Ten Year Anniversary of the First Date

While in Atlanta recently, my wife and I decided to go back to one of the restaurants we ate at when we first met some ten years ago. Our first date is a story that I used to tell regularly in my early years of teaching, but it has fallen out of heavy rotation. It is back on my mind due to our recent outing in the ATL (or HOTlanta if you prefer):

At the time when I met my wife-to-be, I was an underemployed wine importer with long hair, a goatee, and living in my parents' basement (see picture at top of blog). I was also doing a LOT of yoga and was super thin. Turns out that Irene did not like guys with long hair, much less facial hair of any kind, and considered me to look “scrawny” (n.b. I would use the word “fit” to describe myself back then)! I was immediately smitten with her but, in order to sell myself, I had my work cut out for me.

So on the first date, all the pressure was all on me. We went to a fancy restaurant with an upstairs seating area. We were seated upstairs right next to an open area into which you could look down onto the bar area. I started off by playing the only card I had: wine knowledge and general European sophistication. We both had ordered glasses of wine. They were fancy-smancy glasses – big bulbous things with a splash of wine at the bottom.

I am swirling the wine in the glass, waxing poetic about the fermentation of grapes and the olfactory appreciation of the finer things in life. I fall into “European Ken” mode and begin gesticulating a lot while talking up a storm. She is obviously slightly amused and so I make an especially emphatic point with a big sweeping motion. I have yet to take a sip of my wine.


My right hand hits the bottom of my red wine glass at exactly the right angle to carry it up and over railing. Time slows down. I see Irene’s eyes go wide. I see the wine glass spinning in place, hovering out over the edge – daring me to catch it before it drops. Like a scene in the “Matrix”, I seem to have an infinite amount of time. Before I can have another thought, my right hand jumps out and catches the twirling glass by the stem between my first two fingers. In one subtle and elegant movement, I had saved the glass and brought it back to its original location on the table. Only it was empty.

Irene is speechless. I am speechless. She looks at me, I look at her. She is clearly thinking, “Hmmm… interesting situation – his true character will be revealed now.” I am thinking, “Oh – no! I really like this girl and now it all comes down to this. What I say next will shape my entire destiny.”

I lean away from the balcony and ask her, “Can you look over the edge and tell me where the red wine went?” She looks over the edge and reports, “There’s a woman in a white dress sitting at the bar, an empty bar stool, and a puddle of red wine on the next stool.” Nobody, including the bartender, had noticed the wine pouring down from a floor above and splashing onto the seat.

I call over the waitress, explain the situation, and ask for a free refill, since I didn’t even get a sip yet!

Must have worked out okay since Irene is still going out to eat in public with me ten years later. (Full disclosure: In the interim, I did get a haircut, shaved the goatee, moved out of my parents’ basement, found gainful employment, and gained twenty pounds.)

(bar picture from hopstop.com for South City Kitchen)

Playing Parcheesi in my Pajamas

Within the last couple of days, Isabelle has learned to play Parcheesi.

At bedtime, a big part of the ritual in the Riddy household is 'putting on the pajamas'.

Yesterday, we were considering make a run to an IMAX theater to catch the new movie Avatar (still haven't done that).

It's an Indian vocab day!

Recently, I found myself explaining what an avatar was to one of my nongaming colleagues (I'd like to call him a luddite, but since he uses more technology than any other teacher I know, I guess I won't go there).  However, my brother is the one who pointed out to me that the word is Indian in origin (from the Sanskrit avatara - originally for the crossing over or manifestation of a god on Earth).  The computer based use of the word really took off after its use in an influential 1992 sci fi novel, Snow Crash.

Pachis means 25 in Hindi, the highest 'roll' (of sea snail shells rather than dice!) possible in the parcheesi precurser Pachisis.

Pyjama come to us westerners via Hindi as well, although it is originally from the Persian word for leg garmet, Payjama.

We are communicating today in a language that has more words than any other and most of that is due to our easy adoption of the foreign words and novel uses of old words.  Our language is our cultural heritage whether we know it or not;  No British Empire in India, and I would just be playing another cross-and-circle game in my leg garments wondering if I will ever get a chance to see that latest film "Manifestation"...

