You can create simulated 3-D stereoscope photograph by wiggling two slightly different angles of the same pictures, as shown in this picture of my wife & daughter. I’ve been wanting to experiment with this for some time after reading about Wiggle Stereoscopy. I have created this image by showing two successive images in an animated gif picture made with ImageReady.
The two images I am using were not made with this technique in mind, but when I viewed them together it seemed to work. I think it might work better if I kept the camera on the same horizontal plane, rather than changing both horizontal and vertical viewing angle. But like I said, the two images were accidentally made.
We are able to see in 3-D because our two eyes see the world from slightly different angles. A Viewmaster toy is a good example of a true 3-D stereoscope. This technique is only simulated because you aren’t viewing both images at the same time. It’s still pretty cool, isn’t it? What do you think?
Thanks to Paul Bogush, I am now the proud recipient of the “My Blog is Pop-tastic” award. Thank you Paul, this is indeed a great honor. I can remember when I first started getting interested in art several years ago. The Salina Art Center had an amazing show of art from MOMA. This was my first chance to see real artwork up close, and among the most memorable was the work of Andy Warhol. You know, the pop art guy famous for pictures of Marilyn, Elvis, Campbells Soup Cans, etc.? I got to see the Soup Cans and a picture of Chairman Mao. This award is a nod to Warhol, and it truly is meaningful to me since pop-art was my first art experience.
In keeping with the rules for receiving this award, I am giving this award to the following six blogs. Some have not posted recently, but have in some way inspired me over the past year. My hope is in offering this award, I might get to read some new posts for which I have been patiently waiting! Congrats to you all, I enjoy your work and look forward to your continued efforts!
When you receive The Award, please post it on your blog, linking back to the person who gave it to you.
In addition, please link to This Post, which explains the origins of The Award.
Please visit Veggie Mom’s Post , which explains the origins of The Award, and Sign Mr. Linky, so she’ll be able to keep a record of all whose Blogs are Pop-tastic! Feel free to leave a comment, too!!
Pass The Award along to SIX Bloggy Friends, whose creativity merits inclusion in this circle. Link to their blogs in your Awards Post, and notify them that they’ve received The Award.
The quality of my life is determined by the quality of my _____ ?
The question is inspired by a statement I once heard from Jim Fay, the founder of the Love and Logic Institute. I have inserted a blank, in place of Mr. Fay’s idea because it is a thought provoking question.
After I have heard from a few parents, educators and students on this I will share what Jim Fay said. So feel free to leave me your thoughts & comments!
Why do these memes have the look and feel of a chain letter? I haven’t ever worried about breaking a chain, and am only playing along with this because I’m nosy and want to learn more about others. I also don’t want to let Patti Harju down.
1. I was born with a ring around my middle finger on my left hand. It looks like a mark left in my skin from a tight rubber band, but it’s been there for nearly 42 years now. When I was a child my dad explained that he burnt that finger off with a cigarette when I was a baby and it grew back. I later learned that higher order creatures cannot regenerate lost body parts and dad was putting me on.
2. I was raised in landlocked Kansas. I was 20 years old, and had been in the Navy for two years before I ever saw the ocean. (I don’t count the trip to Galveston when I was 2 years old, because I can’t remember it).
3. The longest I have ever been away from Kansas was the two years I was stationed on a ship homeported in Japan. I enjoyed the travel that the Navy offered, visiting Korea, Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Bahrain, Mexico and Hawaii.
4. I had a short stint in Hollywood. While stationed in Long Beach, I was cast as an extra in “The Hunt For The Red October” but was unable to participate because of circumstances beyond my control. I was also present at the filming of the infamous Cher video on the USS Missouri, but I’m not visible in that either. I’m somewhere in a California landfill, swept from a cutting room floor.
5. I am my mom’s cousin. It is a long story, but not as twisted as it sounds. My mother died and when dad remarried, his new bride was my mother’s first cousin. My cousin became my (step)mom. She raised me so I call her mom. But I just looked this up; she’s also my first cousin once removed.
6. I was a terrible student, hated going to school, and was probably the last person you would expect to become a teacher. I attended six different schools in five different communities while growing up. I didn’t like school until I was 28 years old and attended community college. It sort of stuck, because 14 years later, I’m still in school!
