Happy Trails - Frank Thomas

It was a very sad day for me yesterday. I learned that my favorite player on the Oakland A's--Frank Thomas--has left the team to join the Blue Jays. I cried when I found out about this since I love Frank Thomas more than any other player. It will be sad not to see stick guy playing for the A's.

Pictures from the Potomac

Last weekend for Daddy's birthday, we went on a trip to Georgetown. The idea was to visit a really nice park there and then go on a sunset cruise on the Potomac. We managed the park part all right, but we found out that the last cruise only goes one way--from Georgetown to Alexandria, VA (or, as I tended to call it, Alexabama--Alexandria and Alabama confuse me). Anyway, to see some pictures from our trip click here

Robot X - The Movie

Yesterday, Daddy and I revived one of our old games--Robot X attacks the city. Usually, we do this by building the city and Robot X out of Legos and then having Robot X terrorize the city until he either wins or is destroyed by some sort of defense figured out by the citizens. Since we don't have Legos with us in Washington, we made the city and the robot out of paper. We use a lot more paper here than we did in California.

So that you would not miss any of the Robot X excitement, we made this little video of the battle.

Signals and Noise

I love to do experiments. As you know, I started experiments at a very young age--2--when I got to do some sinks versus floats experiments. Since that time, I've done lots of other experiments. Here is the most complex experiment I've done yet. It's called signal versus noise.

To do this experiment, you need poker chips in three different colors. I have red, white, and blue chips. You make two stacks of chips. One stack contains 2 blues, 1 red, and a variable number of white chips. The other contains 2 reds, 1 blue, and the same number of whites. The experimenter then decides which stack to put in the "urn" (my pumpkin basket) and which to hide in a nearby drawer. The other person, then draws chips from the urn, records their color on the data sheet, and then puts them back. After 5 draws, the goal is to guess whether the urn contains 2 reds or 2 blues.

When there are no white chips, it's not that hard to guess correctly. If more reds come up, you should guess red. If more blues come up, you should guess blue. Adding white chips makes things more interesting. The white chips are "noise"--you don't learn anything about the reds and the blues from the whites. After a bunch of trials, Daddy and I learned the following.

The more white chips there are in the urn, the more data you need to make a correct guess. We tried drawing 5, 7, 9, even up to 20 times and making guesses. It gets pretty hard when there are a lot of white chips. The more noise, the harder it is to guess correctly.

Now, for an even more surprising experimental finding. We tried the following comparison. 2 red, 1 blues and 6 whites versus 1 red, 2 blues, and 4 whites. Interestingly, when the number of whites is not the same in the two stacks, you can use the "noise" (the whites) to guess whether there are mostly reds or mostly blues. Amazingly, even without seeing any reds or blues, you can make a good guess. For instance, suppose you draw 7 whites and nothing else. We learned that this is a good indication that the urn contains mostly reds since there are more whites when there are more reds. Daddy says that this is because the whites are "correlated" with the reds.

This is maybe the coolest experiment ever!

A postcript: I've started thinking up and designing more of my own experiments. Yesterday's experiment asked the following question: Do you get more soap bubbles when you add the soap before adding the water or after. To conduct this experiment, I got two identical Dixie cups. In the first cup, I put in one squeeze of liquid soap, filled to the top with water, and observed the number of bubbles. I then filled the second cup to the same level and added one squirt of liquid soap after it was filled. I observed that the second cup had a lot fewer bubbles than the first.

Conclusion: Soap first produces more bubbles than soap added after.

Daddy was very impressed at the quality of this experimental design.

Metro Train Tour

Yesterday, the three family went out on a photo tour of the Metro. I had the idea that it would be neat to take pictures of the various stops for the Metro train as well as taking pictures of the trains, the stations, the turnstiles, the ticket selling machines, and so on. Armed with Daddy's camera, we went off on the tour. Click here to see the tour.

First stop, Dupont Circle. As you know, there's a really huge escalator in Dupont Circle. Amazingly, Nainnie went up and down this escalator a bunch of times when she came to visit us. Pictures 4-6 how the escalator. Picture 6 is a daredevil shot that Daddy took while sitting down on the escalator as we went down it.

