change. It’s why DOS isn’t mainstream anymore. It’s why Ubuntu provides a new version every six months or so. It’s about the contribution Linus Torvaldes made that has kept the Linux kernal advancing over the last 20 years or so.

Sometimes I just wish the rate of change would slow down so I could keep up with it easier. But if change in one area slows down then change in another is likely to compensate. Take PC’s for example. Much of the change has gone underground as the need for higher processor speed and more memory and more storage has diminished. The software side is boiling as is the alternatives like the cell phone computers.

interesting times indeed.

“Even if the broadcaster is ignorant of the fact that speaking into a radio conveys his voice into the public space, it’s still not illegal for someone else to listen to it or record it.

“In each of these cases — the TV in the window, the walkie-talkie, the ham radio or the CB radio — the data is being broadcast via electromagnetic radiation out into the public airwaves and therefore it is not a violation of privacy for someone else to receive and record the data.

“A Wi-Fi signal is exactly the same thing. It uses electromagnetic radiation to broadcast data into the public airwaves.”

This has been a factor in regards to amateur radio regulation since day 1. These days, this thing about privacy being anything someone wants it to be is used to stir paranoia and hysteria. Google got caught up in it not only by having a wifi receiver in their street view rig but also in just the fact that they were taking pictures of what you could see when driving on public streets.

Take care, big bro’ is watching and there is nothing you can do about it?

“This seven page comic book explains in detail and with pictures how to make a good solder connection. It also teaches you all the other bits and pieces of knowledge that you need to successfully solder together an electronic kit, even if you’ve never soldered before!”

This is a Creative Commons copyright and looks to me to be well done. Well worth a run through even if you are an old hand with the soldering iron.

“If you’re like me, you’re the bane of hardware store employees. I wander through the whole place picking up everything, looking at possibilities more than parts. Can they help me find anything? “No thanks,” I answer. What am I working on? “I don’t know yet,” I say. They move on, keeping a suspicious eye on me.”

Steve Hoefer is describing how a bit of synergy resulted in making some small LED lanterns with PVC pipe caps, an Eternal Flame Indestructible LED Lantern

There’s a good True Value hardware store up at the corner. The store has a very large inventory density which means you don’t need to tire out your feet to see a whole lot of stuff that can help put together ideas and solutions to problems you may not have realized you had when you walked in.

I don’t know about the “suspicious eye” thing, though. The staff is useful as well as they usually have ‘been there, done that’ and can often help me finish up a thought with an alternative option. For instance, I didn’t think about storing the PVC glue cap down but that idea should help keep it sealed and provide a bit longer shelf life in the garage.

I don’t think this hardware store is going to suffer much from the new WalMart nearby. They seem to know what makes them special – just as WalMart knows what it does best, too. Nice to have options!

The LED idea was to drill a hole in a PVC cap to glue in an LED and then use a coin cell held in place between the LED leads with a binder clip (from your office supplies). A plug is then wrapped in tape and friction fit into the cap.

A comment has a good warning as well. “NEVER use Kevlar gloves with rotating tools because if the fiber gets caught in the rotating part you may end up with a strangulated or amputated finger. Using gloves is a very good idea, but use leather gloves with rotating tools.”

getting by and making things better is just a whole lot of these little things …

Engineers want:

1. To build things

2. That help people

3. That actually get used

What this is saying is that an engineer is a ‘creative’ that is driven not by aesthetics alone but rather by social needs to contribute to the health, welfare, and happiness of individuals.

The ’501 Developer’ thing is about those software developers who split the scene at 5:01 when their shift is over. The ‘manifesto’ is full of derision for “corporate goals of business owners” and “commercial products the world doesn’t need” and full of freebies and irresponsible lifestyles. “That is to say, we value the things on the left more than we value the things on the right. And some of the things on the right aren’t even on our radar.”

Engineers are not the only ones that want to build things to make people’s lives better. That is what business is all about, too. If they don’t do that, they fail and the investments made to build the business are lost. The ’501 Developer’ types are biting the hand that feeds them and letting hubris overtake common sense. The bragging about such a state is probably a matter of being defensive over their unease at the dissonance.

I think I’ll take the engineers and entrepreneurs any day — those people who get their jollies out of building rather than destroying.

The key is the idea of a resurrection. It is usually portrayed as a life given again to a body deemed dead. That is the simple concept and remarkable enough of an event to cause some stir. Then again, recovering life was something Jesus did in curing the ill and he was not alone in being a ‘mystic’ wandering the country performing such miracles in his day. There was something else, something more important, something not so easily made tangible, something that caused people to remember and revere. Resurrection is perhaps not so simple.