7. In high school I was heavily involved in music & the theater. I let those interests lapse for over twenty years. About two years ago, I performed in a community theater production of Carol Burnett comedy skits, and rediscovered my love of the stage. I have also sang in a high school reunion concert, and several other venues. I like to imitate Elvis, Johnny Cash and others.
In 1983 I was a Von Trapp family singer (back row, middle).
In 2008, I played Dom Dedomdom in Murder at the Brown Grand.
Well, that’s really more than you wanted or needed to know about me. Let’s learn something about some other folks. I’m tagging these twitter users.
@shaggyhill
@lilylauren
@nirak
@Holtsman
@mwesch
Edit: Just received an additional tag from Dowbiggin.
I happened upon a CD called Becoming the Best Version of Yourself by Matthew Kelly recently. It was quite timely because on the audio recording, Matthew speaks about the season of Advent, preparing for Christmas, and planning for self improvement in the coming new year. While the CD definitely has a Christian bent to it, I believe that anyone can benefit from his suggestions.
New Years Resolutions You Can Keep
I always have trouble keeping New Year’s resolutions for self improvement, often because mine are overly complicated or overly optimistic in what can be accomplished. Matthew Kelly has four simple suggestions for improvement in these areas of successful living: body, mind, relationships, & spirit. He recommends setting a goal to:
Exercise once a week
Read 10 minutes a day
Have a date for spending carefree timelessness once a month with the person you love.
Write one thing each week in a journal that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Honestly, I have tried most of these before but something usually interrupts my enthusiasm for keeping them going. What was different about Kelly’s approach is his emphasis on the Advent and Christmas seasons. There is a renewal that can happen. The season is designed to shake us and wake us up.
I know each year by mid-November, I am always feeling drained and eager for the fall semester to end. I don’t know if it is the weather, the changing of the seasons, or just simply a part of my profession, looking back at what I had hoped to accomplish with the classes I teach, and noticing that things rarely go as well as I hoped and planned they would.
This year was a little different for me because I found this little CD, and was a little more focused on the reason for the season. I was a little more aware, a little more focused on others, and a little less eager to blame others for things that went wrong. I’m pretty excited to learn that Matthew Kelly is scheduled to be in Kansas next February. Hopefully it will work out for me to go hear him speak, since his message has impacted me in such a positive way this year. And hopefully I can keep the New Year’s Resolutions that he recommends.
I’m really looking forward to 2009. This year was such an amazing year, with everything I have learned and started to apply; I expect next year to be even better! This blog for instance, I started last spring and haven’t lost interest yet in keeping it going. There is always something interesting to share, or just something I’ve been thinking about. Helping with my wife’s new home based business has also been exciting. There’s something about actually applying some of the technologies that I teach that makes me feel like I’m staying relevant.
Thank You!
I want to thank each and every one of you who take time to drop by and visit this little project of mine. I told myself I would do this, even if it were for my own personal benefit & no one else, however it is certainly nice to see that people come by from time to time to check out what I’m doing here.
Yes, I am an incurable nerd who is easily amused, but I had to share this photo I took this morning. I happened to pass by the bank when the thermometer read -0º F. There are a couple of reasons it’s interesting to me. One is the obvious. Whoa -0º, that’s REALLY cold! The other is the software engineering implications. Obviously an unexpected bug condition in someone’s programming code. It was -3º earlier, but when it warmed up to 0º the minus symbol didn’t disappear.
Just thought I’d share one of life’s little ha-ha moments for any other geeks out there who are amused by these as well.
It seems that 2008 will be remembered as the year that many companies are scrapping the annual holiday party. You may ask, “Why not?” Many people do not like the the company holiday party for a variety of reasons. From being boring, even uncomfortable, to downright offensive and insensitive to other cultures, the company holiday party is a tradition that may not be worth keeping in these times of economic uncertainty.
However, in a story I heard on NPR, business consultant John Challenger, the CEO of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, thinks that companies would do well to rethink canceling the party outright. He says:
Canceling parties altogether is a very tough statement about where the company’s at. It can only be damaging to morale. It makes people even more insecure about their job.