Innumeracy and a New Blog

Recently I was talking a doctor about something and he said "between 30 and 40 percent of people will outgrow this allergy..."  Just to confirm, later I asked "So, there is about a 1 in 3 chance of outgrowing this?"  The doc looked at me like I was crazy and said "No - maybe more like a 1 in 4 chance!"

When I was in AP US history many, many moons ago, the teacher asked the class "What's the approximate current population in the US?" I quickly answered "Around a quarter of a billion."  He looked at me like I was crazy and said "Ahem, the population is around 260 million..."

A few years ago, I remember a reporter on the radio referring to the "100's of millions" of people living in New York City.  Now I happened to know that the population of the city is between 8 and 18 million depending on whether you are counting the surrounding areas too...  This error is like saying 12 people showing up for a party was "hundreds of people."

I suspect that none of these examples would have happened if it had been a subject-verb disagreement or pronoun antecedent issue.  So, I have started a new blog to begin documenting number and science errors that slip through in the media just so I don't have to carrying it around all bottled up inside.  I wanted to name it "two cultures" in honor of CP Snow, but that blog name was taken.  So, then I though "mediacrity", but that was taken as well!   So, I have settled on "mediacisms".  Feel free to email a link to something you notice and I will blog it if I have time!

Doctor "Doctor"

I recently came across this excellent blog (curtesy of my friend BG) all about the misuse of quotes: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

It's one of those great ideas that you read and think "why didn't I do that?"

Reminds me of an incident in the science office a few months back when a student came looking for a colleague.  This colleague has an MD and therefore uses the title "Dr" - the funny thing is that the student put the title in quotes with her fingers while she was talking as if the title were an affectation... "I'm looking for 'Dr' _________"

At one of my previous jobs, a fellow teacher called all of us "Dr": a person of learning or respect being his operative definition (see #7).

People with PhD's go by "Doctor" routinely which reminds me of a great line of Randy Pausch's posthumous book The Last Lecture that went something along the lines of "My mother introduces me to friends as 'my son the doctor - but not the kind that helps people' " (he had PhD in Computer Science)

And then there's my favorite "Doctor" (quotations marks, of course, completely superfluous and, most definitely, never to be used in the air with my fingers!):

Is Carl Sagan my Guru?

Recently a colleague from work, DR, introduced me to a trippy video montage in which Carl Sagan is made to sing. Aside from being a technological piece of slickness, I found myself thinking about the early years when I used to watch the Cosmos series on PBS. I must have been in middle school and I remember thinking it was interesting and a bit odd at the same time.

Now, so many years later, it seems that Sagan had a bigger influence on me than I thought. Why did I major in Physics? Why do I find science fiction irrestistable? Why am I now a science educator? Why do I love those moments in the curriculum when I get to stick in my (or is Sagan's?) two cents in on how we are tiny little creatures on the surface of a moderately sized rock orbiting a below average star in the backwaters of some rinky-dink galaxy?

But isn't it that super-cool: making you feel special and humble at the same time?

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch - you must first invent the universe"

Hunter Moon Coronation

A week or so ago, I took Isabelle out to show her a spectacular full moon that I had noticed on my drive home. Since it was low on the horizon, it appeared very large. This is an optical illusion, since all full moons are the same size. Humans just tend to interpret things as larger when they are close to the horizon (because of context clues) rather than when overhead. This is also why the rising and setting sun seem larger. It's almost hard to believe until you try a simple experiment: try covering the full moon or sun with a fingertip while it is close to the horizon (and appears extra big to us) and then try it again later when it is high in the sky and you will find that it is indeed the same size...

When I took Isabelle out, we noticed a circular rainbow around the moon which I had never seen before: apparently this is a moon corona and it is caused by the diffraction of the moon's reflected sunlight through droplets of water just like regular rainbows:

(photo from http://www.spacew.com/gallery/image001109.html)

I only just learned (thank you, Wikipedia!) that all full moons have names and this one was the "Hunter's Moon" according to one naming system.

