The Ladies Chained

Concerning Nonograms

One reason why there hasn’t been too many posts recently is because of my vacation. Being away from a working broadband connection makes blogging kind of hard. The other is that I’ve been somewhat addicted to nonograms. You may know them as “paint by numbers puzzles” or “picross”, short for “picture crossword”. What’s a nonogram? The following picture from Wikipedia gives you a pretty decent idea:

The previous paragraph was written two hours before I wrote this one. Why? Because I spent two hours solving hard nonograms.

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Bargain Bin Reviews: Handel’s Messiah Highlights

Handel’s Messiah Highlights
The Oratorio Society of New York

Price: $1.67
Verdict: It’s Handel’s Messiah. It’s done pretty well. Musically, it’s worth maybe $3; it’s certainly not the most exciting rendition ever but it works. Personally, though, I’m very glad I bought it.

This is part of a sequence of reviews on CDs I found at bargain piles in the local CD stores, thrift stores or some other place that sells really cheap CDs. Want to read more bargain bin reviews?

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Emerging Research Skills

As an independent academic project, two of my students are trying to learn Labanotation (a very complicated symbolic and concise way of recording dance movement) in a week. Half a week has passed and so far they have figured out the very basics. But they are now stuck on turns. More specifically, they need to figure out how to notate a pirouette. Here’s the outline of a conversation we had tonight:

Student: So we think it’s this symbol that does the spinning because we can read all these other ones. But what does it do?
Me: Well, it’s got a pointy part and is next to the arm bit. Maybe it signifies momentum in the arm that’s causing the turn?
Student: Oh man this is so awesome but so complicated. I wish there were more written on this than the like three web pages we found and showed you last week.
Me: Hmm. Wait a second. (Five seconds later.) Have you ever tried typing “labanotation” into Google and clicking on the first link that pops up?
Student: Yes! We did! Of course! Wait…
Me: You may find this interesting.
Student: Oh wow. We never saw this…
Me: Look! An entire section on turns! And jumps! And look at all these wonderful examples and diagrams!
Student: Okay, wow. This is. Wow. We completely missed this.
Me: I’m going to make fun of you for this and be sassy and sarcastic for the next minute now.

The ironic thing is that I just came back from a workshop talking about emerging technologies and teaching. You know, all that web stuff the kids are so used to using now: Google, for example.

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Sticks and Shapes

To celebrate the last day of classes, my students played with sticks. To quote one of my kids, “this is something we’d do in a Waldorf school”. I don’t teach at a Waldorf school.

Here are some pictures of my calculus class making a six-pointed star and raising two tetrahedra.

If you look carefully you’ll see that the kids aren’t holding the sticks. These are push-sticks. I am pretty sure I’ve played with them long ago but it wasn’t until a yoga workshop with the wonderful Circus Minimus last Sunday did I actually realized that I could use them in class. Or, at least, I can have kids play with them. Push-sticks are basically wooden dowels. What makes them special is that they are held up by two people each putting an index finger on each end. It’s a wonderful exercise in movement and trust. It’s also wonderful for doing things like making pretty things.

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