Challenger continues:
Parties are the canary in the coal mine. They are symbols of where the companies stand, how they see their future, how they think about workplace culture.
A lot of people get uptight this time of year, especially in multicultural environments like where I work at the university. People come from all different cultures and traditions. Maybe it is simply better to cancel the party, especially since money is tight. Many of the holiday parties aren’t all that well attended anyway with so many other things going on this time of year.
But I think we need to look closely at Challenger’s observations. What does it say about our workplace culture if we cancel one of the main ways we come together as a working community? Where I work, we only have one other gathering that everyone attends; the fall semester kickoff, which is usually more of a working meeting than a celebration. Sure we have graduation, but this is attended primarily by the faculty only, not the entire campus.
If we don’t do the holiday party, we need to have something to replace the tradition that enables the entire campus faculty & staff to get together in a fun way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive either. It could be as simple as having a picnic in the park. Play some softball and have a pot luck lunch; something that tries to recognize and build community. In tough times, I think this is more important than ever.
I signed up on Edublogs last spring after attending SXSW because I wanted to join in a global conversation with other educators and to keep a sort of e-journal. I was excited to find one repository of educators using blogging in education. I was so impressed that I quickly offered my $25 to become an edublogs supporter. I figured that it was more than reasonable for what I was receiving. I was recently surprised to learn how few people bother to pay the $25.
Recently, Edublogs began to include advertising on blogs that are not paid supporters. People were caught off guard and some embarassing situations arose like this one:
My blog (msmichetti.edublogs.org) is one that was “hit” with ads today, and it was rather embarrassing. I was showing, via digital projector, my blog to a group of students and educators, and navigated to my blog by entering the direct URL into Internet Explorer. The *first* thing to come up on the screen, both at the top of the page (beneath the header) and on the right (right sidebar) were Google Ads, many of which had nothing to do with education. A couple of clicks around and they were still there.
Although there was a discussion of the potentiality of advertising on the forums several months ago, busy edublogs educators who do not frequent the forums (I admit guilt myself) might not have realized what was coming. They felt blindsided when the advertising was rolled out and it has subsequently been the subject of much discussion and dismay.
Seth Godin has something to say on all of this in his free eBook Tribes Q&A.
Characteristics and actions in a leader that can lead to the death of the tribe include:
•Inability to learn from a mistake
•Pitting members against one another
•Forgetting that a tribe has a life of its own rather than existing as an extension of the leader
•Making decisions based on personal agenda rather than on tribal agenda
•Thinking they cannot learn from their members and worse, thinking they know everything
•Taking a command-and-control approach by:
•Limiting or moderating communication within the tribe
•Exercising hierarchical authority
•Conversely, being too passive and standing by as factions form and turf wars take place
•Allowing drama to exist by:
•Listening to and responding to gossip
•Allowing rumors to circulate and grow
•Devoting time, energy, and resources to deal with personal issues or conflicts
•Passively allowing these activities to exist even if they don’t take part
Edublogs administrators would do well to follow Godin’s sage advice and quickly apologize for this. Dale Carnegie in “How to win friends and influence people” recommends apologizing and accepting blame, even if you feel in the right. I’ve tried it and it works.
Personally, I don’t think Edublogs is blameless in all of this. Perhaps there were issues of communication that prevented notification of each and every Edublogs user, but I think that additional steps could have been taken. I get little notifications and promos at the top of every “Write Post” page. They could have made a big deal on that little widget about the coming advertising, but I don’t ever recollect any such announcement there. Posting it on the forums simply isn’t enough in the eyes of most users, and trying to excuse their actions instead of apologizing will only make it worse.
So what’s going to happen Edublogs? Will you lose your tribe by ignoring the errors that Seth Godin points out? I hope not, because I have no plans of leaving the platform any time soon. It’s really been a great experience to date and I’ve met a lot of great people using Edublogs.
Apologize and fix this!
I fully understand that it costs money to run services like these, and the free lunch has ended. I have no problems with that. You just need to really involve your tribe in a conversation about how to approach this, rather than just rolling it out to see what will happen. Maybe some suggestions will come of it that you haven’t considered. If you must have advertising, you must have absolute certainty that your ads are relevant and appropriate for the audience. It would be better if there were another way to address the issue.