What other cool things are there that I don't know that I wouldn't find out about without kids to share them with?

Faith Hill and Physics

Today we were talking circular motion in class.  I am alway careful to define the confusing words centrifugal and centripetal in terms of their Greek origins (center fleeing vs. center seeking).  Then, I point out a pet peeve: that the 'words' centripical and centrifical do not exist!  I always claim that people use these non-words to hedge their bets since they don't know if something is centripetal or centrifugal.

Today, student SH exclaimed:  "So Faith Hill is wrong!?"  To my perplexed look, she said "You know, that song "This kiss This kiss"?`  So we did a quick internet search and, indeed, it appears that Ms. Hill does say "centripical motion".  She also says that it's like "perpetual bliss" and we all know that perpetual motion is doomed to fail eventually.  Hey!  What is she saying in this song?  Starting to get suspicious about the nature of the song, I scanned the lyrics more closely and found that it's "impossible", "criminal", and "unsinkable".  Only now do I remember that, just like the movie Titanic, country music is supposed to be bittersweet...

Irene cautioned me against using any old site for lyrical content, so (surprise surprise), it turns out various sites will say the Faith Hill lyric is "centrifugal" (a real word but doesn't really fit with the song) but it sounds like "centripical" to me when I listen to the video!

I ended the class singing "You Spin Me Round" much to the amusement of several students...

Fighting the Wrong Fight

We've been dissecting projectile motion problems lately in class.  I have, for years now, been trying to clarify and simplify the thinking process for my students.  Still, some struggle mightily.  I have always assumed that the vector nature of velocity and the algebra of the equations of motion are the sources of trouble for the students.

I have been reading Knight's book on teaching physics and I now think that the issue may be far simpler:  Most people don't believe in Newton's Laws.  Students frequently worry about forces applied during the launching of the projectile and what happens to the projectile after it hits the ground.  (Always confused about "initial" conditions and "final" conditions.)    I think they are uncomfortable with the fact that the means by which the projectile is launched is irrelevant - how it is brought to a stop is irrelevant  -gravity is irrelevant to the horizontal motion - fast things are accelerating just as much as slow things, etc... 

Laws are memorized, equations are manipulated, and answers are obtained - but most people do not change the way they think things work. 

I saw some students at other times of the day and made some terrible analogies based on what they were doing at the time:

1) A student working on his music composition theory homework:  "Think of the bass cleff as the horizontal motion and the treble cleff as the vertical motion: same rules but slightly different roles."  (nervous laughter followed by eye rolling) 

2) A student talking over a recent paper on Thoreau with her English teacher:  "Forget what society tells us about the projectile, let's go back to nature and see what is really going on with that parabola."  (English teacher waiting patiently for me to leave room; student remarks that I should blog this incident)

3) A student engaged in a deep philosphical discussion on the meaning of life:  How far you go is a combination of how much time you have (Vy) and the amount forward thinking you engage in (Vx), but one comes at the expense of the other since you only have so much launch speed to spend. (ok, I completely made this one up but I couldn't resist another plug for Balance)

Push vs. Pull

I am a 20th century creature.  I thought of my blog as a public diary - a place where other interested people may come upon occasion to see what I've been thinking about.  Turns out that one of my students last year started a facebook fan page for me.  I don't facebook myself but Irene does and when she leaves herself logged in, I confess to checking the fan page to see which former and current students & friends have shown up there.

So, recently (some of you are probably reading this post via facebook), the facebook fan page has been pulling content from this blog and pushing it out into the facebook world.  Some of you have been spammed by these posts (I am wearing an especially cool sweater and striking a fancy pose in my facebook fan picture) and I have mixed feelings about this.  In principle, I don't mind but I just hope the pushing of blog content doesn't change my postings (ooops - it just did!). 

I just checked one of my earliest blog entries, and  I do feel that having a forum to write my thoughts down has been a positive thing.  Writing down thoughts requires more discipline than simply thinking them and knowing others may read them forces a certain integrity in process that I would not impose on myself otherwise.  So, hooray for blogging and the 21st century!

