Senor Parrot’s Perch

Robots are good for a lot of things, but this is about as good as it gets! I have discovered that someone has made a robot that can make your coffee for you. Now I love my daily grind, but if someone, or something, can grind and brew it for me, well, how can it get any better?Robot Living reported on this fabulous development from Japan.

I’m showing this to the rest of the family and hinting that it would be great for next year’s Father’s Day. I drink enough coffee, all by myself, that Ancora opened a shop around the corner just for me, their best customer.

I’m intrigued by the programming involved. I wonder if I could pull this off with a Lego Robot? Anybody know?

In this video we have a sort of pre-steampunk robot caught on video. Made of wood, armed with two arms and 5 rubber band shooting Gatling guns, and a guy inside. If this wouldn’t scare your cat, nothing will!

From Make Magazine, here is Osamu Kanda’s Ultimate Rubber Band Shooting Robot. This was posted by Marc de Vinck.

If this stuff fascinates you, get Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots by Timothy N. Hornyak. I highly recommend this book. It has a great section on Japan’s early love affair with automatons that has continued through the centuries and is culminating in their preeminence in humanoid robotics. Here is the link to my previous review of Loving the Machine.

The Snake Scientist (Scientists in the Field)
By Sy Montgomery
Photos by Nic Bishop

Bob Mason is a snake scientist. Every year he travels to Manitoba, Canada to study the red-sided garter snakes that mass in amazing numbers about 100 miles north of Winnipeg. By the time the book was written, he had spent 15 years studying these snakes. Along the way he’s made some pretty amazing discoveries about snakes, including how they use their super-sniffing tongues – they smell with their tongues, to follow pheromone trails that lead them where they are going.

The book is a very enjoyable read, aimed at kids at about 5th grade and up. Author Sy Montgomery does a good job of describing the entire milieu of the research in a way that is easy to understand. He also poses questions like a scientist, which is the first step in designing experiments that give reliable results.

Nic Bishop photographed the book. He’s well known for his nature photography and he’s written or collaborated in a number of good books. In The Snake Scientist he found more folks happy to hold snakes than I thought possible. If you’re creeped out by the slithering serpents, then the photographs may spoil the pleasure of reading this book. But if you’re the type who is ready for anything, especially if its a photograph of someone else with a snake, and not yourself, you’ll enjoy this informative venture into science.

Pelican’s Catch (Smithsonian Oceanic Collection)

By Janet Halfmann,

Illustrated by Bob Dacey and Debra Bandelin

Pelican’s Catch (Smithsonian Oceanic Collection) traces a single day in the life of a young brown pelican. Having just learned to fly, the 11-week old pelican awakens and joins a group of pelicans that are flying overhead on their way to catch their breakfast. Brown Pelican still has a lot to learn, diving over and over into the clear blue ocean that surrounds the mangrove tree island where it lives before it gains its first catch.

Along the way, Halfmann depicts the life of a brown pelican very well. She has written this nonfiction book in a story format which allows her to show the bird’s habitat, social life, physical characteristics and behavior withinin the interesting narrative arc of a single day. The facts about the bird aren’t presented as scientific data, but rather as the features and elements of this bird and its environment.

The illustrations by Bob Dacey and Debra Bandelin are superb. The birds soar and dive with so much life and drama. And the final page is enough to make you quit your job and move to Puerto Rico. Say- I do have a friend from Puerto Rico. I’ve met some of his family that live there. Maybe, just maybe, I could do a bit of couch surfing until I can find a job on a boat down there.

I first learned about this book through a review on someone’s blog. I really don’t recall whose it was, but it may have been this review over at The Well Read Child. It does look familiar. I checked out some of the other spots that review science and nonfiction regularly and found this excellent interview with author Janet Halfmann over at Lori Calabrese’s blog Lori Calabrese Writes! I was unfamiliar with Janet Halfmann before reading this book. But now, after reading Lori’s interview with her, I’m looking for more of Janet Halfmann’s books.

