Infinite number of monkeys OR red wigglers with Legos

I gave the red wiggler worms about an hour on the two Lego base plates in my search for activities to keep forty preschoolers engaged at a two-hour "Worms and water conservation" program for Earth Day. The worms did not write "Hamlet" or even any letters. They were surprisingly clingy, preferring to stay in clumps rather than venture out. I expected them to be in a hurry to find the edges of the base plates so they could go underneath where it was dark. These must be Pre-Columbian Flat Earth worms. When they got to the edge of the plate, most turned around and went back to the middle. In the first half hour only one worm went underneath.

Worms don't write Hamlet

In the first act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Guildenstern muses that "If six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their heads"




“There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.” 
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


You can watch a little video of a worm moving on a base plate here.

OR

You can learn about infinite monkey theorem, probability, and randomness here.

I will add that the worm movement was much more purposeful than our preschool students' search for plastic eggs on the playground Thursday morning.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Anachronisms of time travel and other Thanksgiving thoughts

Just finished Stephen King's massive 11/22/63.  Still in a fog.

Finding anachronisms in movies and books always makes me happy.  The wrong color of Tupperware or a premature bundt cake can make my day. Two anachronisms jarred me enough in 11/22/63 that I jotted a note to myself.  They 're not spoilers.

• "Assisted living" is not a term that would have been used in 1963.  The concept arose in the late-Seventies, and became commonplace in the Nineties.  See abstract below.
• I am really suspicious about a dirt-poor little girl living on Mercedes Street in 1961 Fort Worth knowing rules and techniques of soccer.  Soccer caught on earlier in Dallas than in Nebraska where we played something called "kick soccer" that was really a rolled big ball variant of baseball in 1965. This scene seems really wrong.  So I checked with one of North Texas' earliest soccer moms:  

We moved here in 1972.  No one new much about the sport.  It didn’t cost much; shoes, a ball, a team shirt.   I think soccer was popular in Dallas before it caught on in Ft. Worth.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like 10 years earlier in ’61…and for a girl…and in Ft. Worth,  But I certainly don’t know for sure.

I enjoyed the novel immensely, and read it in under two weeks, the library limit on my check-out.  If I were a reviewer, that would certainly qualify the book as "compelling" and "a page-turner", but I'm too pokey of a reader to ever be a reviewer.  This is also my first ever King book.

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Still with Stephen King here, our vocabulary word is obdurate, as in "the past is obdurate".  My big red dictionary definitions include inflexible, intractable, stubbornly impenitent, unyielding, and hardened. The good old Online Etymology Dictionary has:

obdurate 

mid-15c., from L. obduratus "hardened," pp. of obdurare "harden," from ob "against" (see ob-) + durare "harden, render hard," from durus "hard" (see endure). Related: Obdurately.

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Veering off from King, but still with "assisted living", Dad was found on the mat beside his bed this morning.  The nurse said he kept saying he wanted to "go home."  We all do in some way for Thanksgiving.  My sons could not "come home" in a geographical way, but we were all in touch today.  I took a long hike on Planet Earth today and felt very relaxed and centered "at home".  After my hike, I sat reading while Dad slept the day away, and so was able to finish the novel.

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I chose to read 11/22/63 partly because many years ago I picked up Don DeLillo's novel, Libra, from a discount cart at a used bookstore.  DeLillo's portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother/son relationship stayed with me.  In an odd circuit, I will pick up my reserved Angel Esmeralda and Other Stories, DeLillo's new book, at the library tomorrow when I return King's.

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Technology stuck its big foot out to trip me this week, and spilled coffee on the rug was only part of my problems.  In a panic to email a newsletter article containing a properly underlined book title, I hit Ctrl and underline repeatedly.  Down the rabbit hole went my readable text until it was nothing but a squiggle of unreadable DNA code.

There was no Go Back Go Back GO BACK I MEAN IT RIGHT NOW key.  D'that ever happen to you?

