research gossip

Dear Students,

Yesterday, during the Saturday Science Drawing Jam at the Wisconsin Institutes for discovery, we made drawings from science images to help us guess about things that they could be. A lot of different people of different ages worked together, and we were joined by cartoonist and teacher, Ivan Brunetti. That’s him in the last frame.

Thank you to those of you who volunteered to work with the kids and their parents who came to draw with us.  Sometimes I have to remember how rare this sort of thing is, how rare it is for people of all different ages who are strangers to each other to sit together and draw together in response to a question.

Those of you who came to help made that happen.

Best to you,

An animated chart of 42 North American butterflies

Signily: ASL Keyboard app 

Signily is a really neat keyboard app that lets you type many common ASL signs as images or gifs, in both left and right hands, and in several skin tones. 

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Dear Students,

This was filmed yesterday.  It’s your final project taking shape and making its way to you.

Sincerely,

Dear Students,

What did kids drawings look like in 1240? This.

Scratched on birch bark and discovered in Novgorod, Russia (via Wikimedia)

“The most famous of the birch bark texts are the scribblings of a boy named Onfim. Estimated to have been between six and seven years old when he made them, Onfim idly drew himself as a grown warrior and disguised as a beast; the aspirational art isn’t much different from the drawings of children adorning refrigerators today. Often these seemingly inconsequential relics don’t survive the passage of time.”

One of the Onfim birch bark drawings, showing the boy disguised as a beast (1240–60) (via gramoty.ru)

You can view the archive of Novgorod birch bark manuscripts online

Until the very end when the kid and his mom are behind her in the checkout, and he leans up and whispers loudly:

Other plants have an approach where they use those chemicals to scream HEY SOMETHING IS EATING ME SOMEONE COME EAT IT BACK! Like: are aphids eating at you? Announce to all local ladybugs that you have a big fat buffet crawling on you and they will remove your problem.