Next, we came to the ticket vending machines. There are two types. The red ones only take cash while the blue ones take credit cards. Pictures 7 and 8 show these. I took picture 8 in a Daddy extreme photography pose. I more or less lay on my back in the Metro station (which Mommy thought was yucky) and shot up at the ticket machine.

Metro stations have lots of nifty turnstiles. Picture 9 shows me checking them out.

Next, we rode on the red line and transferred to the blue line at Metro center. Picture 10 shows the transfer point. Then we rode t L'Enfant plaza and switched again to the green line. This took us to Chinatown (picture 11). We roamed around Chinatown, but it was not as exciting as the Metro train. We went back into the Chinatown metro station. Picture 12 shows it. The rainbow thing in the back is a big lit-up Chinese fan piece of artwork.

We rode the red line back to Dupont Circle where we went up a different big escalator (pictures 13 and 14) before arriving at the top (picture 15). We stopped at the Dupont Circle fountain for a lollipop break (pictures 16 and 17) before heading home.

Sad postscript: We got home just in time to watch the Steelers lose a heartbreaker to the Falcons. Daddy and I were waving our "terrible socks" (really just my yellow socks) to try to help the Steelers.

Dali and the Ghost

I don't really like to follow the rules when it comes to making things. When coloring, I like to do it my own way--purple hair, pink clouds, and so on. Same thing when it comes to activity books. Sometimes I try to get the answers right, other times I try to get the answers wrong. A "perfect" score is when I can get them all wrong. Well, in this vein, Mommy and I were making Halloween decorations yesterday. One of the decorations we were making were ghosts. We have foam ghost bodies and sticky eyes, etc for other parts of the ghost. Mommy made ghosts with faces that looked like this:

* *
g

_____

where * = eye, g = nose, and _______ = mouth

My ghost face looked like this:

*
_______
*
g

I like my ghosts to be different.

Texas Hold 'Em

Daddy brought home some poker chips the other day after I spent the previous evening in rapt attention at this year's World Series of Poker. I give a lot of the gys on that show nicknames like handsome guy (the ultimate winner, Jamie Gold), sunglasses guy, fat guy, ugly shirt guy, yellow dog guy (Allen Cunningham, who always wears a yellow shirt with a white dog on it), and so on. One guy, Leif Force, who has very bad hair, was eliminated while I was watching. I was sort of happy about this since I decided I didn't like him.

In addition to the guys, I like to make predictions about which guy has the better hand. I now know that two aces is the best hand to start and that you should fold if you have a deuce-seven off suit.

Anyway, Daddy and I have now been playing full-blown Texas Hold 'Em at home. It's hard for me to remember all the combinations of the cards. And keeping track of the shared card in the center and how they relate to my "hole" cards is tough. But I love playing, and I especially love pushing my chips into the pot. One of my favorite things is going "all-in" and seeing if I win a big pot.

Planes, Trains, and Boats

We had a great day of transportation last Sunday. First, we went on the Metro train to the Mall area between the Washington Monument (which I learned is an obelisk) and the Capitol. While there, Daddy brought a bunch of sheets of paper, and we made some paper airplanes. We tried to figure out whether airplanes fly better when launched into the wind or away from it (into the wind is better) and to figure out which model of plane flies the best. It seemed to me that the origami box plane was the best design---followed by a plane called "The Master". After that, we walked to the tidal basin where we went on the paddle boats. I was a bit nervous about the paddle boats but soon came to appreciate their many advantages. It was a fun day to spend as a family.

Champagne Celebrations

This weekend, I saw the deciding fourth playoff game of the Yankees-Tigers series. Daddy has had several conversations with me instructing me never to root for the Yankees, so naturally, I was cheering hard for the Tigers that afternoon. When the Tigers finally managed to win, I got to witness a truly odd celebration. They taped cellophane all through the locker room and got out a bunch of champagne. While I recognized the champagne (it's the wine with the coolest type of cork), I didn't understand the need for cellophane. When Mommy and Daddy have wine, they don't cover the house in cellophane. Daddy explained that the wine was mostly not for drinking but rather for spraying on one another. Sure enough, the players ran and jumped into the locker room and proceeded with the sprayfest. Some of the players even wne back out to the stands and sprayed the people in the first couple of rows with champagne.

