What are thaumatropes you ask? Thaumatropes are Victorian spinner toys. In this case they are also Eli’s birthday party invitations. I got the idea from my new favorite author Ester K. Smith. The thaumatropes are from a book called Magic Books & Paper Toys. You hold the strings, twist and see the robot open and close his eyes and mouth. Eli is obsessed with them. While I was working on them, he claimed all of my prototypes and goofs.

You can also see the buttons I made as party favors in the foreground. Eli can’t decide which robot he wants to keep for himself. I have this sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be making four or five more buttons for him to keep for his very own.

I have gotten a ton of crafting tools (the button maker! and a Bind-it-all!) and books at Christmas and since then. There’s going to be many, many craft/making things posts in the days to come.

“That says ‘player’s handbook’. There’s a woman on the cover. Why is she holding some fire?”

“I guess because she thinks it looks cool.”

“Oh, look! There’s a dragon and he’s holding a thing to fight with!”

It’s also nice to see Wizards of the Coast returning to tradition and placing a woman with semi-covered breasts on the cover.

Congratulations, Barack Hussein Obama.

And now comes the hard part. Best of luck, to you and to all of us.

Today we did some painting since it was way too cold and snowy to go outside. Here are the kids in action:

Click the photo for more painting!

Also, here’s a photo I got of the kids watching tv. They aren’t often that still that close to one another so I had to memorialize it.

He’s Just Not That Into You.
Still Waiting.
Patriotville.
Serious Moonlight.
Youth in Revolt.
Drag Me to Hell.
After.Life.
Planet 51.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel.

Nine movies, all scheduled for release in 2009. One thing in common.

Justin Long.

Justin Long!

JUSTIN LONG!

The smirk is inescapable.

Also, I have now typed “Justin Long” enough times that his name looks very strange to me.

This factoid courtesy of last night’s WhatTheCast taping, in which we pre-judged the 2009 movies.

You can tell someone is a child of the 80s if they make a Gauntlet joke. But you can tell what kind of geek they are by which character they use when they say, for example, “Wizard needs food, badly!”

This morning while driving the kids to school the temperature was 19° F at 9 a.m. It was snowing heavily but the sun was shining as well. The sun caused the snow to sparkle like glass as it was swirling in the breeze. It was like being on the inside of a snow globe.

This is probably not unusual for those of you that live in snowier climes. For me, it was quite remarkable.

A haiku from RISD’s President John Maeda.
Clifton Burt turned it into this awesome sign.
Originally spotted on the Make Blog.

Several years ago, a friend from church graciously gave me a trunk load of her son’s toys. He was turning 13 and I guess that means some sort right of passage by ditching all of his kid toys. One of the things in the stash was LEGO Creator: The Race to Build It Board Game and it has languished on the shelf in Eli’s closet for several years. The recommended playing age is 7-10 so I didn’t think we could really do much with it for at least another year. The past week Eli has asked multiple times to play the game. Today he wore me down and I took it off the shelf.

This game is so cute! And because Eli is reading now, it totally works for us. It is exactly what you would imagine a LEGO game would be. You race around the board collecting pieces and the first to finish the project from his/her card wins.

I thought when I first looked at the board, it would be too simple and the game play portion is very easy. Roll a die, move around the Monopoly-like board and follow the directions on each square. The squares tell you how many and what kind of bricks you can pick up.

The project cards are the real fun though. There’s about 20 cards and they are color coded for difficulty. One half of the card shows the kind of bricks you need. They are drawn actual size so as you are collecting you can place them on your card to remember what you’ve picked. The other half are the standard LEGO instructions for building your project. We had an awesome time building our projects and Eli did very well following the directions. He did better than I expected given our previous attempts with Lego instructions.

I think this is a great boy game and I am sad that they don’t make it any longer. (Did you catch the $260 price tag at amazon.com?) I think we’ll be playing it again tomorrow.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: There were extra LEGOs and another book in the game box. I sorted out the pieces and bagged them separately from the game. When I started looking at the book, I realized it was a LEGO robot kit. It’s 86 tiny robots to make. Any questions about what Eli and I will be doing for the next couple of days?

Hey, look who’s a confirmed guest at Dragon*Con. Now I guess I should come up with things to talk about.

Actually, that’s not my problem. My real problem is that I have too much I’d like to talk about. I’m going to be doing a live WhatTheCast episode (right, Brian?) and be on the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow panel (note to self: come up with a new funny way to take over the world), so I only have two or three more slots I can fill lest I fall over dead some time around Sunday morning.

So, dear readers, tell me what I should talk about! I’ve got several options already, though I’m always open to more.

Quantum Encryption. Did you know you can encrypt information using simple quantum tools like superposition and entanglement? Sadly it won’t be useful any time soon, but it’s a swifty thing to talk about.

Dark Matter, aka “dude, where’s my mass?” There hasn’t been a lot of new solid data on this, but there are a lot of interesting bits of speculation, and this is something I’ve wanted to learn more about. That’s how I choose my science talks anyway — pick something I’m interested in but don’t know a lot about. Good thing I have an advanced degree in faking the funk.

The Pioneer Anomaly. Pioneer 10 and 11 are headed out of the solar system after slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. The sun’s gravity is slowing them down. However, they’re slowing down more than they should. Why are they doing this? Who knows!

The Physics of Better Gas Mileage. This would be an expansion of the rough calculations I did last year. This was really timely when I first started thinking about it last year!