The Warlord’s Puzzle

The Warlord’s Beads

The Warlord’s Fish

The Warlord’s Messengers (Warlords)

The Warlord’s Alarm, A Mathematical Adventure

Children’s Books by Virginia Walton Pilegard
Illustrated by Nicolas Debon

Also in the series, The Warlord’s Puppeteers and The Warlord’s Kites, which I haven’t read.

Powerful, rich and proud, the Warlord always seems to find himself in a bind. Young Chuan somehow always gets him out with one sort of invention or another, and always with good, old fashioned clever thinking. Always using his brain, Chuan, and sometimes with the help of his friend Jing Jing, solves every problem using mathematical or scientific principals learned illustrated in another context.

These books are very fun to read. Despite the “Warlord” in every book, there is no violence, except in one, where the young boy, Chuan, and the artist to whom he is apprenticed are kidnapped. Each book emphasizes problem solving, which makes them ideal for stimulating younger students eager to learn. They would also make a great supplement for learning about ancient Chinese culture since they are set in feudal China. At the end of each book, author Virginia Walton Pilegard shows how the Chinese really did use solutions similar to Chuan’s and she includes a fun craft or other activity for kids that applies the same science. The publisher also has study guides available at their website.

Study Guides:
The Warlord’s Beads
The Warlord’s Fish
The Warlord’s Kites
The Warlord’s Puppeteers
The Warlord’s Puzzle

Sindbad: From the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights Retold and Illustrated by Ludmila Zeman

Sindbad, or Sinbad, is one of the great characters of all literature. He sails mysterious seas of from Arabia to India and down the Horn of Africa. In every journey he encounters danger and escapes only by his wits. In many ways, he is the literary sailing rival of Homer’s Odysseus.

Sindbad comes to us from the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, which, according to legend, were told by Scheherazade to the evil king who marries her. Retold and illustrated by Ludmila Zeman, the tales are magical as ever. Her spare language is perfectly matched by her beautiful and engaging illustrations, strongly influenced by Persian art, making this book one to pore over time and time again for it’s detail and beauty.

Zeman has two other Sindbad books to go with this which I haven’t read. They are Sindbad in the Land of Giants and Sindbad’s Secret.

As an extra comment, Nikolai Rimsky Korsokov, a Russian composer from around 100 years ago, wrote a beautiful piece called Scheherazade . It was the first piece of classical music that I loved and probably the reason I continued to listen. It is sensuous and evocative of the stories and has a great sea scene with Sindbad depicted in one of the movements. Listen to it just once and you’ll never forget the voice of Scheherazade, represented by a violin, as she weaves her stories together, night by night.

I had some hum-drum work to do so I fired up iTunes to listen to some podcasts while I hum-drummed along. From Just One More Book podcasts about kids books, I saw that they too had just reviewed You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!
These guys sound Canadian, ay!

They really liked it, too. Even more than me, by the enthusiastic sounds in their voices. And they really loved artist Andre Carrilho’s illustrations.

My review from this morning is over here.

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!

Author: Jonah Winter

Illustrated by Andre Carrilho

When I was a kid, Sandy Koufax was greatest pitcher in the game. He threw harder, faster and better than anyone else playing at the time, or since, or before. It was still the good old days of sports, when we talked about great athletes instead of doping scandals. So I was excited to find You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, a great children’s book about that great baseball player.

This book provides a glimpse into Sandy Koufax’s life during his brief athletic career. A natural athlete, Koufax started attracting attention for his pitching when  he was still a teen. His amazing pitching speed won him a birth with the Brooklyn Dodgers, later the Los Angeles Dodgers, after they moved.

Koufax was not an immediate success. His pitched erratically and he lacked the control to consistently pitch in the strike zone. It was some time before he displayed the greatness that he would later achieve. What happened? How did Koufax develop into one of the greatest pitchers who ever played the game of baseball? No one knows for sure, but one day, after walking four batters in a row to fill the bases, he transformed in an instant, and struck out all the remaining batters and from that minute on he became perhaps the greates pitcher of all time.