Christ has indeed risen. He is in the hearts and minds of his followers and it is those followers who have built the society and culture that has done more than any other in terms of humanity and the ease of suffering. The original sin and the nature of man will always exist but those who follow Jesus know that salvation is possible and they know the direction they need take and the goals to which they should strive.

With Easter, we take note of the event and how it has influenced us so as to carry it forward. There is something exceptional that guides us and we must not forget the path we follow else we become lost.

“Teaching math is like teaching drawing skills …

“We all know of people who seem to have a natural ability as artists. Those without this natural, seemingly inborn, ability stand continually in awe of those who have it. We wonder how these natural artists are able to take pencil to paper and draw something that actually approximates reality, while we, ourselves, are stuck drawing stick figures, even as adults. This happened to me. Then, in my 20s I had an opportunity to take a short, six-session drawing course from a fantastic instructor who understood that drawing is a SKILL which CAN BE TAUGHT. In TWO HOURS, I went from drawing stick figures to drawing quite realistic portraits, and so did my other classmates.

How is this possible? I remember the feeling exactly. What happened was the teacher was able to show all of us a DIFFERENT WAY OF SEEING.”

Tracking is just the grouping of students by their needs and that gets into the modern diversity ideologies. Set that aside and consider the phenomena being offered here. Learning is about a new way of seeing things. Teaching is about enabling the vision to see old things in a new way.

The ’80 mph’ video cited provides a good case in point. The difficulty is in seeing the speed as a unique independent thing rather than a compound thing. For the mathematically oriented, it is obviously a compound thing in describing how many miles could be travelled in an hour. For the subject of the video, it is its own unique thing related, perhaps, to speed limit signs and a sense of speed like hair blowing in the slipstream and not at all connected with distance or time despite the words in the concept.

It is often very difficult for a teacher to realize that decomposition of phrases and words represents an education gap and bridging that gap can be difficult. This example is rather simple which is why the video was rather popular (people do like to feel superior to others, it seems). This gets into such things as Piaget’s developmental theory and why algebra follows arithmetic and why science in high school is often taught as a sequence of biology, chemistry, and then physics.

There was a movement to turn high school science sequence around as biology depends upon chemistry which depends upon physics. That is logical as far as dependencies goes but illogical when it comes to developing concepts. Basic biology can be taught as mostly descriptive. Chemistry needs algebraic thinking. Physics is why Newton (and Liebniz) developed calculus. The debate is really about whether high school is teaching subject matter or is more involved with cognitive development.

“The primary steps or changes in the design of radio receiver construction are, the “crystal set” or Passive Tuned-Radio-Frequency (TRF) receiver, the Active TRF, or ‘straight’, receiver, the Regenerative (‘regen’ or ‘howler’) receiver and the superheterodyne (superhet, or mixing) receiver. There are other designs such as the ‘superregenerative’, ‘direct conversion’, and ‘homodyne’, but they are not significant for our purposes and are used today, if at all, for specific niche purposes. The four main categories each may have a use but only one, the last, will generally prove practical for a modern, all purpose radio and constitutes 99% of all commercially manufactured sets. All are worth knowing about and may have some specific application depending on the resources you have and what you are trying to accomplish.”

I don’t know about any prepper buying parts in order to be able to build a radio when it hits the fan – that’d take a bit more than a description of receiver types. There are kits and instructions out there, though, for hobbyists. I wonder who you’d listen to if civilization was destroyed and you had to bug out, GOOD, and take refuge in your remote bunker? The Prepper hobby has become popular enough that National Geographic now has a series about its adherents. I guess that goes with the survivalist shows on the Discover and Learning Channels.

“It turns out that as an April Fools stunt, Monday’s strip serves up a different comic depending on your geographic location and/or the web browser and/or the device you are using to visit the site.”

With XKCD you really need to check out the mouse-over text on every cartoon. For this one:

XKCD #1037 wrote:Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit–from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

The mouse-over is a popup that shows when you move the mouse pointer over a graphic if the proper meta-data has been set for that graphic. For this cartoon, the text describes what the cartoon illustrates. The programming behind the cartoon to customize its display may have been why I had a bit of trouble trying to get it to display properly.

XKCD gives a bit of meaning to the term avant-garde in several respects. This example is one.