The Sunday Poem: Science Homework

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Mar 162008
 

My daughter has a science project she has to do. It involved testing various substances to see whether they were acid or base, using a stinky cabbage juice concoction. We did the experiments on the kitchen table this evening…

Science Homework

Cabbage juice and acid a pinkish fluid make.
Cabbage juice staying blue means you found a base.
Cabbage juice with bleach, though, is turning green;
Heavens! A chemical reaction unforeseen.

Glasses strewn on kitchen table, tablespoons of love,
Careful mixing of antacids and the smelly stuff;
We tolerate the messes and hope nothing explodes
For sake of experiments further down the road.

Avogadro’s number has nothing much to tell us
Here on a Sunday while younger brother’s jealous.
“I want to blow stuff up!” he says; someday his chance will come.
Meanwhile, I ladle cabbage juice into a poem.

If only we each got six glasses for our mixtures.
But all our lives are made of tests that became our fixtures.
Hypothesize, trial run, measure and record;
You take the acid, form your base, and keep on moving forward.

The Sunday Poem: The BASICs of life

 Posted by (Visited 5170 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with: ,
Mar 092008
 

10 Dimension all your variables, figure out their sides.
20 Remark, perhaps, on how data twirls across divides.
30 Print a hello world, as if the world could not read cursive;
40 Go to thirty, looped but still printed, not recursive.
50 For once you have some code that doesn’t do much else,
60 Next you’ll want to make it special, of yourself.
70 Data will be read, perhaps, or Fibonacci spun,
80 While you tally figures until the job is done.
90 Poke a byte, peek a bit, nybble ‘til you’re through,
100 End with too few memories, dimensions still unused.

The Sunday Poem: Sometimes a Duck

 Posted by (Visited 7718 times)  Game talk, The Sunday Poem  Tagged with:
Jan 062008
 

Sometimes A Duck Is Just A Duck
(A Semi-Sonnet On Whether Strategy Guides Are Cheating)

Suppose you had a duck to deconstruct.
It sits atop a log, it quacks at things,
It flaps its wings all frantic, daring, dumb.
What parts of duck are really duck, you think?

Take feet. They’re webbed, for sure, and orange-black.
But geese and other cousins have them too.
That is not duckness, any more than spoon-
Billed beakness is a sign this duck is true.

It might reside in quacking; ducks take pride
In never shutting up. Perhaps parades
Of ducklings crossing streets like in old books?
A duck of culture, a consensus made,

Composites made of pieces sharp and blunt.
I must conclude that ducks are… elephants.

This is, of course, a riff on the poem I posted a while back called “Pondering a Duck.”

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