After blindly trying all sorts of key combinations and Google searches, I did what any mom would do.  I called the Woolly Mammoth, my youngest son, all the while feeling like a major geezerette.  Thank heaven he didn't immediately know the magic formula for reversing the mistake, so I could salvage a little self respect!  Here I was in my own rabbit hole of time travel trying to reverse a fatal error and change history for the better.  Here's the secret fix:

Unshifted underline = Ctrl minus, therefore the reverse = Ctrl plus which is really Ctrl Shift =.  And yes, I was late to work.

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Gerontologist. 2007;47 Spec No 3:8-22.

Historical evolution of assisted living in the United States, 1979 to the present.

Wilson KB.

Source

Jessie F. Richardson Foundation, 15900 SE 82nd Drive, Clackamas, OR 97015, USA. kwilson@jfrfoundation.org

Abstract

PURPOSE:

This article provides a historical overview of the emergence of assisted living in the United States over a 25-year period to identify goals and key concepts that underpinned the emerging form of care.

DESIGN AND METHODS:

The method is historical analysis based on records and my own personal experiences in conceptualizing and implementing assisted living in Oregon and nationwide.

RESULTS:

I identified four time periods: (a) 1979 to 1985, when a paradigm shift occurred on both the East and West coasts, motivated by distaste for nursing facilities and idealistic values regarding residential environments, service capacity, and consumer-centered care philosophy; (b) 1986 to 1993, when providers, consumers, and state governments became interested and four identifiable types of assisted living (hybrid, hospitality, housing, and health care) appeared, each of which informed the evolution of assisted living; (c) 1994 to 2000, a period of expansion, Wall Street money, dilution of the ideals, and emerging quality concerns; a crisis of confidence and a crossroads for assisted living; (d) 2000 to the present, a time of regrouping, slow-down in growth, and reexamination of earlier efforts to define and set standards for assisted living.

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© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

A small dish of perspective with a large dollop of real whipped cream

Remembering my first job in the hospital kitchen.  Visualizing the walk-in refrigerator with the big steel door.   Going in to retrieve shallow pans of cherry jello.  Me a gawkward geek in a low cost white uniform and hairnet.  Goosebumps.

The scraping sound of cutting stripes through the red jello with a dinner knife.  Cross stripes to make cubes.  Dishing up the cubes with a large spoon--servings by the hundreds.  Then back into the walk-in to retrieve the giant stainless steel mixer bowls full of real whipped cream.  Most of the jello dishes then received their dollops. Each whipped cream topping looked like an @ sign atop the # of jello cubes.

See the #?  That is how much jello I want.  See the @?

See the asterisk * on your keyboard?  That is the size of the yellow translucent spider walking on the armrest of the park bench at noon.  It's only 95 degrees outside, so it feels cool.  Woodpeckers and chickadees are having a fabulous time.

See the 8?  That is the size of the quick brown spider following the yellow spider on the armrest.

Oh, isn't that cute?  Maybe the * and 8 spiders are friends! We can all share the park bench. Let me just find my camera in my purse so we can pose for a happy friends photo.


The 8 spider is an inch behind * and gaining rapidly.  I pull out the camera and switch it to macro.   Dang, 8 has already grabbed * and eaten *'s head!  8 is carrying the rest of * to the shadiest side of the armrest, but alas, has dropped one of *'s legs.

Forget the quick brown fox and the lazy dog.  The quick brown spider is amazing. This drama is taking place a foot from my elbow. Grateful  I'm just the camerawoman, and not one of the two leads in this movie.




© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Facebook Facebook everywhere

Two mourning doves are standing on the top of my patio fence looking remarkably clueless. They want some bird or squirrel to show up and knock seeds out of the birdfeeder and onto the ground. Birdfeeders are too high-tech for mourning doves. They have to eat at ground level.

Sometimes the doves stroll along the fence top showing off their bright coral colored feet. Other times they turn around and around like a dog getting ready to sleep. One coos. The other doesn't. One does silly rotations of his neck. It must be the male because it's the same motion my ex used to do, twisting and popping his neck. One is lacking tail feathers.

