We brought back science books

The House of Glee visited friends and family in Portland, Oregon, this past weekend. We went to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) for the first time, and were impressed that the chemistry lab was an actual lab with chemicals and experiments, and the physics lab had a theremin and static electricity to play with. Bede and Lucia finally got to try freeze-dried ice cream, too.

The science section at Powell's Books now has its own building (along with math and technical books), which is new since we last visited Portland. It used to be that I could park myself in the science section while my daughter browsed the children's books. At Lucia's request, I got for her Jeff Kinney's The Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book, which occupied her attention for the rest of the trip. I would never have guessed that Diary of a Wimpy Kid would be the book to turn her from someone interested in stories to an avid reader, but that was the book that first grade boys carried around last year. While I am a little tired of hearing about the "cheese touch," I am getting a kick out of the drawings she's come up with.

I'll admit that I went to town in Building 2 of Powells. I found a used copy of Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars, plus an out-of date but much enjoyed book both Bede and I pored over when we were children: National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe, by Roy Gallant. I also decided to capitulate to the purchase of a few science and math Basher Books, a series aimed for children and published by Kingfisher. The books provide overviews and explanations of basic science and math concepts as first person anthropomorphized accounts.* The House of Glee currently owns the following:

Chemistry: Getting a Big Reaction
Physics: Why Matter Matters
Math: A Book You Can Count On
Algebra and Geometry

I hovered over The Periodic Table: Elements with Style at Ada's Technical Books today, but made myself practice restraint. Funds aside, we've got plenty to read. Speaking of funding, I always get a little frenetic around the time of Seattle Public Library's annual furlough because of budget cuts. I hope my fellow Seattleites have stocked up.

*August 26 update: The problem with giving objects and concepts personalities (as in the Basher Books) is that one inevitably has to deal with the sex of the anthropomorphized subjects. In Physics: Why Matter Matters, when personal pronouns came up, they were male. My daughter notices. I notice. She can change the text to suit her, i.e. decide that Gamma Ray and Photon representations are female, but she shouldn't have to. Inclusive language would have been so simple.

Math Doodles

Thanks to Tanita Davis for this video by Vi Hart with an accompanying NPR article by Robert Krulwich. The article is called I Hate Math! (Not After This You Won't) and the video is "Doodling in Math Class: Snakes + Graphs."

P.S. In a little under three hours (as I write this), our family may be able to see the 2010 lunar eclipse.

Exponents and Nature By Numbers

Have you ever seen The Powers of Ten (10) by Ray and Charles Eames? It's a short film about exponents that extend outward toward the cosmos and inward toward the atom.

A friend recently sent me Nature by Numbers, a film by Cristóbal Vila. It's about math in nature with a particular focus on Phi (ϕ). It's beautiful, but makes me feel a bit melancholy that ammonites are no more.

Math Windows

From Fish to Infinity by Steven Strogatz is a New York Times opinion piece that's the first in a planned series about math.

From the article:

I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

I'm going to follow this series. My math foundation is shaky. Test scores indicated that the aptitude was there, but I could have benefited from math teachers who knew how to teach children who struggled with math. (Smaller class sizes would have helped, too.)

I would like to find a book that helps grownups review and redo their math educations properly. I've looked through some books from the library and perused reviews online, but was wondering if a reader had recommendation for books they've actually used and liked. In the meantime, I'll be hanging out with the Math Gnomes.



Thanks to Year of the Dungeon for the link.

Melisande, Or Long and Short Division

Melisande, Or Long and Short Division, by E. Nesbit, is a literary fairy tale that incorporates mathematics. Perhaps when I made Princess Division for my Royal Math Gnomes, I unconsciously had this story in the back of my mind. Lucia enjoyed it very much. While you can read the story in its entirety, I read the story aloud from a collection called Stories for Eight Year Olds. When I was in second grade, I had a book from the same series called Stories for Seven Year Olds, which I enjoyed very much. Sara Corrin, the editor, and I seem to have similar tastes in stories, so I am going to look for her other collections available in the library.