One thing that Caleb and I really enjoyed doing when he was younger was playing video games together. Due to his premature birth, his fine motor skills were very poor. I thought playing video games would be a fun way to help, thus we bought a PlayStation 2. While he’s still addicted to playing video games and a master with a game controller, I’m not sure how much it helped with his handwriting or other tasks that require fine motor skills. Specifically, I remember playing a few games a lot with him. One was Lego Star Wars which was a two-person game. It was a really fun game, and I remember calling the valuable blue Lego coins “Blue Boys” which I think I got from a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry replaced his favorite t-shirt “Golden Boy” with “Baby Blue.” We played Kingdom Hearts and Tomb Raider, in particular Tomb Raider 2, a lot. These weren’t two-player games but I would frequently play when he needed help solving a puzzle or riddle and give him tips to help him get through certain levels. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was another fun game we played a lot.
Unfortunately, I could never seem to get Caleb interested in much more than playing video games. I would have loved to helped him play baseball, football, basketball, or pretty much any sport, but he just had no interest. His premature birth and difficulty with fine motor skills left him very uncoordinated, so he just wasn’t interested in sports. Plus, he was always afraid that he might get hurt. He also never seemed to be interested in science or building things. While I’m sure he would have eventually discovered video games on his own, I regret having introduced them to him at such a young age. I thought it would help with his fine motor skills, not become an obsession.
I did some science things with his classes in elementary school, but Caleb never really seemed interested. He and his classmates had a lot of fun levitating ping pong balls above hair dryers as shown in the YouTube video. Unfortunately, the physics that produces this behavior–Bernoulli’s Principle–is hard to explain to grade school students.
Amanda and I did a lot of fun things together over the years. Amanda likes to build things, both virtually and in real life. I think she would have been into playing with Legos if Rita hadn’t been so against buying them; she thought they were too much of a mess. I had been working on a research project to show how carbon nanotubes that have a large enough diameter can collapse, and I was looking for a macroscopic example that would also exhibit the behavior. At the nano-scale, it is van der Waals forces that cause this. About that time BuckyBalls (small magnetic spheres) had become a popular office toy. They were later banned in the United States because young kids would eat them, and if they did so on separate occasions they could snap together and pinch two sections of the intestines. The ban has actually been lifted at the time of writing.
Gaussian primitives.
Making a tube from them turned out to demonstrate the nano-scale behavior well; if the diameter of the tube was large enough you can squash the tube and it will remain that way. It turns out you can make all kinds of interesting-looking and behaving things with these magnets, and I got fairly addicted to playing with them. During one summer when we spent a long time in Michigan, Amanda got interested in making things with the BuckyBalls. At that point, I had played with them a lot and understood much of what was possible. There were a few fundamental building blocks you could make to build all sorts of structures. These are shown in the figure and I called them the Gaussian primitives as they are defined by their Gaussian curvature. If you make a ring of six balls and surround it with rings of 12, then 18, etc. balls you will get a flat surface. If you use five, then ten, then 15, etc. rings you will get a cone. Starting from four balls gives you a cone with steeper sides and so on. If you start with seven balls and add 14 around them you get a saddle-like surface. Eight balls give you a saddle surface with more curvature. Cones have positive Gaussian curvature, saddles have negative Gaussian curvature, and a flat surface has zero. Amanda and I had a lot of fun making all kinds of things, and I made a video collage and posted it on YouTube.
Amanda and I also did quite of few science projects over the years as she seemed interested in working on things. Our house had what is called a Russian furnace, or masonry heater, in it. The idea is to burn a very hot fire in the firebox for a short period of time and allow the masonry to absorb and then radiate the heat over a lunch longer period of time. To extract most of the heat from the fire, the exhaust gases exit the house through a winding chimney. A big problem with this is temperature control because there is a lengthy delay between the time the fire is its hottest and when the masonry is their hottest. I had inherited a thermal camera from someone that left Penn State, so Amanda and I decided to use it to do a science project with the Russian furnace. Unfortunately, I appear to only still have the chart we made of the maximum brick temperature over a period of 38 hours.
We also made some fun demonstrations using the BuckyBalls and electromagnets. A BuckyBalls’ diameter is just slightly less than the inner diameter of a classic Bic pen. I thought it would be interesting to make a little coil gun by winding magnet wire around the pen tube. Putting the pen in a drill allowed me to wind a lot of wire quickly, which I then encapsulated in epoxy. Using two BuckyBalls stuck together to control the direction of the magnet poles and some tissue paper to plug one end of the tube, I could get the BuckyBalls to shot (at a low velocity) out of the tube by touching the ends of the magnet wire to a 9-V battery. Amanda helped me put together a little circuit with a solenoid that would respond to a signal sent from my phone using a little app I wrote. I was planning to ramp up the power with high-voltage capacitors but other things put an end to that.
Amanda’s fourth-grade teacher was looking for science demonstrations, so we decided to take the little coil gun in to demonstrate electromagnetism. We also made a little Gauss gun with magnets and a ruler as shown in the image gallery. These are fun because they actually shot the ball bearings quite far if you use a few stages as we did. There are many nice videos on YouTube using high-speed cameras that capture what’s going on. The kids really enjoyed this, much more than the pathetic coil gun, because it’s really difficult to see in real-time what’s happening. I at least had a lot of fun doing this, I think the kids in her class learned something–they all seemed really interested–and Amanda and I had fun getting everything ready.
Another thing that Amanda and I really enjoyed doing together is playing Minecraft. I think it must have been in 2011 that I started hearing about how fun it was, so I downloaded it. I recall not really understanding the fervor for it at first; I could never survive the first night initially. Once I realized what it was all about (there was no guidance in the game) and you needed to craft things, I realized it was quite a bit like The Sims Castaway which Amanda and I had really enjoyed playing together. Amanda and I built some very elaborate worlds and had a lot of fun playing. We installed many different “mods” that had been developed to add new functionality. Before maps were introduced in the game, we would constantly get lost and not be able to find our base. I discovered software that would make maps from the Minecraft world data. This allowed us to get an overview of the world but it didn’t show us where we were relative to our base. We developed a method whereby we would build a huge tower which we called a “twig” at our current location with something indicating a direction. This would show up on the world map as a little protrusion–hence the name “twig”–and allow us to make our way back to our home base. As she got older she continued to play with her friends online and, when the creative mode was introduced, basically used it as a virtual Lego kit to build extravagant houses. She then moved on to playing The Sims 3 and 4, but I think still plays Minecraft a bit, as Amelia seems to be getting interested in it.
Minecraft Home Base
I recently discovered the files defining the world and was able to load them into the most recent version of the game. The home base is shown in the figure to the right; much of it is underground. It’s been fun roaming around seeing all the amazing things we made.
Unfortunately, I never really had the opportunity to find common interests with Amelia. She was quite young when Rita and I separated, and when I had custody of her, Amanda and/or Caleb were usually also there. We did all kinds of things together but never really had the chance to find a common hobby. I spent a whole lot of time pushing Amelia on the swing; she loved to swing. We have, however, been able to work on a few fun projects together and do some fun things since the separation, but I’ll talk about this in another intermission.
It was interesting to see how each kid responded to being pushed on a swing. They all enjoyed it but Caleb never wanted to go very high. Amanda wanted me to push her higher but having the chains go slack was too high for her. Amelia seemed to enjoy having the chains go slack and I don’t recall her ever asking that I not push her higher. She also really enjoyed riding her bike, and I would take her to one park that had a short bike path. We would also ride around the neighborhood when she was good enough for me not to worry about her riding near cars.