My recent excursion into Facebook must look as clueless to insiders of the online social networking phenomenon as the mourning doves look to me. I'm pretty much opposed to the concept of online social networking except in the case of worm composters. Alas, I'm being dragged to Facebook by my newspaper and public radio.

When I tuned in "Weekend Edition Saturday" I was warned, "You ignore Facebook at your own peril," by Andy Carvin, NPR's Social Media Strategist. It sounded like a hokey horoscope from my junior high newspaper, but I had to check it out. The Dallas Morning News op-ed page had columns by Farhad Manjoo and Mark Davis about Facebook, and by Jeffrey Weiss about the online explosion of "25 Random Things About Me" this week.

"Remember when our kids were into instant messaging? Remember how there were so many beeps?," asks my walking buddy. Oh, yes. I couldn't get through a simple set of instructions to a teen son about transportation arrangements and meal provisions without two or three IM interruptions. It all seemed a lot like passing notes in Social Studies class.

When I learned to type the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. When kids learn to keyboard now they begin with emoticons, I'm sorry to say. They will grow old without dreaming of interspecies leapfrog. : - (

IM users and text-messagers devised abbreviations to oversimplify the human experience with LOL, OMG, WTF. The only really useful abbreviation was the one created by kindergarten Danger Baby to describe carpet cleaning with the VQM.

At the urging of a Muse, I started this blog in the summer of 2003, a little before Facebook began. At the time I didn't even know what "blog" meant. Up to that point, I thought the greatest use of the internet was being able to search library catalogs and reserve books in the middle of the night. I'm still not entirely convinced otherwise (ECO).

I have to conclude this post, with further reports from the frontier of Facebook as events warrant. If you have thoughts about mourning doves or moms on Facebook, I'd love for you to comment!

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Dance of the Sugarplum ISBNs

Last Saturday at the literacy workshop we played with Wikki Stix to form letters. Wikki Stix are basically pieces of yarn coated with colored wax. They have endless kids' craft uses, but I hadn't considered the teaching possibilities before. At the workshop we used Wikki Stix to form letters and numbers on a flat surface, then make crayon texture rubbings on paper over the formations. Wikki Stix adhere to the table unlike most texture rubbing craft materials, making it much easier for preschoolers.

The possibilities for creating animation and flip book sequences with the Wikki Stix rubbings really recharged my brain's dry cell battery. What if a marching band of red wiggler worms formed mutating numerals a football halftime show? With the Wikki Stix it was so easy to make incremental changes and produce quick rubbing images.

This Saturday I worked at the library preparing order forms for books, large print materials, and audio books. ISBN numbers danced around in my head like a proofreading nightmare version of "The Nutcracker".

International Standard Book Numbers used to be ten-digit identification codes that had a good beat you could almost dance to or type from memory. Now they are cursed thirteen-digit headaches that identify each individual media format for a particular title. As the day progressed, the ISBN numbers began to wiggle and shimmer, uncurl and travel when I tried to type, like enthused wax-dipped yarn dervishes. If they didn't all begin with 978, I would never have been able to corral them on paper!


The second edition of Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage has just one ISBN:
9780977804511

Judith Viorst's new book, Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days, has all these ISBNs for various formats:
9781400105281
9781400135288
9781400155286
9781416550051

Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope has twice that many number assignments. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has thrice just in English. Form those numbers, my little red wigglers, between the yard markers and the hash marks.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Hot Collage Gals

Misspellers* around the globe search for explicit photos of university coeds and stumble onto this blog. That's the problem with Boolean keyword search engines. Even during nineteen straight days of temps over one hundred degrees (Fahrenheit not Celsius), there's a world of difference in this big old Lone Star State of Texas between UT Longhorn sand volleyball bikini babes, and hot-flashing middle-aged Collin County mixed-media artists with three grown sons.

Four skills never go out of style:

1. Spelling
2. Keyboarding, or, as we warm gals call it, typing
3. Proofreading, or attention to detail
4. Punctuation (meaning cannot exist without form)

You can't depend on Spell Czech. Those Prague Mamas are probably hot, too. The Kingdom of Bohemia may be one of those European countries lacking in ice cubes, but I can't research that right now. My main concern is the age at which a woman crosses the line from girl to gal.