While I liked the idea of the players celebrating like this, I wasn't sure I would want to get squirted were I in the stands. First, I tried to gauge how far he spray might go. It seemed like it went in about four rows and not beyond. So if I were in the fifth row I'd be safe. But what if I had a REALLY good seat in the first couple of rows. Daddy explained that we could always move back in that circumstance before the players started squirting. I then thought that maybe if I wore a hat my hair wouldn't get wet from the champagne. I didn't mind the idea of my clothes getting wet, but definitely not my hair.

At the end, I decided that I'd really like to be in the stands for a champagne celebration. Especially one where the Oakland A's were celebrating.

Japanese Engineering

Yesterday, Felix came over to visit us. I kept confusing his name with Phillip, another of Daddy's work friends who I've met. I told Felix that I was very excited to see him since he taught me the hard boiled egg tapping game. (This is the game where you tap two eggs together and the one that doesn't break wins.) I explained to him my strategy---I try to figure out which is the stronger egg. Then I insist that the other person keep her egg still while I do the tapping. Ususually this strategy wins. Felix was impressed.

Next, we had a paper airplane flying contest with three guys. We picked our airplane teams when Daddy was out of the room, so he got the dregs of the airplanes. In both contests, Felix managed to win thanks to a Japanese plane. The reason is that he picked a plane called a shiburu in Japanese. A shiburu is a Japanese origami version of the standard paper airplane, but, as you might imagine, it's got a lot more folds than the usual plane. It flies very far and straight, which is an advantage in this contest since distance determines victory. Felix kept saying it was the triumph of superior Japanese engineering---sort of like the Toyota.

Sirens

Yesterday, we had an incident where a paper airplane set off our house alarm. Today, it was bears that did it. As you know, I love my stuffed bears. I like to surprise Daddy in the morning by having the bears "fly" down the stairs to greet him. Today, the bears flew down and banged into our front door with a thud. Apparently, this was enough for the alarm to think that the bears were intruders trying to get in, and the sirens went off. This led Mommy to propose a new rule in the morning---no bears, planes, and so on until the alarm is switched off. Since I don't like the sirens, this seems like a sensible rule.

Greetings from the land of the Metro train

This weekend, Mommy and I flew to DC on my favorite airline, JetBlue. Daddy greeted us and showed us around. My room is great. It has a gold coffee table and a couch with sparkly pillows on it. I also have an enormous bed. I like our vacation house a lot.

Over the weekend, Daddy and I got on the Metro train---the best train ever---and visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I wanted to make sure to see all the best parts, so we quickly took off to the exhibit with the aircraft carrier. I told the planes when to take off and land from my spot in the tower of the aircraft carrier. I also got to see a cool plane with a spinning propeller that has the engine on the outside. The engine spins along with the propeller. We saw some planes from World War II and figured out where the machine guns and cannons were on these planes. I also like the wheelwells---little circles underneath the planes where the landing gear can tuck in.

Best of all was the "How Things Fly" exhibit, which has lots of cool stuff for kids. We went to two shows at this exhibit. One was on paper airplane building. I built my plane and tried to fly it through the hoop to win a prize. It was not easy to get it to fly through. Still, it was fun. I volunteered to be the "line leader" which meant that I got to go first in flying my plane. We also went to the "how things fly" demonstration, where we saw lots of cool experiments. Again, I was the first volunteer and got to use a Magdeburg sphere. This is a sphere which is easy to open when there is air inside it, but almost impossible when there's not. I pulled and pulled, but couldn't open it when the air was taken out. Several people said I was the star of the show since I did a lot of smiling and chatting with the person doing the experiments. After the show was over, I told him that I knew about a particularly good kind of jet airplane---Jet Blue.

We learned all about the four forces affecting flight: lift, thrust, drag, and gravity. We decided to test these out at home by buying a paper airplane book and making paper airplanes. Daddy is mostly in charge of the making part, but I'm in charge of the decorating and flying. Since we have a big staircase, it's fun to fly them from way up high on the stairs to the living room down below. We've been doing some experiments by varying the flaps of the planes to see how this affects the way they fly. We've learned that by making flaps that tilt up, the plane gets more lift and stays in the air longer. We've also tried varying the thrust. When you give a plane more thrust (a bigger push), sometimes it can make a loop de loop. It tends not to do this when it has less thrust.

We also had a couple of accidents with our planes. The most serious one involved the plane banging into the security system and setting off the alarm. It made a loud siren noise. Daddy disarmed it and told the security guys that it was just a paper airplane that triggered it. Paper airplanes are very cool.

