The last few weeks have gone by rather quickly. And I'm getting ready for a fairly hectic month coming up.
But first, I'm fully recovered from the sickness. It does seem to be have been a stomach bug of some sort, as I was feeling pretty much normal after the big purge. A day of liquid and a couple days of easy foods, and then it was back to normal.
The end of that week was my graduation from Leadership Las Vegas. So everything is now official. I have some documents signed by politicians and other people congratulating me, but right now they just live in the envelope they came in. I'm not even sure if I've even pulled them out yet. I have a weird relationship with these sorts of things. Trophies, plaques, certificates... they just don't represent very much to me because I value the knowledge and experiences so much more. For example, I make fun of my Ph.D. because it has Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature on it (he was still governor of California when I graduated). Does that signature enhance my diploma? Cheapen it? I don't know. There's always just been some level at which I view these things with a weird skepticism towards its value. But on the other hand, I'm also not throwing it away. So maybe it does have some type of value. That's something I'm just going to have to leave as an open question for now.
The last few weeks have mostly been focused on finishing up my videos for Chapter 4 of MATH 127. I've started posting them to YouTube (MATH 127 Playlist). I set them to be released at a rate of basically one every day or two over a period of about 6 weeks. Part of this is a little experiment I'm doing with the YouTube search algorithm. It's a completely uncontrolled experiment, so I might learn absolutely nothing. But that's okay. The underlying question is whether my channel and my videos would be more likely to be found by the search algorithm if I release videos over an extended period of time, or if it's the same as just dumping them all at once. But either way, things will still just chug along.
I've also spent a lot of time over the last couple weeks packing up my office. We were told that the move might start happening in "Mid-July" and that happens while I'm in Mexico, so I needed to be ready in the unlikely event that construction was on time or ahead of schedule. So I've got my entire office boxed up and ready to go, even though I fully expect that everything will still be there when I get back.
I was back in California last weekend visiting family. I flew out on Friday and spent the evening with just my parents. On Saturday, the three of us went into San Francisco to visit my grandma in the morning, and then got back home for my older brother to arrive in the afternoon. On Sunday, we all went to visit my younger brother's church and then spend the afternoon/evening together. On Monday, we went to Contra Loma park in Antioch to go swimming, and then flew back that evening. I got to meet my newest nephew (Jalon). That's niece/nephew #6. And #7 will be along in a couple months. It was a quick visit, but a good one.
Much of the rest of my time has been spent getting ready for this summer's trip to Mexico. The first part of the trip will be focused on the Science Center. The building is (supposedly) 90% complete with regards to the main structures (electrical, walls, windows, doors), so we're going to help them understand the floorplan. We'll be meeting with the teachers (Vicente and Manuel) and going through some of the protocols with them to make sure that they have at least a sense of the types of activities they can be doing. I think there will also be space for them to do their own things, such as maybe a terrarium for bugs and other creatures they find, or maybe a small aquarium to capture some of the tadpoles that are in the river, or just other exploration activities. We're also going to leave them a couple nature documentaries (the BBC ones, like Life and Blue Planet) that they will be able to use to create almost a movie theater environment (there are no movie theaters in the town). One of my colleagues will be on this trip, and it will be his first time visiting. Before getting the update (which came in yesterday), I was a little concerned that we wouldn't have enough to do there. But now I feel pretty good about it. There will also be some work to do down at the ranch in preparation for the following week.
Speaking of which, that's how the middle of the trip will be spent. Last year, it involved lugging around bags of onions through the crowded market and buying a telescope from a sporting goods store. I think it will be much of the same this year, but will probably also include some painting and minor construction. And then the kids will start showing up. The guy I've worked with the last couple years won't be there, but there will be a Mexican science (physics?) teacher there, and the translation will happen through someone who I've gotten to know over the last couple summers. So I don't anticipate any real problems. We're going to try to do a cornstarch pool this year. I've got a few other things, like looking at blood through a microscope, a water surface tension demonstration, and of course the sky lanterns (which is now a tradition).
The LED cube project has been partially side-tracked with me making an 8x8 LED grid. I really wanted to get some soldering practice in with something that would allow me far more flexibility for errors before diving into the three dimensional shape. So even though I understand how to build and program the full cube, I want to take the first step of just making the smaller grid instead. I'm glad I did, because soldering isn't as easy as it looks like it should be. I've got most of the LED grid put together (on a simple foam core stand), and so the next trick will be to solder the chips, resistors, and transistors onto a PCB board. That scares me a bit more because I don't want to have almost all the pieces soldered in to discover I've made a mistake somewhere along the way.
I've also got a rough framework for maybe taking on that horse racing thing again. I have several concrete ideas for things that I ought to be able to calculate if I have data, which will be the starting point for making predictions. Maybe I'll be able to hit that one up in the fall or winter. Or maybe it will get kicked down the road another couple years. We'll just have to wait and see.
I guess that's pretty much it. It's been particularly hot this last week. It's 11:17 PM and it's 97 degrees outside. We've had temperatures in the 110-115 range. My car read 118 at one point, but that point was just getting into the car as it was sitting in the sun. After driving for a few minutes, that dropped down to a more sane 114. We had a simple bachelor's party for Daniel on Friday. Heard on July 4 after a failed (probably illegal) firework launch (from neighbors near a friend's house): "That burned a hole in my shirt." I'm glad for them that that's all that got burned. People can be dangerously dumb sometimes. Pickled carrots and onions are the current thing I'm making. I had leftover vinegar in Livermore, and so I took a shot at it there, and I made another (better) batch back here.
