Charlie Rose

...turned me on to these simple but engaging educational videos by Salman Khan, a good example of lead learning and my future supplement to TED Talks.

yellowstone national park

Back from my camping trip! Dad was a chipper camper, and we had a lot of fun. I have about a trillion pictures of microbial mats, spouting geysers, landscapes landscapes landscapes, my parents, and Jackson Hole, WY. Here are a few highlights uploaded onto my mom's flickr (well, more than a few...).

Looking forward to coming home to my roomie family, adding Dan Kamen returned from South Africa, with Romain and Brandy and little kitty still close-by across the street. I'll be teaching science for my fellowship at Curley K-8 School, taking hoop/trapeze and aerial silks, classes, research, good times and autumn leaves.

In high school I learned that fall was the season of the tragedy archetype, the season of the fall from innocence in Genesis, when the dignity of man is backlit by his unfortunate circumstances. Spring is all about rebirth, Summer about romance, Autumn about tragedy, and Winter about satire and irony. But fall was always my favorite season, not because of the melancholia, but because of the colors. I never really understood the seasonality of literature anyway. I prefer the seasonality of temperate forests.

the last great american road trip

If you can't reach me in the next week, it's because I'm passing through California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. And my phone might be off.

Armed with books from the San Diego public library, tents, trail mix, and a good rapport with my parents, the Abramoff-Zhengs are going north to say sarcastic things about nature while secretly enjoying it. This'll be dad's first time camping, at the ripe age of 74, as opposed to me and mom who have been all over this spinning pear. I'll uh.. put up some photos when I get back.

The nature of adjectives

I spent the day sieving soils at BU. I blasted some music in a small windowless lab on the 3rd floor and made a day of it. It's a little weird how much fun it is to sing really loudly and terribly by yourself in a building you know is empty.

When I came home, Becky, Steve and I rediscovered the natural order of adjectives, where be basically spent an hour figuring out the list you get when you pull up the wiki page for "adjective", reproduced below.

1. quantity or number
2. quality or opinion
3. size
4. age
5. shape
6. color
7. proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
8. purpose or qualifier

Example: One steamy big old square white American swimming pool.

ESA

There's been an interesting discussion in ecolog (ecology listserv) lately centering around one of the biggest conferences of the year happening right now in Austin, TX. It has to do with whether or not the public should be able to attend the conference. I think it's a pretty good idea. Inviting people to learn about the research we're doing fulfills the only important purposes we have (education and advocacy, am I wrong?).

A bit of talk on the subject here.

Glog II: Return of the Glog

K-12 educational tools like Glogster provide great ways to procrastinate. Like with powerpoint, you can waste hours producing content-free, effects-heavy bullshit. You can even embed media and link out, just like blogging, facebook, google+, etc. Now I can let people know that I'm eating a sandwich with text, picture, video, audio, and cartoon avatars. Brave new world!

Here's my first shot at a Glog below. Notice how the video doesn't even kind of work, but you can find it here. It's actually a pretty cool NASA animation of seasonality around the globe.

Climate science cross cross post

other blog

Glog and Cafetorium

All last week I was the Program Coordinator for a summer educational program for middle school girls called Techsavvy.

I was in charge of carting 27 middle school girls to and from various classes, labs, and activities at different institutions. This was part of my training for the teaching fellowship that will fund me next year.
It was rewarding I GUESS.
Mostly it was exhausting, because middle school girls are godless harpies, descending upon each other with cliquey-ness and cell phones, full of hormonal energy and covered in glitter that NEVER WASHES OFF.
Before they even knew each others' names, there was a clique of five girls, and they were deciding to all wear blue the next day. On Wednesday, they wore pink.
Some girls were cute, some were intelligent, some were well-behaved, and some could NOT SIT DOWN ON THE MOTHERFUCKING BUS. I'm glad to say that for the entire week, I did not swear and I maintained control of the group, using some common-sense discipline tips from Becky. I guess this means that a middle schooler is not much different from a 1-year-old. They think everything is about them and have short attention spans, but ultimately respect your authority and want you to like them.

I spend the weekend decompressing at Rachel's mom's place near Las Vegas' less attractive sister, Atlantic City. We jumped around in the waves. The family puggle looks like Samuel L. Jackson. Fun fun fun fun.

This week begins a different kind of teacher workshop, where I meet up with the teacher I'll be working with during the school year and we plan the curriculum. I'm paired with an awesome lady who teaches science to grades 3,4,5 in JP. Today a woman who looked and sounded like Sarah Jessica Parker told me about using technology to teach kids. I learned two new words:
Glog - online poster, etymology unknown
Cafetorium - dual use cafeteria and auditorium

Me and the kids.