thoughts and posts
Missed learning opportunity
We have grandkid duties this week – since the school is closed for the summer. My wife developed a little program of activities that we are following. It has plenty of playtime on different beautiful playgrounds in the area. On one of these our grandson was very interested in experimenting with sound devices. They are available at many playgrounds now – bells, tubes, shambles – all arranged in colorful displays and child-proof. Here the kids can play with sounds and can use little rubber hammers to bang at the devices – which is in its own right very attractive. He was playing sound flowers – which have different sizes of metal petals that swing at different frequencies when activated by the hammer. It happens so that there were three of these flowers. Little kids can be territorial! So, our grandson operated two of these flowers – aligned with his reach
The wrong way
One of our favorite hobbies is kayaking on the Deschutes River. To simplify the logistics of a kayaking outing we usually find a launch spot, park the car and paddle upriver for as long as we can or have time for and then we turn around and let the current carry us back to where we came from. While there is every so often paddle boarders or kayakers like us most boaters follows a different schema – with the help of a rental outfit, friends or just by leveraging multiple family cars people start upstream and float and paddle down and collect their launch car after the journey is complete. One benefit of our method is that on busy days we get to meet and greet many other boaters. In most cases this is a nod or a friendly hello, but sometimes little conversations are being struck up. Usually, they
Chicken and egg game
I am listening to an audio book by Thomas Friedman “Hot, flat and crowded”. The book talks about the need for energy efficiency and conservation. One example illuminating the implementation of projects along these lines takes the listener to Indonesia, which is home of the orangutans – a species that has been decimated significantly in recent years and which can only be preserved with measures for retaining their natural habitat. The author describes a bit how the orangutans live and at one-point states that they move around in the canopy of trees like Tarzan, to avoid the interaction with snakes, tigers and leopards. The story went on, but suddenly I found myself looking back. Orangutans move like Tarzan? One would think that the Orangutans have been here for a while longer! Turns out that the story “Tarzan of the apes” came out originally in 1912 and a first silent film