What a wave!

Holy smokes, that was awesome!

I've had an awesome response from people both here and in my e-mail since my message went out on the Listserve, and I just want to say thank you all for taking the time to look at my blog and/or send me a note. I plan to respond to everybody soon, either in e-mail or blog posts. A lot of people said or asked things that gave me ideas for things to post, and I definitely want to get into the rhythm of doing that. (My progress right now might be cranking through a textbook, but that doesn't mean I should just post chapter updates here... This sure ain't gonna be an idle blog, at this rate!)

A few people asked me why there wasn't a Twitter link for following the blog, and I kind of gaped a little -- I never thought of doing that. Usually I just grab an RSS link for a blog and tack it into Apple Mail, so putting up a Twitter feed didn't really occur to me. I'm glad to say that's fixed now, if anyone's interested... @RobotFrogBlog is up and running. Thank you to anyone who asked about that!

A lot of people e-mailed their own stories, and one person told me to keep his e-mail handy if I needed help feeling motivated. :D That was terrific. Sometimes hanging on to those words in a special stash of good thoughts is what someone needs to get an extra push. To anyone who e-mailed, thank you for helping me start that precious file.

Again, thank you all very, very much. More to come soon!

Post-Debate PSA

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney claimed during his first debate that he would cut funding (i.e., "the subsidy") for public broadcasting. He made specific reference to Big Bird, of Sesame Street fame.

I'm from a generation that was, quite frankly, raised by PBS. Every day in my home, Fred Rogers, Big Bird, and LeVar Burton were on the air, and really, I think I might have learned more from them than from any school-based teacher I had at the same time. Better yet, this was before satellite and high-speed data were used to deliver instructional content to schools -- as a result, all of the K-12 instructional TV went through PBS stations, and schools just set their VCR's to tape whatever they wanted to save for future use. The happy upshot was that any time I was home from school, I could turn on a PBS affiliate station and watch a wide variety of shows on all kinds of topics. When I say variety, I mean it -- individual series might show up a few times a week, but so many programs were in circulation that quite a while would have to go by between repeats. I still remember a lot of the things I saw. 

But I digress. Let's get back to Big Bird and Sesame Street. Anyone remember this?

The uploader's chosen title notwithstanding, this is one of those things from PBS that I remember fondly. Look at the comments on the video, and you'll see I'm not alone. Keep in mind Sesame Street's target age group -- these aren't the kids that necessarily need lectures about how robots work. The key to engaging these kids was (and still is!) giving them something fascinating to see and then letting their own curiosity go to work. (It's not a huge leap, for example, to picture just what selection of books a sparked kid might gather on their next trip to the library.)

I read a lot of robot books when I was a kid. I can't say I trace my interest back to this one video, but it had to do something for me to remember it for this long.

The fine people at CTW might not still show this video among the many they include in episodes of Sesame Street. I doubt they would (the video is originally from 1986). What they are still doing is engaging young minds, again, quite possibly far better than most schools would. While PBS isn't carrying K-12 resource programming anymore, they are showing plenty of programming that's sophisticated enough to draw a kid's imagination -- and nowadays, a lot of it is STEM-based. (While the internet is a fantastic conduit, let's face facts. A TV tuned to PBS or PBS Kids is a much safer means of disseminating knowledge to children than is the internet, even with the various parental controls in place.)

Losing funding for PBS isn't an academic issue. It's not a matter of having more pledge marathons to make up the shortfall. Losing funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting means that the vital resource that provides and supplements so very, very many children's educations would no longer be able to function at all. If you're from a generation that grew up watching PBS, stop to consider what growing up would have been like without having that resource to grow on.

We have absolutely nothing in this country that could possibly replace this. At all. Anywhere. We can't cut this. We must preserve it.

Listserve to Blogger...

Wow.

I'd had this blog sitting idle for as long as I had my Google account -- the big G tacks on a Blogger account automatically once you set up a credential with them -- and I kid you not, last Friday night I was mulling over using it to track my field change. Sunday morning I had an invitation to post on the Listserve. (If that ain't kismet, I don't know what is.) I spent a day deciding just what I wanted to say, and I figured that I could possibly get some eyes and opinions on my (evil?) master plan by telling my story on the list. As far as the timing of these two independent events go, I'm pretty pleased. (For the hat trick, tomorrow's my birthday. Happy quirks like this always give me a smile.)

What I posted to the list read as follows:

I just graduated in May with a MS in biology, focused on animal physiology and biomechanics. I learned many things about myself during my graduate education; in particular, I learned that I truly don't want to continue in biology. Suffice to say, killing my research animals made quite an impression.
Throughout my studies, I had a growing interest in pointing my biomechanics knowledge less toward animal systems and more toward robotics. My interests grew until finally I broke biology ranks and took an introductory robotics course through the computer science department at my university the semester before I graduated. I didn't have the background everyone else in the room did, and I spent a lot of time outside of class catching myself up on unfamiliar material. I loved every second of it.
My new goal is to develop this interest to the point that I can pursue a graduate degree in robotics and make contributions in that field. Since I'm now out of school, a lot of this development is must be done informally. I'm documenting the process on my blog, robotfrogblog.blogspot.com. I'm hoping to use this record as a way to keep myself motivated, to follow my progress, and especially once I have something concrete in my new graduate school search, to set an example for anyone else out there who finds themselves wanting to re-chart their course. As I've been told, it's never too late to start over... or to change.
Cheers!

Now, what exactly do I intend to do with any of this?