Posts tagged children
Boulder Creek duck race loaded with prizes
025th annual EXPAND Duck Race to be held May 28; online duck sponsorship now available
The 25th annual EXPAND Duck Race will be held at 4 p.m. on Monday, May 28, at the Boulder Creek Festival®. The EXPAND Duck Race is a benefit for the Parks and Recreation Department’s EXPAND (EXciting Programs Adventures and New Dimensions) program, which provides recreational opportunities for children, youth and adults with disabilities.
Participants may sponsor ducks for $5 each and watch them race from the 9th Street Bridge to the finish near Boulder Creek next to the Main Library lawn. Online registration is now available, and is open through Sunday, May 27. Participants may also sponsor ducks at the Boulder Creek Festival®.
Dozens of prizes will be given away to the top duck finishers, including an all-inclusive, three-night stay in Cancun with airfare from Denver, courtesy of Doris Mundy Travel, Apple Vacations and Dreams Resort and Spa; $1,000 in cash from Fisher Kia & Honda of Boulder; a nine-month self defense package from Boulder Quest Center; gift certificates; and much more!
Participants do not need to be present to win. Prizes will be mailed and winners will be notified within 14 days. All proceeds benefit the EXPAND program.
For more information, a full list of prizes and to sponsor a duck, visit www.EXPANDDuckRace.org. For more information about EXPAND and the programs offered, please go to www.BoulderParks-Rec.org.
Boulder Art and Jazz Fest May 5-6
0
The 7th annual Boulder Arts, Craft and Jazz Festival kicked off today Saturday May 5th and runs through Sunday May 7. It features music all day from a main stage on the Pearl Street Mall at the court house. Other musicians are spread up and down the mall. There are literally hundreds of arts and crafts tents from one end of the mall to the other. Interspersed are food tents with everything from Mexican, Oriental to American.
It was a beautiful day on Saturday at the festival with a friendly relaxed atmosphere reminiscent of a Boulder old school event. A lot of Boulderites were present with a fine mixture of tourists. This is the big event of the year that kicks off summer in Downtown Boulder.
The event is promoted by the folks from the Dickens Store who started the original Bands on the Bricks many years ago They really know how to put on a family event. You don’t want to miss this one because it was not a crush of people who have been drinking all day. Of course the bars and restaurants are all open on Pearl Street and they were packed with festival goers as well.
The theme is early 1969 Woodstock and for those of you who were there, it is all love, peace and music at the The 7th annual Boulder Art and Jazz Festival. The music is excellent too. Bands played all day today and will start on the stage at 11:00 am til 6:30 pm: see the line up below. This appears to be the largest authentic music festival in Boulder. There are some others but they take place in theaters and bars and not on one stage. The Boulder Creek Festival is of course the very largest muical event just 3 weeks away on Memorial Day weekend with 5 music and dance stages. But Sunday afternoon will be the highlight of the festival.
The event is a charity event for Olive Branch a non-pro t organization which brings resources and opportunities to widows and orphans in Rwanda and Uganda. They are active in building Orphanages, Medical Clinics and Schools in this country!
LEGO Kids Festival
0Boulder Channel 1 and Denver Channel 1 visit the LEGO KidsFest at the Denver Convention Center April 27 through April 29 2012. The event is sold out. The LEGO KidsFest brings all of the creative hands-on, minds-on fun of LEGO building and experiences together in one activity- and entertainment-packed family event for children of all ages and builders of all skills and interests. In this special event we bring you to the festival, watch kids hard at work building tons of LEGO constructions and a personal interview with Chis one of the LEGO Master builders who tells us about the things kids can participate in and lots of cool LEGO models to check out.
Find out more about the event at http://www.legokidsfest.com/
Proving a Negative: Superman, Flying Saucers and God Don’t Exist by Dan Culberson
0The Naked Curmudgeon curmudgeon n [origin unknown] (1577) a crusty, ill-tempered, and usu. old man. naked adj 6: devoid of concealment or disguise. Attempting to cover everything that annoys me, Dan Culberson.
Here’s what gets me.
One of the basic tenets of logic is “You cannot prove a negative.”
For example, you cannot prove there is no God, flying saucers don’t exist or Superman doesn’t exist, according to the philosophers, psychologists and logicians.