Some Pictures from DC

Right now, Mommy and I are in California while Daddy's in DC. I talked to him yesterday and told him how much I was looking forward to going to the Air and Space Museum. That's the best musem. Anyway, Daddy asked to borrow my weblog t post some pictures he took n DC. The first are a series of shots of the Capitol from a variety of angles. The statue in a couple of the shots is James Garfield. Next comes a couple of cactus shots from the National Botanic Garden and finally some shots of artworks from the National Gallery. You can find them all here.

Glittery Show

I love glittery shows. Last night we had a really cool one. Daddy got out his tripod and set his shutter speed to something really slow so we could take some pictures of the show. Here they are.

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

This weekend was a great weekend for golf. The PGA Championship occurred this weekend, and I was very interested in the fate of my favorite golfer, Tiger Woods. I was also interested in the giant trophy awarded to the winner of this tournament (pictured above). As you know, I love big trophies.

To celebrate the joys of golf, we got out the clubs and practiced hitting and putting and generally playing with golf balls. Daddy also invented a Thomas golf game, which I then modified. In this game, each player has a Thomas engine (Daddy had Mavis and I had Percy) and they have to "drive" up the putting green and into the hole. The person whose train makes it into the hole in the fewest "strokes" (pushes) wins the hole. This is a pretty fun game.

Santa Cruz and a Day Out with Thomas

Here are some pictures form when Nainnie visited us. We went to Santa Cruz to hang out on the beach and then we went to "Day Out with Thomas" in nearby Felton. It was a great trip.

See the pictures here.

Let's Go Oakland

Lately, I've been obsessed with the Oakland A's. I like to see them in the newspaper. I like to watch them on TV. I like to look at my baseball cards. But, most of all, I like to go to the stadium to see them play. On Saturday, Daddy and I were watching an A's game, and I asked when we could go again. Daddy came up with a good idea---tomorrow. So off we went to see the A's play the Devil Rays. It was Eric Chavez backpack day, so I got a cool backpack in yellow and green with Eric Chavez's picture on it. I really like it.

The game was great. I had cotton candy and lemonade. I also led a lot of the cheers. I would start yelling "Let's go Oakland" and then clapping and soon our whole row was joining in the chant. The game was exciting too. After falling behind 1-0, Frank Thomas (aka "stick guy" since he uses a steel rebar to warm up in the on-beck circle) got a single. Then Eric Chavez hit a soaring home run to right. The A's added a run in the 8th and Huston Street closed out the 9th for a 3-1 win.

When we got home, we replayed the game with "balloon baseball". In this sport, the balloon is the ball and a piece of cardboard from a wrapping paper tube is the bat. It's a really fun game. I like to pretend to be sitck guy when batting and Danny Haren when pitching. My fascination with Danny Haren comes from a bobble-head I have of him. Apparently, the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, was kind enough to send it to me.

Here are some photos of me in my A's gear as well as some wine country photos from Grammy's current visit. Click here to see.

Cards and the Art of Trash Talking

Well, not exactly trash talking, but there is a certain set of fun expressions that go with card playing. Sure, there are the usual expressions like deuce for 2 and lady for queen, but then there are some other expressions I like to use. Here are some:

"I've got a hand like a foot" when my hand is not especially good.

"I've got a dilemma" when I'm faced with a tough choice about which card to discard.

"It's time for the dreaded...x" when throwing down a card that's not especially high in rank.

Surprise Going Away Present

This morning I made a going away present for Nainnie. I like all my presents to be surprises, so I went through some measures to keep everything secret. First, I made her a colorful envelope out of construction paper, which I then decorated with stickers. Next, I made a card to go in the envelope. Rather than drawing pictures on the card, I wanted to express myself in words. I asked Daddy to come and help me by being my secretary while I dicated what I wanted to say. I wrote that I wanted Nainnie to have a very nice time and to get off her plane safely. Then I told her I loved her "really much". Finally, in a bt of deception, I wrote that the message was written by Thomas the Tank Engine. But, just in case she was really fooled, I signed it, "Love, Aidan."

Some Photos

Here are some photos of me in wine country.

Napa July 2006

Here are some photos Daddy took when he was in Berlin recently.

Berlin