Dear god, Raq. That's like.... that's like the first time I saw Keanu. You know, before he opened his mouth.

(Also, I've been dying to ask what conference you're at -- it sounds fab.)

You know, before he opened his mouth.

And released demons from the bottomless pit of...well...nothing, actually.

Hil, what fantastic news! Congrats!

Etech. [link] Is fab. erinaceous was supposed to speak at it, actually, but had to cancel.

I have about 50 blog posts colliding in my head from conference ideas, and I'm rather delighted that I attended a meeting back at my real job yesterday via Second Life.

Yes, I am pretty close to geekgasm.

Etech

jealousjealousjealousjealous

(but we'll have to trade SL thoughts at some point, as I both want and need but the kool-aid keeps utterly eluding me)

So, today was character day at school. I took some pictures of the kids, which led to them wanting to take pictures of each other with my camera (which I may not let them do again. Eek!).

In case you were wondering what happens when you give a four-year-old a camera...you get very fabulous abstract pictures like [link]

Because I am an utter dork, I started looking at the kind of watch that has a built-in slide rule around the face. Seems cool. Can't find one small enough to not look ridiculous on my wrist, though. I suppose that getting it small enough to look OK on a small wrist while large enough to be usable would be difficult, and there's probably not enough of a market for any company to try it.

Could still get a slide rule keychain, though. Oooh! Someone must make a slide-rule bracelet! Right? Off to google.

Adorable pictures, vw.

Hmm. The slide rule bracelet seems to be a no-go. Did find a bunch of sites selling old slide rules, including one made for really little kids that just does addition and subtraction. Which actually seems like a neat way to teach that. (You can't really understand how the multiplication works on a regular slide rule without understanding logarithms, but this addition/subtraction one makes the number line perfectly clear. Pretty neat.)

I'm home. I have bag o' files staring at me, saying, "Turn us into comments, teacher-lady!"

Donwanna.

Oooh, lookit the pretty: [link] That's a mahagony body and celluloid scales, from sometime around 1920. It's $200. I don't think I can justify $200 for even a really really pretty slide rule.

Kristin, I've got a stack of midterms to grade. From glancing at a bunch of them, I already know that a good number of my students completely forgot about the existance of numbers other than integers. (Basically, they were able to get to a point in the problem where they realized that the answer had to be bigger than 1000 and smaller than 1001, and just said, "There isn't an answer. There are no numbers between 1000 and 1001.") Don't wanna grade these, either.