Koufax is also famous for his integrity and character. A Jew, he refused to play a game in the world series because it fell on a Jewish holy day. This honorable act showed he truly held the convictions of his faith, putting it before everything else. Nowadays, that level of commitment to one’s beliefs is so rare and almost strange to see. Personally, I find it extremely noteworthy and admirable and it reminds me of Eric Henry Liddell, the amazing athlete from Scotland who ran for England in the 1924 Olympics, who also put his faith and convictions before personal ambitions (see the great movie Chariots of Fire for a glimpse of Eric Liddel).

This book is also noteworthy for some great illustration. It’s really a picture book as much as a biography. Some of the illustrations remind me of renaissance religious paintings. The illustrations frequently emphasize oversized stylized heads, but also offer some great perspectives and convey the strength, motion and grace of baseball. You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! is a must read for your young baseball fans. Adults will enjoy it as well. And if they are around my age or older, they can enjoy recalling the glory days of the sport when character still counted for more than winning, and athletes won without drugs.

Here’s another bio of Koufax. I haven’t read this one yet, but I recall that it was very well received. Sandy Koufax, by Jane Leavy is aimed at the Young Adult and older crowd.

“Before Anyone had heard of Black Beard, Long John Silver, or Calico Jack, there was a pirate named ROGER.”

So begins Roger, the Jolly Pirate, a children’s book written and illustrated by Brett Helquist. Roger was not your scariest pirate, not by a long shot. Instead of a parrot screeching “pieces of eight!”, a chicken perched on his shoulder. He was too happy, too. Never a cause for alarm, his shipmates disparagingly named him “Jolly Roger”.

But one day, as his shipmates battle for their lives, Roger is confined below decks. To win the crews approval he bakes a cake using anything and everything he could find. His plan works, though the way he had planned.

Helquist does a good job here. His story is as silly as his illustrations. This is a good book to read aloud to your young pirates or for your older crew in the early grades to read to themselve – but only if they like to laugh aloud.

Bubble Homes and Fish Farts by Fiona Bayrock
Illustrated by Carolyn Conahan
ISBN 9781570916694

On the strength of several reviews a couple months ago, I went out and got Bubble Homes and Fish Farts by Fiona Bayrock and Illustrated by Carolyn Conahan. I read it through quickly and found it quite good. I thought it would be over the head of my 6-year old, but I also thought that this book may help turn her into a junior naturalist. We learn a lot looking at the world around us and books like Bubble Homes and Fish Farts help us know what to look for and how to look. In particular, this book helps explain how animals use bubbles to survive and thrive in their environment.

My family spends a lot of time exploring a local lake in kayaks or sailboats and we enjoy looking for cool stuff. My 6-year old has an old root beer bottle with a cap that she uses to collect her lake specimens, usually weeds and other floating stuff. She’s already beginning to look closely at nature. As we read through the book last night I spent time talking about what we might find in the lake that’s making those bubbles we see from time to time. Now, we have even more things to look for now. I then reminded her of the spittlebugs inside the foamy bubbles on many of the plants in the neighborhood that we look at while walking the dog. All this was fun for her and made a connection in her mind.

Along the way in this book, I did learn about fish FaRTs, that is, Fast Repetitive Ticks. Herring, at night, swallow air and pass it out the other end, possibly using this to communicate amongst themselves in the dark ocean waters. There’s an experiment for you – how do you test the communication theory? I remember when I was young, and way up north in the frigid taconite country of Hibbing, Minnesota. In winter we’d all be outside shivering and talking excitedly but never hear a word that another was saying. Our words froze up in our breath and fell onto the snow covered playground with hushed clunks. We’d pick a few of our frozen conversations up and take them inside, where they’d thaw out and produce a random, nonsense conversation as our words escaped their frosty prisons. Maybe herring farts will be like that. We just need to pop the bubbles to hear what they’re saying. I can see a research grant proposal here! Stranger ones have been funded.