I wish someone could just lay a palm on me and make all the anxiety that comes with teaching and working at a school magically dissolve.
I wish someone could just lay a palm on me and make all the anxiety that comes with teaching and working at a school magically dissolve.
Is tumblr better or worse than it was a year ago?
I’m not freaking out every night worrying if I prepared enough for class.
Funny: saying ‘I think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 seconds.
Pretty Funny: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 minutes.
Pretty Creepy: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 hours.
Creepy: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 days.
Kind of Sweet: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 weeks.
Pretty Sweet: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 Months.
Sweet: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 years.
Funny: saying 'i think I love you’ to someone after knowing them for 5 decades.
The fascinating thing about putting human feet on things that aren’t human is that as you get further from the human baseline, it starts out funny, then becomes creepy, then goes back to being funny again. It’s not a continuum.
Like, human feet on a duck: funny.
Human feet on a crab: creepy.
Human feet on a refrigerator: hilarious.
I think roughly the reverse is true for putting nonhuman feet on a person, both in terms of intensity of reaction and the feeling evoked.
Furniture feet on a human: nonsensical to moderately discomforting.
Crab or other invertebrate feet on a human: intriguing aesthetic, artsy even
Duck feet on a human: No.
Let me tell you, my friends, of the story of me and this cursed tumbr post. I am enraged and horrified at the depths to which you have managed to plunge me, oh demons of intellectual curiosity.
Above you have the Post. Heinous as it is. There it stands. And upon reading the first half of its damnéd text, I thought to myself, “it’s not a linear continuum, it’s a sine wave.”
Then I continued to read the thrice-bedeviled second passage, I said, “This is a shifted sine, or perhaps a cosine, methinks.”At which point I found myself in Excel. With a spreadsheet. I don’t actually remember opening the spreadsheet, but I blame this upon the spell wrought by the discourse above. I dutifully and thoroughly considered the items, and several new ones, to the point of sketching a few of their designs. That calamitous and hellish paper has since been burned over the kitchen sink, as I found I could not look at it without getting sucked back into the mire of this hellish, devil-spawned post.
Here, however, are the final results of my gruesomely insatiable, rigorous analysis.
A table was all well and good but I found myself wondering if it were, indeed, a sine wave, and if so, what sort? And this led, my dear, misguided friends, to a graph.
It is a sine wave, I said, but not one wave, no, it is the addition of several sine waves, and after a three-hour session with the Goddess Desmos and an appeal to the Paragon of Mathematic Wisdom (commonly referred to as @deadhawke ), the closest we got to the mysterious wave was funniness factor = 2sin(what foot is on) + sin(0.5(what foot is on)).
If anyone is able to find a closer estimate, they are free to read this tome of sacred text:http://www.emptyloop.com/technotes/A%20tutorial%20on%20trigonometric%20curve%20fitting.pdf
This very text, thanks be to Einstein, Curie, Tesla, and Hawking, was what served to break me from the spell of This Accursed, Most Evil Post, and brought me back to sanity with a cry of “WHY AM I ANALYSING THE ODDNESS OF MISPLACED FEET???”
And with that, my friends, I go to bed.I applaud your efforts friend, and I have more thoughts on this but it’s 1AM and too late/early to be drawing diagrams, and also I am bad at math.
My favorite thing about this post (I like a lot of things about this post) is that it’s a sideways lesson in data visualization and scientific communication, because if you rearranged the Things axis–Things is not an ordered list, so you could do it however you want–this would not look nearly as satisfying (or like a sine wave at all).
I did try to give the Things an order - from most human to least human. Which is a bit of an arbitrary order, but my thoughts went like this:
- Human: V human-like.
- Duck: has a spine. Has internal bones. More human-like than, say,
- Spiders/crabs/other invertebrates of the leggy sort: Alive, but not-human-like, mostly just weird
- Furniture: Not even alive, my dudes.
Which just proves I spent too much time on this.
Aha! A reasonable rubric (and I appreciate the reply!) though I’ll point out that the graph also posits that Human, Duck, Invertebrates, and Furniture are equally spaced along the axis of…um…let’s call it Thing. If I were designing a lesson plan to teach data literacy with this graph, this is the part where I would ask everyone to brainstorm what the units on the Thing axis might be.
So I have been in a new job for just about two months now, and I love it. I love the people and the place, but most importantly I love the work. For the past ten years or so I was an educator, teaching, coordinating professional development, and building academic programs in schools. It was ok, but it didn’t light that fire inside me. After two months on the job, solving problems with code every day, I know I made the right decision. The best part is that I’m learning so much new stuff about Ruby and JavaScript and DevOps and Frameworks… and that’s part of my job too! Before I used to do it in my off-time. Now I might even get back to the hobbies I put aside while I was learning to program.
In the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking about this blog and wondering how I might incorporate programming into it more.
We shall see…
In the meantime, if you have dreams, be patient with yourself, make decisions with them in mind, and don’t give up.