Blog

My Guide To The Doctors

I made this for my wife

I made this tongue-in-cheek guide for my wife’s amusement.

When I was a new fan of the British science fiction television show Doctor Who, I had a lot of trouble keeping straight all of the incarnations of the Doctor. This was because the Doctor had the annoying habit of regenerating into a different actor every so often as the series progressed over the course of 50 years. So I started giving each one of the incarnations a nickname just for my own personal use.

My conversations with my wife, Tamara, who is far more knowledgeable about all things Whovian than me, would then go something like this:

“Doesn’t the First Doctor look like Franz Liszt?”
“You mean William Hartnell?”
“I guess so. Which doctor is “Patches”?”
“What?”
“You know, the one that dresses like Patches the Clown.”
“You mean the Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker? And he does not!”

Eventually, like most things that I do in our marriage, her exasperation turned into amusement:

“So “Celery Man’s” daughter actually married “Lord Business” in real life?”
“Ha. Yes, the daughter of Peter Davison, who played the Fifth Doctor, married David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor. Her name is Georgia Moffett. You need to write this stuff down.”

She has been bugging me to make an image guide listing all of my nicknames for her Doctor Who Fans Unite fan club, so here it is. Feel free to copy it and share it. My fan-made guide is under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license, so feel free to copy, modify, and share it so long as you give credit and it’s not for commercial gain. After all, I do not own the images and I am using them for fun as a fan.

Whether you are a fan of the older series or of the new, check out the Doctor Who Fans Unite meetup if you want to be a part of a local group who love the Doctor in all of his various forms.

Periodic Window Of Elements

My wife was dropping off our son Alton at his summer drawing class downtown and she saw this displayed in one of the campus buildings at a local private school. The periodic window of elements?

IMG_4234

The LEGO Movie

lego movie

I just saw The LEGO Movie with my son Alton and everything is awesome!!! It is The LEGO Group’s first feature-length comedy adventure film, although they have come out with other, shorter LEGO films before this one, covering such subjects as Bionicle, Hero Factory, Clutch Powers, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars. The LEGO Movie is directed and co-written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller and is distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures.

The movie is about Emmet Brickowski, an ordinary construction worker with no special qualities. He builds things with the aid of instruction manuals, and even uses one to manage his daily life. He meets Wyldstyle, a woman who is searching for the Piece of Resistance, an object capable of stopping a doomsday superweapon called the Kragle. Wyldstyle takes Emmet to Vitruvius, a wizard who explains that he and Wyldstyle are Master Builders capable of building anything they need, both with great speed and without instruction manuals.

The ability of these LEGO characters to manipulate their own LEGO universe offers the adult viewer some ontological questions that is in part what makes this movie clever and funny. The conflicting worldviews between conformist building (do not deviate from the instructions) and creative building (construct your desires from anything available) are expressed throughout the movie and remind me of how different people treat LEGO bricks.

Also, several websites come to mind. LEGO Education is the part of The LEGO Group that offers several STEM building kits for students to explore and to work hands-on through practical experience and demonstration.

LEGOengineering is a website developed by the Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach with the support of LEGO Education to inspire and support teachers in bringing LEGO-based engineering to all students.

Besides the obvious use of using LEGO building materials for design and construction, LEGO bricks can also be used to provide an analogy for atoms, molecules, and their reactions. Scott Halpern at ChemistryUnderstood.com has used LEGO bricks to explain atomic theory.

Texas Tech University’s GK-12 Building Bridges program participants Arla Jo Anderton Gideon, John Como, and Jennifer Hortman (a high school chemistry teacher, a science PhD candidate, and a master’s candidate in math, respectively) developed a lesson module for using LEGO bricks to teach balancing chemical equations.

Along those lines, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Edgerton Center offers a Chemical Reactions lesson that introduces to students molecules, atoms, chemical notation, and chemical compounds through an engaging hands-on wet lab and LEGO brick models of atoms.

Remember, LEGO is not only from the Danish phrase leg godt which means play well, it is also Latin for I study or I put together.

50th Anniversary Of Doctor Who

doctor who 50th

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the British science fiction television show Doctor Who.

The show was first broadcast on BBC1 at 5:16 PM GMT on Saturday, November 23, 1963. The show ran for 26 seasons on BBC1 until it was suspended in 1989. In 1996, a single television movie was broadcast on the Fox Network. In 2005, Doctor Who finally returned and is currently being broadcast once more on BBC television as a direct continuation of the 1963–1989 series and the 1996 television movie. This makes it the longest running science fiction televison series.

The BBC is celebrating the 50th anniversary by broadcasting simultaneously in 94 countries The Day Of The Doctor, a special episode written by Steven Moffat.

600_19919263

Whether you are a fan of the older series or of the new, check out Doctor Who Fans Unite if you want to be a part of a local group who love the Doctor in all of his various forms.

tardis

While you are at it, download and build your very own paper TARDIS and join in on the celebration!

Anatomies

I was familiar with Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ previous book Periodic Tales, so when I saw his new book Anatomies at our neighborhood library I was eager to read it. This time, the author offers his entertaining blend of science, history, and culture on the subject of the human body.

Aldersey-Williams tells an engaging narrative that spans from ancient body art to modern plastic surgery. He witnesses the dissection of a human body, tries his hand at drawing in an art class, and visits a morgue. His stories do not just come from science and medicine, but also from the works of artists, writers, and philosophers throughout history: Rembrandt to Frankenstein, Descartes to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like a good friend having a conversation over coffee, he shows how attitudes toward the human body are as varied as our postmodern culture, as he talks about fig leaves, shrunken heads, Einstein’s brain, bloodletting, tattooing, and fingerprinting, as well as other things.

I bought a copy for my own library.