Not so, say I!
Of course you can prove a negative, as long as you establish agreed-upon ground rules for the premises, the statements of facts or suppositions made or implied as a basis of argument. For example, “If A equals B, and C equals B, then C equals A.”
If premises “(A equals B) and (C equals B)” are “true,” then the conclusion “C equals A” is also true.
For example, “If (2 times 3) equals (6), and (3 times 2) equals (6), then (3 times 2) equals (2 times 3).”
“If Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, and if you were born in 1950, then you are a Baby Boomer.”
Now, back to God, flying saucers and Superman.
Can we prove they exist? Sure. All we have to do is get God to appear before us and some corroborating witnesses, coax a flying saucer to land in our backyard and take an irrefutable photograph of it and make Superman take off his glasses and fly faster than a speeding bullet, do something more powerful than a locomotive and leap a tall building in a single bound.
Can we prove that they do not exist? Sure, too. All we have to do is agree to the premises and then prove it with logic.
Now, we know that in one sense all three do exist, because a great deal has been written about them and a lot of people believe in them. One even has his own sequence of films, a couple of television series and a comic book to proclaim his existence.
So, instead of proving they do not exist, we need to prove that they are not real and do not exist outside our imaginations.
Well, we know who created Superman, because they have admitted it, and we have even seen Superman die and be reborn at the whims of his current comic-book owners.
Rather than use a negative in our proof, we need to rephrase the premises and conclusion to allow a positive conclusion.
“If Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster admit they created Superman and everyone agrees Superman is imaginary, then Superman is imaginary.” Conclusion? Superman does not exist, regardless of all the literature about him and all the children who believe in him.
Flying saucers are trickier. We know the date of the first, most famous sighting and who reported it (although some believers claim the Bible even has sightings recorded in it, such as Ezekiel’s “wheel”), and there have been countless sightings since then, sometimes with physical “evidence” and many so-called “abductions.” But we have no physical evidence that when examined by everyone is convincing enough for everyone to conclude “Flying saucers are real.”
“If we admit that many people with vivid imaginations create stories about observed or unobserved phenomena for their personal or financial gain and no one has ever produced any physical evidence of flying saucers that has withstood repeated, scientific examination, then flying saucers are imaginary.”
Conclusion? Flying saucers don’t exist, regardless of all the literature about them and all the people who believe in them.
God is even trickier. We know that primitive societies create a supreme being to worship and shamans establish rules of conduct for society to follow and sometimes to provide for the shaman’s personal or financial gain, we know that all the major religions cannot be worshipping the same God and we know that no one has ever produced any physical evidence of God that has withstood repeated, scientific examination.
“If we admit that anyone can create a story about ‘God’ based solely on belief for personal or financial gain and if everything that has happened in the past and is happening today makes more sense without a God than with one, then God is imaginary.”
Conclusion? There is no God, regardless of all the literature, people who believe and atrocities created in God’s name.
William of Occam, the great Franciscan scholastic philosopher, stated that all unnecessary facts in a subject being analyzed are to be eliminated. In other words, if there are more than one explanation for a phenomenon, the simplest explanation is more likely.
Conclusion? Superman, flying saucers and God don’t exist.
I rest my case.
###
“The Three Stooges” Is Soitainly an Embarrassment
0“Soitainly an Embarrassment”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Three Stoges: The Movie is how the publicist wants references to be made about this movie, which is so bad, it is lucky to have any references made to it at all.
However, speaking of references, what first comes to mind is a parody from the Bible: “When I was a child, I enjoyed the antics of The Three Stooges, but when I became a man I put away childish things and don’t find them funny anymore.”
The second reference that comes to mind is that the story is straight out of the 1980 The Blues Brothers: raising money to save the orphanage in which the title characters grew up.
This story starts off with three babies being tossed out onto the steps of the orphanage, and they look just like the identifiable mugs that we have come to recognize by their haircuts, Moe with his bowl-cut style, Curly with his shaved pate, and Larry, who is half bald and half wild and curly haired.
Incidentally, Moe is still the self-appointed leader of the group, but the grownup Larry is played by Sean Hayes, who is more well known than the actors playing Moe and Curly, and so Hayes is billed as the star of the movie.
