Author: TimW

First night outside

TimW2 Comments

May 18 is the first night that Liam and Reid are sleeping on the back porch this season. last summer it became a nearly constant phenomenon. They slept out basically every night for weeks upon weeks. I look forward to seeing how long they will do it this time.

Forecasting COVID deaths in homeschool

TimW2 Comments

In homeschool science with Dad I made a little machine (mathematical model) in Microsoft Excel to try to predict/forecast the future deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. We used an exponential curve to model it. Our equation was deaths = growth rate to the power of days since first time input. The model took a lot of fiddling about to create an accurate representation of the outbreak. It was really fun to make and I learned a lot. I hope you all enjoy it!

COVID-19 Mathematical Forecast

Hope you are all doing well,

Liam

Hiking Pomola

TimW1 Comment
On labor day weekend before school started in full swing, we took one last family summer hike, up Pomola peak in Baxter state park. Reid had a fever but he did it nonetheless!

Campsite

Dinner the first night

A ferret croses our trail. There were two.

First break

The kids soldiered on to the peak!

Lunch at the peak.

Fairly, Reid need an assist on the way down. He’d spent everything he had.

The next morning it was raining and cold. So I cooked pancakes for the little family huddled in the back of the car.

And Liam played piano on the way out.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Tissue, Porch

TimW

The same set of gentlemen (those being Liam, Reid, Wesley, Alden, and I) also created another derivation of Rock, Paper, Scissors, creatively entitled “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Tissue, Porch.” Unlike Salsa, Octopus, Train, which features a sub-game, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Tissue, Porch features a meta-game. Specifically, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Tissue, Porch, is a regular game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, within a larger game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. This is how it goes:

  1. Players start as usual by saying “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” before throwing their choice of any of the five options including Tissue and Porch.
  1. Rock, Paper, and Scissors (RPS) work as usual. R->S->P->R
  1. Porch beats all RPS (because none of those affect a porch). Tissue looses to all RPS (because each of them destroys a tissue). But Tissue beats Porch (because no one wants a gross tissue on a porch).
  2. This means that Tissue (T) and Porch (P), combined with RPS form another RPS system, in which each beats one and it’s beaten by one, in what is called a transitive cycle. T->P->[RPS]->T. So this is a meta game of Rock, Paper, Scissors wrapped around a regular game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.