Hopefully you haven’t already done irreparable damage with this move and it can be repaired because I really like using Edublogs.
When I reported to my first ship the USS Cochrane in Japan, I believe I was there for about a month before I discovered a shipmate in another department who I went to high school with. We sang in the choir together, he moved away, and it was several years later when we wound up serving on the same ship together.
When I was in Navy recruit training during service week, I was assigned to cleaning the drill hall when I got one of the nasty sinus headaches I sometimes get when the weather changes. Remember this is a week of hard work, and you hardly get a chance to even sit down. But the kind-hearted sailor in charge showed me a loft that I could go lie down for a while without getting caught. Turns out, he was from my tiny home town in Kansas and I had even worked at the hardware store for a time with his brother.
On liberty in Hawaii, several years into my hitch in the Navy, I accidentally ran into one of my best friends from high school who moved away when I was in 11th grade. He was also in the Navy and we had lost track of one another, finally meeting on accident in a Waikiki bar. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw that friend, we haven’t been in touch since.
These kind of chance encounters happen a lot, and it makes me wonder how many times I just walk past someone I should know or somehow be connected to. I think that missing people you should know will decrease as social media catches on. We will become more aware of our existing connections as technology links us together.
For example, a guy I work with and I became acquainted with many folks from around the country at Wakonse last May. Last night he told me about his high school classmate who contacted him to ask how he knew his colleage from Iowa State University (one of our Wakonse friends). The classmate saw the colleague on a friend’s facebook and notified the friend about the connection.
Lesson learned: it doesn’t hurt to browse through your friends friend list to see who they are connected with that you know but are not connected with. I’ve found a number of high school classmates this way. (By the way, if interested, you too can befriend me on Facebook.)
Yes, it’s a small world and through technology it’s getting smaller.
Yesterday, while attending the SMARTT 2008 conference of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science, I had the pleasure of hearing Homer Hickam speak. Mr. Hickam is the author of the book, “Rocket Boys” which inspired the movie “October Sky”. (I purchased an autographed copy for my kids.) If you have not seen this film, SEE IT! Here is the trailer:
If you havent’ figured out by now from reading what I write about, I love nothing more than when the Sciences & the Arts meet. So a writer who focuses on science and gets a movie made about it will always gain my attention.
I connected with his story because I also came from a small town of limited opportunities. Here was a boy, inspired by Sputnik, who dreamed of building rockets. His story is inspiring to me, and I believe it should be to the kids who live where I am from.
Today’s Sputnik
Today, there is no Sputnik-like, instantly recognizable symbol of the changing world. But we have had our Sputnik and it is called the Internet. Instead of a flashing light overhead, this new Sputnik has eased into our lives over several years time as people adopted it’s use, and the technology improved to the point that it is easily navigable and usable.
I want to challenge and inspire my students, and the kids growing up in rural areas to be like Homer. Not necessarily learn how rockets work (although it suits me if you do), but learn how the Internet and computers work. When I was a high school student, the personal computer was still a novelty, and to use one you had to understand programming. These days, as near as I can tell, schools have abandoned teaching programming in favor of learning how to use applications that someone else has written.
Teachers, let your students play computer games in class. But only the games that the kids themselves create! There are a number of tools that the kids can use to accomplish this goal, two of which are Alice and Scratch. If you don’t know how to use these tools, it’s ok because your students can figure it out for themselves.
Yesterday, Homer Hickam mentioned his 3 P’s to success: Have a passion, have a plan, and perservere! I believe if more math, science, even humanities & social science teachers were open to the possibilities, computer technologies can allow students to latch on to these P’s with amazing results.
The nice thing for students in rural areas with limited resources, the two development environments I’ve mentioned, along with many others, are complely free. You already have what you need to make some modern “digital rockets.” For example, you could try doing a gravity simulation in Alice or Scratch.
I would love to hear from educators in remote locations who are making the most of our new Sputnik, the Internet. How are you inspiring your students to be everything that they can be in these exciting times?