Then we see the Stooges 10 years later, and they are doing the same shtick that we enjoyed watching them do when we were children. A young couple choose Moe for adoption, but it doesn’t end well, and they return Moe and choose another young boy instead.
Then it is 25 years later, the boys are all grown up now, and everybody learns that due to lack of money, the orphanage will be shut down at the end of the month.
The orphanage needs $830,000 to be saved, and Moe says, “We’ll do whatever it takes.”
All they know how to do is handyman work, however, and of course they aren’t even very good at that. But the Stooges are pure of heart and dim of wit.
And what follows is a falling out among the Stooges, Sofia Vergara as a rich woman who hires them for some dirty work, and a wasted and tasteless introduction of the reality stars from “The Jersey Shore.”
The Three Stooges: The Movie is not much of a movie and soitainly an embarrassment.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Boulder County Head Start is recruiting students for the fall
0
Boulder County, Colo. – Boulder County Head Start is recruiting students for the fall of 2012. Head Start is a free, comprehensive program for children ages 3 to 5. Children must turn 3 by Sept. 30 to be eligible. Income guidelines apply.
Full- and half-day classes are offered in Boulder and Lafayette. Head Start works to build a strong partnership between teachers and families, honoring the family as their child’s first and most important teacher. Boulder County Head Start has been serving the community since Head Start’s national inception in 1964.
For more information, please call Susi Gritton at 720-564-2210. A family interview will be scheduled to go over registration details and paperwork.
Food Tax Rebate applications available
0
Deadline to apply is in June
Each year, the City of Boulder provides rebates to help compensate lower income residents for the city sales tax they pay on food. Those seeking a rebate must fill out an application documenting their eligibility.
The application period begins Thursday, March 1. Applications can be picked up starting March 1 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, at the West Boulder Senior Center, 909 Arapahoe Ave. Completed application forms must be received by Friday, June 29, or postmarked by Saturday, June 30. Applicants from 2011 will automatically receive an application in the mail.
Rebates are $73 for low-income individuals and $224 for low-income families. To be eligible to receive a rebate, people must have been a resident of Boulder for the entire 2011 calendar year and be:
• a low income senior, age 62 or over for the entire 2011 calendar year,
• a low income person with disabilities, or
• a low income family with children younger than 18 in the household for the entire 2011 calendar year;
The Food Tax Rebate Program is administered by the Department of Housing & Human Services, Division of Senior Services. Additional information on the program is available online at www.boulderseniorservices.com or call John Bunzli, program manager, at 303-441-1836.
Boulder County group wants to help break the circle of poverty
0Partnership with businesses, volunteers helps Circles participants move toward self-sufficiency
Boulder County, Colo. – The Circles Campaign believes that it takes the coming together of an entire community to end poverty and is seeking partnerships with local businesses to help participants achieve their goals of sustained self-sufficiency.
Essex Motors in Longmont recently donated a car to Brenda Spencer, who has been in the Circles Campaign for more than a year and was struggling to find reliable transportation. Spencer says having a vehicle will save the time and energy she needs to work on moving her family out of poverty.
“Not having reliable transportation really set limits for me,” Spencer said. “As a single mother I am stretched to find the balance between caring for my four children and my employment outside the home. Having a car will save hours of walking and riding the bus, which will free up time for me to go back to college and finish my degree.”
The Circles philosophy is that the only way to end poverty is to build community and there are many opportunities to get involved. Local business owners interested in joining the Circles Campaign should contact Eliberto Mendoza at emendoza@bouldercounty.orgor 303-441-1503.
Additionally, Boulder County is recruiting “Circles Allies” to help participants develop skills and access resources needed to work on their long range plans to move toward economic stability. For more information being an Ally please visit the Boulder County Circles website at www.BoulderCountyCircles.org to download an Ally volunteer description or attend the next Circles Ally 101 training.
What: Circles Ally 101 training for those interested in volunteering for the Circles Campaign
When: Wednesday, Feb. 29, 6-8 p.m.
Where: Sister Carmen Center, 655 Aspen Ridge Drive, Lafayette
RSVP: Eliberto Mendoza, emendoza@bouldercounty.org or 303-441-1503
“The Woman in Black” Is a Movie in Trouble
0A Movie in Trouble
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Woman in Black is a traditional ghost story, and of all the movies about ghosts that have ever been made, this is one of them.
