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Sage words for programmers everywhere:

Ain’t that the truth…

Back in the day, when particle physicists were creating the list of subatomic particles and putting together what’s known as the Standard Model, they named the six types (“flavors”) of quarks as follows:

up
down
charm
strange
truth
beauty

I always thought those last two were particularly poetic, but unfortunately over time truth and beauty became known as top and bottom. A few years ago there was quite a bit of excitement when the top quark– the most massive one, and thus the most elusive to create in a particle accelerator– was “found”. It would have been fun to read about how “truth had been found” instead.

Anyway, I still like to refer to them as truth and beauty, just as I continue to refer to Pluto as a planet. This evening I was reading an article about the discovery of a couple of new elementary particles (Xi_b and Xi_b*) at the Large Hadron Collider. To my delight, the article I was reading mentioned that the particles are comprised of three quarks: strange, down, and beauty. Aha!

It’s good to know truth and beauty are alive and well.

The adventure continues. This afternoon Alex, Laralee, and I drove down to Boulder for a tour of the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) campus. It was about 35 degrees and we were walking around for over an hour, but at least it wasn’t 10 degrees like it was a few days ago!

CU is a big school, with about 30,000 students, and covers a lot of ground. It was definitely a different experience than our recent tour of Colorado School of Mines. Unlike Mines, which is almost entirely focused on engineering disciplines, CU is a true “university” and engineering makes up around 25% of student enrollment. Still, they have impressive research work, and their physics department is world-renowned (they have three Nobel laureates on the physics staff!). Alex doesn’t plan to go into physics, but it’s nice to know that CU has strong science programs.

Laralee said she was pretty bored after the tour. Like our earlier trip to Golden, I found it really exciting to see the campus and picture Alex attending college. And, yes, it brought back memories of my college days as well.

For the past few weeks I’ve been hounding Alex to work on scholarship applications. There are tons of scholarships available, and there are even web sites that consolidate them pretty nicely so you can skim lists of hundreds of them and select ones that seem interesting or applicable. He’s been working on the applications, albeit slowly, and today I hope some of the harsh reality of the cost of a college education will be motivating to him.

I did some quick research and found these estimated annual prices for the four schools Alex is considering:

Colorado School of Mines – $31,023/year
University of Colorado Boulder – $26,933/year
Brigham Young University – Provo – $16,163/year
Brigham Young University – Idaho – $11,483/year

Holy smokes. Those first two will cost over a hundred grand for a full degree. I sure hope he finds some sweet scholarships…

Monday night Kyra’s symphonic band performed with the University of Colorado band. The high school group had been invited to join the CU players, which was a pretty big honor.

Mom and Dad had commented in the past that if any of our kids had a special performance or event, they should invite Grandma and Grandpa to come visit. So Kyra did, and they were able to schedule the trip. It was really great.

When we arrived at the CU auditorium, Mom was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to see Kyra at all. There are a lot of players in the band, and only a few of them are visible– most are in the back or behind their music stands. Fortunately, Kyra is first chair flute which means she always sits on the right side of the conductor, on the end chair closest to the audience. Sure enough, when the students came out and took their seats, we could see her easily.

The band played well, and Kyra had several solos that were really good. She’s definitely a strong flautist– it’s hard to remember the early days when she sounded more like a squeaky wheel.

Nice job, Kyra!

Zack has an iPad Mini for school– all of the students get to “lease” one for the year, and the teachers use them as part of their curriculum. It’s a nice program, and I think it helps the students learn how to use technology every day. Of course the students look at it as an opportunity to install the latest Minecraft mod or Candy Crush game.

Zack has tinkered with it a bit, and now he can enable Siri and ask her:

“Who am I?”

To which she replies:

“Your name is Popo, but you asked me to call you the Chinchilla Master.”

Of course that’s in the semi-robotic voice of Siri, which probably makes it even funnier. I don’t know where the Chinchilla Master came from, but Zack chuckles every time he does it. I love it– his sense of humor is as goofy as mine.

Alex scored a 32 on the ACT twice but I encouraged him to take it again to see if he could improve on his score. Since he’s been working on college applications and scholarships, I think he saw the benefit an impressive ACT score could give him. So last month he went in for a third time.

Today he checked his score.

34!

Nice. He scored a perfect 36 in science (interestingly, the only section on which I did not score a 36 back in 1989). He’s pretty stoked about it, and hopefully it’ll translate into easier admissions to colleges and some more scholarship money.

We just came home from Alex’s black belt graduation ceremony. After about five years of hard work at Origin Martial Arts, he received his first-degree black belt and a pretty spiffy black gi.

He’s been attending two or three nights a week for all these years– quite a commitment, especially for someone as busy as he is lately. It’s been a lot of fun for him, and also very rewarding to finally achieve this. Nice job, Alex.

Well, tonight’s the night. We’ve had our Halloween decorations up for a couple of weeks now, and– like Christmas– all of the preparation always comes down to one final day. One of my favorite decorations is this little construction-paper craft that Alex made when he was something like five years old:

I don’t even know how it’s survived this long, but every year we tape it up on a wall somewhere.

Since Alex is 17 and Kyra is 16, neither of them felt like it would be appropriate to go trick-or-treating. Alex went over to a friend’s house where they were planning to jump off the roof (on to a crash pad) to scare kids. Uhh. I don’t think it happened, although it reminded me of the good old days when Dirk and I camped out on the roof of his house on Halloween and whenever someone approached the front porch, we’d drop a Cabbage Patch Kid who was tied to a noose. Hilarious! Kyra went to a friend’s house to watch a movie– apparently it was going to be something scary but ended up being The Dark Knight Rises. Go figure.

Anyway, Zack is the last trick-or-treater in the family, so he spent all of ten minutes planning and creating his costume. Behold… the hobo!

Basically these were some random old items I had stashed in our costume box in the crawlspace. After about five minutes he realized the afro wasn’t going to be a lot of fun as he walked the neighborhood, so it came off and he was basically some guy wearing torn jeans and the remains of a flannel bed sheet. Ahh, creativity these days.

I quit work a little early this afternoon because we’d planned to carve pumpkins as a family. Well, it turned out no one actually wanted to do it. We had five nice pumpkins on our front porch, so I went ahead and did a couple myself.

First there’s the classic one that I do every year:

Then we had a tall skinny one so I really went wild and did something completely different:

The other three? They sat on the porch as boring old pumpkins.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm from the fam about this holiday, I always think it’s a good time. Happy Halloween!

Today’s the deadline for Alex to send his senior picture to the high school. Of course we hadn’t done anything about it until now, and we weren’t really inclined to spend a few hundred dollars on the professional sitting because this photo will be used in the yearbook (which Alex doesn’t care about) and for a two-second part of the senior slide show. So Alex and I went to the back yard and he stood in front of the neighbors’ bushes.

A bit of image editing to adjust the colors and remove a few prominent zits, and it turned out pretty decent.

I remember when I was in high school, I had a pretty bad situation with acne for a while. Back in those days, without digital photography they actually retouched the physical prints with some airbrushing. They removed all of my crazy zits, and the resulting picture didn’t even look much like me because I hadn’t had a complexion like that for years. At least Alex didn’t inherit that from me.