When kids first enter primary school, they spend their time doing creative things like drawing, painting, building, and experimenting. But after those first years, the creativity stops. Dr. Resnick is working to change that. He and his team have developed new ways to help older students engage with technology in order to encourage them to create and experiment the way they did in kindergarten.
When I commuted to Tysons from DC, I would have lots of time stuck in stop-and-go traffic to consider the reasons and causes for traffic slowdowns. It seemed that often, we’d all be slowing down and then speeding up again for no reason. I always speculated that sudden braking could cause a wave of slowdowns that would propagate backwards for hours/miles, leading to the annoying slow-down-speed-up cycle.
A team of Japanese researchers recently created an experiment to show that the effect of breaking can easily create traffic jams. It’s all just physics. Their experiment shows that when the density of cars on the road passes a certain threshold, traffic jams will be caused simply by the multi-particle interactions of the system. In layman’s terms, drivers inconsistently hitting their breaks will cause a wave of stop-and-go backups behind them.
We finally got some frozen precipitation. It was only an inch of snow, but given where we live, it was enough to delay school for two hours. So the boys got to enjoy playing in the snow, albeit only briefly.
Online real estate company Redfin recently listed its hottest neighborhoods in metropolitan areas across the country. In addition to D.C.’s Petworth and Rockville’s Fallsmead, the list included our neighborhood, Pimmit Hills.
I got a kneeling chair as a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. It’s something I’ve wanted for a while for work since normal office chairs hurt my back after a while.
I didn’t expect, however, for the kids to love it so much. After much fighting over the chair, the kids finally found a way they could both enjoy it.