In fact, the only reason to see this yawner with all the tricks and twists and turns of a traditional ghost story is to see Daniel Radcliffe trying to act like an adult in his first starring film role after the “Harry Potter” movies ended in 2011.
Now, seeing as how this is a story about ghosts that wants the audience to take it seriously and realistically, you have to ask yourself one question: “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Well, do you? And then ask yourself more questions.
Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, who works for a law firm in London in either the late 1890s or the early 1900s, whose wife died four years earlier while giving birth to their son, Joseph.
Arthur is sent to a little village in northern England to go through the papers of an old woman who died and report if the law firm should take over the house that she left, which is known as the Eel Marsh House and sits on a piece of land whose only access by road is covered by water whenever the tide comes in.
Arthur is told that this assignment is to prove his worth to the head of the law firm and is his “final warning.”
When Arthur arrives at the village, he gets no cooperation at all from the villagers except for one man, Sam Daily, whose son died many years ago, and whose wife could only be called crazy.
In fact, many children in the village have died, and Arthur eventually learns that there is a connection between their so-called “accidental” deaths and the appearance of a mysterious “woman in black” who is seen occasionally and who has a connection with Eel Marsh House.
Well, naturally Arthur stays at the house to go through all the old woman’s papers, scary things naturally happen, and naturally Arthur sees the woman in black more than once, along with many more mysterious events.
Of course, there are many cheap audio and visual shocks designed to scare the audience, but it is possible not to be scared.
The Woman in Black is a movie in trouble with a really cheap ending.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
CU Boulder prof gets MAJOR cred
0CU-Boulder Professor Elected to
National Academy of Engineering
Diane McKnight, professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
McKnight is among 66 new members and 10 foreign associates of the academy announced today. She joins 16 other faculty from the campus who have been elected since the academy’s formation in 1962.
Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”
McKnight was recognized for making clear the interrelationship between natural organic matter and heavy metals in streams and lakes.
Her research expertise is in the interactions between freshwater biota, trace metals, and natural organic material in diverse freshwater environments, including lakes and streams in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica.
In the Rocky Mountains, she has focused on the impact of metal contamination in acid mine drainage streams and the influence of climate change and nitrogen deposition on alpine lakes and wetlands. McKnight has interacted with many state and local groups involved in mine drainage and watershed issues in the Rocky Mountains.
“Diane is a worldwide leader in the interactive effect of metals in our water system with natural organic matter,” said Professor Ross Corotis, who was dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science when McKnight joined the faculty and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in 1996. “In addition to her advanced research for protecting environments from the Antarctic to the Rocky Mountains, she is a leader in developing books for children to help them learn about the water cycle.”
McKnight has been working in Antarctica since 1987, and is a leading investigator studying extreme life at the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research site funded by the National Science Foundation. In the harsh polar environment, stream channels flow only a few weeks out of the year and the only life forms inhabiting the area are microorganisms, mosses, lichens and a few groups of invertebrates.
She wrote and published a children’s book, “The Lost Seal,” in 2006, that tells the true story of a wayward seal discovered near the research camp in 1990 and its eventual rescue. The story gives children an understanding of Antarctica’s extreme environment and the work of scientists there.
She earned three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1975, a master’s degree in civil engineering in 1978 and a doctorate in environmental engineering in 1979.
She was a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Research Program for 17 years before she came to CU-Boulder. She was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2004 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.
She is a former member of the National Research Council’s Water Science and Technology Board and Polar Research Board, and she received a Meritorious Service Award from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1995.
Other CU-Boulder faculty who have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and their years of election, are: Bernard Amadei, 2008; George Born and Kaspar Willam, 2004; Ross Corotis and Fred Glover, 2002; Frank Barnes, 2001; Delores Etter, 2000; Martin Mikulas, 1999; Valerian Tatarskii, elected a foreign associate in 1994; Earl Gossard, 1990; Don Hearth and Richard Strauch, 1989; Jacques Pankove, 1986; Richard Seebass (deceased), 1985; Klaus Timmerhaus (deceased), 1975; and Max Peters (deceased), 1969.