Wikipedia doesn't consider age connotations of female synonyms:

The word girl has many synonyms, including "belle", "chick", "doll", "gal", "lass" or "lassie", "maiden", and "miss". The slang word "gal", as in "Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight", is a variant pronunciation of girl.

In my search for enlightenment, I slogged through a mucky slough of academic jargon before finding a flicker of clarity:

In all University settings, members of the University community should:

1. Use gender equivalent construction. Equivalent or parallel construction should be used for males and females. Thus, if males are referred to as “men,” females should be referred to as “women,” not as “girls” or “ladies.”

2. Use alternatives to the masculine singular pronoun for generic singular. The masculine singular pronoun traditionally has been used as the generic singular. Such usage fails to acknowledge the participation of women in human activity unless they are specifically identified. Alternatives to the use of “he,” “him,” and “his” for the generic singular are he/she, she/he, her/him, him/her, hers/his, his/hers or one’s. Some individuals may prefer to alternate the use of the male and female singular pronoun to indicate generic singular. While some alternatives may seem awkward when they are first used, they become comfortable with usage and will, as any other language construction, become second nature in time. It is this natural incorporation of women into language on an equal basis with men that is the purpose of non-sexist language usage. [I don't have the slightest idea what this means, but it sounds kinkier** than the title of this post!]....

...6. Exhibit non-patronizing, non-condescending ways of describing and addressing women, particularly women in traditional occupations, e.g., secretaries, clerks, nurses. Both men and women should be sensitized to the negative effects which result from usage of terms such as “girl,” “gal,” “coed,”, “girl Friday,” the “girls in the office,” and the like.

I'm happy to report my discovery of Ruth Walker's "Words On the Move" column in the Christian Science Monitor***. I'll be checking in often for my language usage fix:

There are plenty of colloquialisms for "female person": They start with terms like "chick" and go on through terms you aren't going to read in this space. What they have in common is that they define women as "the other," in a way that terms like "guy" or "bloke" do not define men. When Simone de Beauvoir called her book about women "The Second Sex," people knew what she meant.

There's "gal," which isn't to everyone's taste. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a "vulgar or dial. pronunciation of 'girl.'" (The Compact Oxford is somewhat more forgiving, defining it as an informal, chiefly North American term for "girl or young woman." In practice, "gal" has a rather flexible upward age limit; see "Golden Girls," above.) "Gal Friday," or " girl Friday," has worked its way into the language as a takeoff on "Man Friday," itself a phrase of dubious political correctness. Nowadays "his girl Friday" may well be the executive vice president for strategy and human resources. But why was it ever OK for the counterpart of "man" to be "gal," anyway?

*Yes, I checked two dictionaries on this one! Gals, your dictionary is your friend in a way that the masculine singular pronoun for generic singular never could be. Now excuse me. I have a volleyball game at seven.

**This blog has no opinion at the moment on the independent candidacy of Kinky Friedman for governor of Texas. I've read some of his books, but didn't think them as funny as he did. By the way, that's what my dad says about the guys on Car Talk.

***Some other day we will ponder the resemblance between 2004 Inductee Baseball Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, one of my favorite players, and monitor lizards, who swallow their prey whole.

Mum's the word

This is so very groovy! I have been invited to Homecoming at last! Steven's friend Stephen went through all the girls on his cellphone list, and decided I was his best bet. Never mind that his classic Datsun 240Z was made after I graduated from Lincoln East High School in 1973. (His car is often as reluctant to start in the mornings as I am!) Never mind that my best friend and I went on a spring break road trip in March of '75 in her 260Z to Purdue and Michigan State.

Speaking of roadtrips, I am going to see "The Motorcycle Diaries" tomorrow. Che+Machu Pichu+Mexican heartthrob actor=diversionary anticipation. When I was a senior in high school I wrote a big research paper over the Christmas break entitled "Cuba After Castro". I typed it on my dad's 1928 Fleetwood (I'm hazy on these particulars) with carbon paper.