Capacidad de erosión del agua.

Aprovechando un video que me ha enviado un amigo sobre las recientes inundaciones en la zona de Jerez, se lo mostré a los chavales para que vieran de forma gráfica la capacidad de erosión del agua, de la cual les había hablado en bastantes ocasiones mientras comentábamos unidades de la asignatura de Conocimiento del Medio.

(El video que había incluido aquí ya no está disponible en la web).

Leonardo da Vinci & the Renaissance

Nicolás is now learning about the Renaissance at school. He is being taught the importance of humanism, the return to classical antiquity, ingenuity and observation of your surroundigs, all values that had little to do with the Middle Ages and its mindset. And who better than Leonardo da Vinci to illustrate this new and daring spirit. So, we watched —and commented— BBC's documentary on Leonardo, in three different parts. Here is the link to the first part of episode 1. You will find the rest on YouTube.




What did I learn?
(Nicolás)
I'd say that Leonardo da Vinci was a very knowledgeable person and probably the most intelligent person known to humanity. His work involved science, art and technology and, on the other hand, every scientist we know (besides Leonardo) only studied and worked on one thing that they where good at and they never really studied anything else. Leonardo was a great artist, a great mechanical engineer, a great anatomist and a great philosopher. His real name is actually Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci.

Interpretando un mapa.

Mi esposa vio hace unos meses un mapa de gran tamaño en casa de una amiga, así que decidió comprarse uno en Ikea y colgarlo en casa en una de las paredes de la oficina para que los chavales puedan usarlo cuando les haga falta. Eso sí, les será de bien poca ayuda sin el conocimiento necesario sobre cómo interpretarlo. Esta tarde me reuní con ellos en la oficina, le echamos un vistazo y aprendimos los conceptos básicos para interpretar el mapa geográfico y político, así como los husos horarios y las coordenadas geográficas.

Introduction to computer networking.

My oldest son has been showing some interest for computers lately. So, today I decided to give him an introductory lesson to computer networking using our own home network. For starters, I explained how in the old days most people had desktop computers at home, and these weren't even connected to each other (not to talk of the Internet!). I then explained how, in order to be able to put together a network with a few nodes, you need a way to address each individual component of the network, and how several different schemes had been developed to accomplish this. In the end, though, the Internet became so popular that everyone adopted its mechanism: IP addresses and TCP/IP. At a later stage, the task was connecting those networks with each other, therefore creating the figure of the gateway. I told him about the concept of a subnet, as well as the gateway and broadcast addresses. I then proceeded to explain to him that all this could be configured via a static IP configuration or via DHCP. Finally, I taught him how to find out the IP address assigned to his own computer both on an Apple Mac and a Linux system, and also both using the graphical interface and the command line, before teaching him how to use the ping command.

Echando una mano a los haitianos.

Por desgracia, la educación suele reducirse demasiado a menudo a lo meramente académico. Se interpreta como la transmisión de conocimientos relativos a una serie de disciplinas que nuestras sociedades consideran vitales para desempeñarse en ellas como adultos, y poco más. Sin embargo, la educación integral (esto es, la educación auténtica) no tiene más remedio que incluir la transmisión de valores éticos. Por eso, aprovechando (no se me ocurría otro término) los desgraciados incidentes recientemente acaecidos en Haití, Leslie y yo pensamos que era el momento oportuno de introducir a los niños a la idea de contribuir a una causa justa y echar una mano a los más necesitados. Así pues, les hablamos un poco sobre la situación política, económica y social del país, dónde se encuentra geográficamente, y les mostramos unas imágenes publicadas por la revista Time sobre el terremoto que ha asolado la capital antes de conectarnos al web de la Cruz Roja española para hacer una modesta contribución económica.

A History of Hacking.

There is no doubt that technology dominates and defines today's society. Yet, concepts like that of hacking are quite misunderstood. While at the beginning of the digital era, hacking was considered to be any sort of experimentation that one might do with new devices (especially, if one were to use them for a purpose they had not been originally designed for), it quickly became a synonym for a computer criminal in the 1990s. Computer hobbyists prefer to use the term cracker or black-hat computer hacker for the latter, but the word never truly made it to the mainstream media. As a consequence, most people out there identify hacking with illegal activities.

So, what I was trying to teach my kids with this vitamin is that hacking (in the original sense of the term) could actually be something creative and productive. That most scientists and inventors that have been were actually hackers in this sense. In other words, I tried to promote hacking as conceived by Paul Graham in his book Hackers and Painters: an activity that promotes curiosity, experimentation and creativity, associating disparate ideas and solving puzzles and problems. That is the time honored tradition of hacking, as described also in Steve Levy's classic book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

In order to explain all this, we watched a documentary by Discovery Channel, which tells the story of three well-known hackers: John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch), Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick.

Roasting chestnuts in the fireplace.

All these years, and we never lived in a house with a fireplace... until now, that is. So, since we all like to buy roasted chestnuts when we walk around in downtown Seville, I imagine that there must be a way to roast them at home. The answer, of course, was just a quick search away. WikiHow has an article on How to Roast Chestnuts that seemed easy enough to follow. The same piece also includes a short video by Chef Jason Hills with a quick step-by-step. Using foil and throwing them in there works just as well.