Pandemic planning-The kids edition

You've stocked the house, set up your at-home office, negotiated a cleaning rota with the family...and then they cancel school-at-school. The funny thing about this pandemic is that in cancelling so much it has made some things, long delayed, now possible. I've been meaning to teach the boys a few things, and to write about what those things are. This is my chance, so here's my hopefully frequently updated log (in reverse order) tracking this effort. Your suggestions for future classes in the comments please!

LESSON 20: How to give a shave

Nearly impossible to find, and almost certainly not allowed unless your county/country is a lot more "open" than ours, shaving remains a necessity. And, if someone else does it, shaving becomes a luxury. Here's how:

Just watching it is so relaxing....

LESSON 19: How electricity works

Well, not all of it, but here's a guest post on the simple (but we didn't guess it) design for a two-way switch.

Credit the Engineering Mindset for this and much else.

Let's imagine that I have two pens and an ant that is stuck on a ledge. The pens can rotate around their centers and pen one is positioned at 90 degrees and the other at 180. To get the ant down from the ledge both pens have to connect but they can connect in two different ways; up, up or down, down.

I hope that explains it because it's all Felix had to say.

LESSON 18: How to train a puppy



Because we're doing that too!

LESSON 17: How It's Made

The assignment: find videos teaching about three different important industrial manufacturing processes. The result: discovering thousands of "How It's Made" videos on YouTube. A few of our favorites:

Aquarium fish
Shuttlecocks
Blueberries
Luncheon meats
Frozen fruit
Axes
Waffles
Graphite pencil leads
Flavorings
Retractable cords
Soy sauce
Mechanical singing birds
Felt
Popcorn
Bowling balls
Vaulting poles
Oysters
Jawbreakers
Horseradish  

We recommend watching at 1.5x speed because it makes all the industrial production machinery look even cooler.

LESSON 16: International shipping



How does stuff get from one place to another? A vital thing to understand in times of supply chain disruption. Chief MAKOi's Seaman VLOG is a fine place to learn about big ships, which do most of the work of hauling stuff internationally and, to surprising degree, in-country as well. So we're spending some time watching his vids (the ones on transiting the Panama Canal, the port of Singapore, and a tour of the ship are recommended by Felix), but mostly this is an excuse to introduce one of my long-time favorite websites: the Gallery of Transport Loss. The Gallery doesn't seem to be getting updated, but that doesn't stop accidents from happening every day.

LESSON 15: How to raise chickens



Because we are.

LESSON 14: Space, Time, and Everything

The Illusion of Time

Every few years I attempt to get my head around the biggest questions: what is the nature of physical reality, of time, of the universe and everything in it? And every few years I fail. I came closer than usual in my last attempt though, thanks to Brian Greene's especially good book on the subject. So I was ready with a few choice quotes when Felix strayed into the topic, as he does now and again. Even better, turns out they made a video series, so that's up next for us.

LESSON 13: Citizen science

SARS-CoV-2 main viral protease

Citizen science is science done by amateurs. There is an infinite amount of science to be done, so plenty of room for amateurs. You can go find your own way to contribute, but today's lesson is about how CS can help us make progress against COVID-19, and specifically about using FOLDING@HOME, a massively multiuser protein folding application, to this end. Fold along with us by joining team 260889.

LESSON 12: How to tie your shoes

Because you may not already know how to do it (Gideon), and if you do, you're probably doing it wrong. Two minutes that may change your life.

LESSON 11: Lots of TED talks from Felix
Recommended by someone who watches way more TED talks than I do:







LESSON 10: Perspective via documentary 

And you're not the only one.

A Dutch documentary film festival has released online a set of short documentaries for kids. So far we've watched one about a boy who became a girl and about playing marbles. Lovely films, and a good way to practice Dutch, too (though many of these are subtitled), but simply scrolling through the list and reading the summaries communicates the main lesson, which is empathy. Even without COVID, children face enormous challenges simply surviving in many parts of the world.

LESSON 9: Mutation map

Mutations let us track transmission

Cool visualizations, and the animation of viral spread across the globe is worth watching, but we didn't find this data set as easy to work with as we had hoped. We were not able to get details for the one sample sourced from Marin, for example, so don't know which strain is active in our area (though here's a good article highlighting the fact that for California as a whole there have been many vectors). Still, this led to some further research that convinced us that while there is enough genetic variation in samples to support tracking transmission, there isn't reason at this time to be concerned that the virus is learning lots of new tricks, or that multiple vaccines will be required to combat it.

