Frustrated with all evangelical home school science curricula on the entire planet–the entire old planet, if you get my meaning–I have decided to make up my own. Yesterday was our first lesson.

We spent about twenty minutes discussing how it is we know about things. We identified revelation, observation, authority, and “reason” as sources of knowledge about things. We skipped intuition and probably a few other things, but this is elementary school, not undergraduate Intoduction To Epistemology, okay?

The kids seemed to appreciate the first lesson, and were able to think of examples of each category as I introduced them. Today we’ll talk more about the “reason” category, describing the difference between deduction and induction, and explain that induction is at the foundation of all science. I think the fourth grader will do okay with this. We’ll see about the first/second grader. (What are these grades, anyway? This is homeschool!)

In the cuteness department, the seven-year-old offered this definition of science before the lesson began:

You experiment stuff. Sometimes you do liquids, animals, places…magnets, lots of stuff.
Sometimes even stuff with food, you can do that.

Science is just like sort of seeing what things are gonna look like and learning things about animals and stuff. And you can do it with rain sometimes. And maybe maps. You can do it with a lot of stuff.

Not half bad, really. We’ll see what she says in a month.

Don’t worry, we will get to actual science content at some point. Gotta start with some fundamentals, though.

And oh yeah, why don’t we just buy a non-evangelical science curriculum if all the young-earth irks me so badly? Because it’s expensive and does a poor job teaching the big picture. What I’ve seen typically has a perfunctory chapter teaching “The Scientific Method” with absolutely no context at all; that is, it does not explain in an age-appropriate manner the problem of how to know things, and how the scientific method attempts to answer this question. The book then launches into an oddly-organized flood of specific science content that itself does a bad job of building from first principles. Little kids can understand atoms and forces at a high level; why not start there?

I’ve been wanting a cheesy desktop music tool for some time. I’m told they can be had in the few-hundred-dollar range, which is well outside of the impulse buy, messing-around-with-it price range. James has done it, though. The music is ever-so-slightly explained and apologized for here.

The ESV, the bible translation you should be reading anyway, is now available as a web service. Good News Publishers/Crossway Books seems to be very attentive to current trends in content syndication and application integration. Nifty.

Link via Christianity Today via reader Adeodatus.

Two words: Java on Game Boy Advance. (Okay, five words. I wasn’t expecting a sort of Spanish Inquisition.)

My first major program wasn’t a game, but my second one was. The key to teaching a boy to program is keeping his interest. Zach embraces the concept of learning to write programs, but in these days of ubiquitous video games, the competition for his attention is intense. Writing programs that run on his shiny new GBA might just do it.

You can learn all you want about the JEMBlazer product here. If you are a Java developer and have a GBA, you might just need this thing.

I haven’t had much time to process the images I took the other night, but I have got one vaguely Martian-looking shot out of the effort. Before we get to that, let me explain what I’m doing.

The June issue of Sky And Telescope had an article on an emerging practice among budget-minded amateur astronomers: using webcams to image bright objects like the moon and planets. Some enterprising folk have even made extensive modifications to these cheap cameras to get them to work for long-exposure, deep-sky targets. The entry point for astronomical digital cameras is about $1,000, and they don’t get good until two or three times that, so having a serviceable option in the $100 range is a good thing.

I am using an old 640×480 IBM webcam that I bought under a compelling rebate offer a year and a half ago for a well-intentioned but ill-fated experiment with videoconferencing at the home office. There are a couple of cameras that have floated to the top in amateur astronomical circles, and this isn’t one of them, but had the advantage of being in my possession. Now, the webcam astronomy scene is most accessible to people who have use of a machine shop, which I just happen to have through the generous services of my father-in-law. One plastic and one aluminum fitting later, and we were seeing light.

The camera’s biggest shortcoming is the lack of manual “shutter speed” control; image gain control is fully automatic, so a bright subject on a dark background (say, Mars) must fill a significant portion of the picture before it will be anything but a completely saturated white blob. This means I had to crank up the magnification as high as my equipment could manage, which in turn resulted in less clarity, not more. (I had a spreadsheet that calculated the effective focal length in this arrangement, but I can’t find it. I think it was something like 8000mm, but I’d have to redo the calculations and measurements to be sure.)

Well-exposed Mars in view, I then captured about five minutes of video, resulting in 436 frames of 640×480, 24-bit video. A scaled-down and shortened snippet of that video can been seen here if you are interested in seeing what it looked like in real time on the laptop screen. The ever-useful Registax then selected the 242 best frames of that shoot, aligned them, and digitally combined them to form this rather unimpressive image:

A little bit of Photoshop histogram maintenance later, and we have:

That, I think, is as good as it’s going to get with my equipment. The blotches on the center-left of the planet are due to dust on the CCD element, which will be blown off with compressed-air impunity this evening. I’ll update this post with some more details, including the name of the prominent dark band on the upper half of the planet, as soon as I have some time to do a bit more research. (No Martian atlas is at hand.)

I’ll also post some lunar shots I took that same night. They should be somewhat sharper.

Yes, the time on this post is correct. Tonight was my first night out with my new telescope-adapted webcam, and I feel like a nerdy kid in a science education store. A very tired one.

I got what I think are a few good images of the moon and Mars. One was easily recognizable as the Red Planet, even if it was somewhat less detailed than the Hubble photos you’ll see on TV.

Webcam astronomy actually produces AVI files as its raw data, which must then be laboriously processed to make worthwhile stills. Most of the heavy lifting is done by a freeware tool, but I still have several hours of image processing ahead of me before I have anything worth posting. You’ll see it here first when it’s done. Membership has its privileges.

The madness is mostly over here. Life is slowly returning to normal, but then we haven’t even been home from the reception for twelve hours. I hope to make blogging more interesting this week. Thanks for your patience last week.

Hopefully you’re already familiar with the world of Homestar Runner, but if not, let me introduce you.

The oddest (and potentially darkest) content is Strong Bad’s independent comic, Teen Girl Squad.

Who is Strong Bad, you ask? You could email him and ask, or just click on his name to see how he answers emails from people like you. My top recommendations are Suntan, The Show, Dragon, and Japanese Cartoon.

Who is Homestar Runner? Is there anyone besides Strong Bad on this site? There is a short movie explaining each character to clue you in.

Enjoy.

I’d guess a lot of my readers have already read this, but it bears re-reading every so often. It is attributed to Francis Bacon in 1592:

In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.

Let us never discount modernism too thoroughly.