LESSON 8: How to deal

Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who did a truly epic cover of Bowie's "Space Oddity" from actual outer space

I invited Felix to read Chris Hadfield's lovely An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. As the subtitle suggests, it's topical, too. Consider this extract:

A lot of people talk about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, but I think that’s a seductively misleading concept. There’s never just one “worst.” Almost always there’s a whole spectrum of bad possibilities. The only thing that would really qualify as the worst would be not having a plan for how to cope.

So pleased to discover him and Gideon watching "What I learned from going blind in space," Hadfield's related TED talk. Maybe they'll figure out how to get us out of this mess....

LESSON 7: Find the oversight provisions

Today's lesson comes to us via Zephyr Teachout, the most political of a very well educated family of sisters (I went to school with her older sister, Woden). Zephyr tweets:

A good home-schooling project for your kids: find the oversight provisions on the corporate slush fund in the multi-trillion dollar bill just passed by the Senate. Questions that will help guide the project: Who appoints the special Inspector General? Does that person have any history of not appointing Inspector Generals? Does the Congressional oversight committee have any power? Unfortunately, this is only a 20 minute lesson. Good luck with the rest of your day.

In truth, neither I nor Zephyr mean to send you on this wild goose chase, but it is a good opportunity to talk with your kid (and maybe learn yourself) about one of the major tools governments can employ to manage the economy, or try to. Here's some material to assist you.

LESSON 6: The US Census

It's that time of decade

Filling out basic information? Child's play. Or rather, child's work: we assigned it to Gideon and are taking the opportunity to explain what it is, why it is important, and that we are worried it will be screwed up, like so much else of a scientific nature, by the same venal politicians who are responsible for us having to teach at home in the first place.

LESSON 5: Using product management to save the world

Felix had an idea: what if we could use special effects in videos to show people the infectious trails they leave behind them as they move around? Well now, maybe we could. Great opportunity to teach him product management (which is what I do), so we made a presentation to explain our idea and shared it with Autodesk Research. Here's how we built our case:

Current visualizations about social distancing are too abstract:

Close one, little match man!

What's needed, we propose, is a system that lets you take your own video clip and mark it up with social distancing metrics. In any video of humans passing by one another or transiting the same space the system should illustrate the "viral trails" each person leaves behind them as they move, and should flag all instances when one person intersects another trail or, more direct, violates their social distancing radius. In addition, the system should note all of the times when a person has touched something, and mark that spot, flagging it, too, if another person touches it later on in the same video. The goal is something anonymized--we propose using skeletonization a la the MX3D smart bridge project--so you can share it. And, of course, the system should also predict the probability of viral transmission given the flags thrown.

Autodesk has all of the tools required to make this service, but ours is only one of many ideas submitted (and perhaps not as needed as it once was as the police seem to be stepping into an educational role). Still, an educational experience.

LESSON 4: Zoology as taught by Safari Cards

Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of Safari Cards, fun to use and crammed with fascinating facts!

Remember these? I've got hundreds, been waiting for an excuse to break them out. Today, Gideon and I tried to make combinations of six cards that covered all six living continents (sorry, Antarctica) without any overlapping classes or habitat. Harder than it sounds, we only got two such sets assembled. Much trivia for the budding naturalist. Good times, though I can't help but wonder how many of these animals have become extinct since getting their card, and how many more will do so in Gid's lifetime.

LESSON 3: Respect the power of government

Today we, and all Californians, were placed under order to remain at home until further notice. We read the order, examined the regulations which it referenced (including the one stipulating penalties), followed the link to the excepted essential services, and discussed whether this means that no one can come over to play badminton any more. The power of government is truly a terrifying thing.

LESSON 2: Stretch your imagination with SciFi

Read this:

Mind-blowing SciFi with a rich Fandom exegesis

Felix then chose three technologies or phenomena described therein and discussed how they might work and if they could ever really happen. You can choose your own book, but if you choose this one then you can examine the Phobos singularity, q-dots, and those whip-like things the gogol pirates used to attack Mieli. Takeaways: that there are lots of phenomenon responsible for making things sticky and that particle accelerators aren't going to create black holes that eat the Earth.

LESSON 1: Data visualization and why you can't blame China for its role in the climate crisis

If you don't know Hans Rosling, the recently deceased Swedish statistician and data whisperer, you're missing out. He was a particularly clear-sighted individual, and a great communicator. Here's something he said:

I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it these problems that cause me most concern? Because they are quite likely to happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are happening now; and because each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades. If we fail here, nothing else will work.

Hans Rosling, et al., Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why

Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), 237. 

But before he said that, Rosling helped me understand just how much progress we have already made. I watched with the boys, and recommend to you, these videos:

It will teach you that the US is not the center of the world, that using data to explain things is powerful but only if you can keep it simple, and that China has done the most colossally amazing thing in human history by lifting a billion people out of abject poverty in a few short decades.