In this 21st century, everything is tracked and google analytics tells me that over 450 people have taken a look at the site for an average of 2.2  minutes per visit since I started the blog last June (2009). 

Here is a pie chart generated by google to show the breakdown by network location of the visitors (who knew they could do that?) (Wayland Public Schools is the 7th most popular provider - hmmm....)

Western Red Persimmon or Foreign Eggplant?

The other night, my father-in-law mentioned that in Chinese a tomato is a "fān qié" which means "foreign eggplant". Finding this very interesting, I mentioned it in a class with two Chinese speakers.  The Cantonese speaker agreed, but the Mandarin speaker disagreed calling it "xī hóng shì" which means "western red persimmon". 

Hmmm.... I was very confused since I know that my wife's family is Mandarin speaking.  It turns out that this is a difference in mainland China vs. the more western-influenced Taiwanese Chinese.

What is a tomato to me is a foreign eggplant in Taiwan and is a western red persimmon in mainland China. 

But, it's all good, because the original word in the New World meant "wolf peach" anyway...
(if you want to learn where we got our word tomato from, refer to my old post about turkeys)

Thanksgiving in Corsica

A blast from the past:
What follows is a cut-and-paste from an email I wrote some friends in November of 1998 while I was in France working with my aunt and uncle in the winery: (believe it or not, it is all true)

So somehow, at some point, the French relatives got the idea that I was going to prepare an authentic Thanksgiving dinner (seeing as how I was staying so late into the year this time). I wisely prepared my escape by discretely announcing my date of departure from Corsica as November 26. I thought I had it made until a week ago when my Aunt tells me, "Since your cousin is coming home next weekend and you'll be leaving the day before Thanksgiving, why don't we celebrate it early - say this weekend. Oh, I'm inviting my parents too"

Oh, great!  My thanksgiving knowledge consists of which Nouveaux Beaujolais is cheapest this year. So I start sending the pleas for help to my mother:  "Well, you need a big turkey of course" Do Turkeys exist in France? I think it's a new world meat... When I start asking around at the stores here, the response is more or less along the lines of "You mean a WHOLE one?" coupled with those exasperated aren't-you-an-idiot looks that only the French can give. Eventually the best I can find is a frozen, pre-stuffed (I never did understand with what, but it was definitely not cornbread-based which Mom said was a must) turkey weighing a whopping 3.5 pounds. In the same store, I spot a beautiful frozen bird, weighing in around 7 pounds and, best of all, unsullied by any strange French stuffing or sauces! "That's the ONE !" I cry (turns out it was a neutered rooster (is that a violation of the Geneva convention? Is this commonly done in the U.S. and I am simply ignorant?))


Next the quest for cornbread was on. This one turned out to be easier than expected as I found a box of cornmeal in a grocery store sandwiched in between "Authentic American pancake mix" and "Authentic Mexican Salsa Sauce" in the "Strange and Unusual" aisle. The cornbread, avoiding baking like the plague all my life, turns out to be thinner after baking than before. Suspicious, but probably okay since I'm going to break it into small pieces anyway... I felt like things were going awry when my Aunt looked simply horrified when I was roaming through her refrigerator in search of random things to throw into the stuffing, "You mean there's no meat in the stuffing?" I hem, I haw, but quickly remember those pearls of wisdom from my mother ("When dealing with the French, be your most confident when you are at a complete loss"), "Ah, no - you see- the first pilgrims who started this grand tradition were actually vegetarians and they, uh, except for fowl of course, and so an authentic American thanksgiving has no meat. Except for the turkey, or the neutered rooster, as the case may be". She looked mighty suspicious of my explanation, especially after she caught me slipping a little bacon in the stuffing. But, hey, the French do respect a well told twist of the truth when delivered with confidence.

Vegetables, I need vegetables with lots of fall colors. Bake it, puree it, stream it, boil it, whatever- don't know what they were, I just made sure there were plenty of colors in different bowls scattered around the table. Ah, you should have seen me convincing my Uncle that you were supposed to put instant mashed potato flakes in the pureed squash (how was I too know it was going to come out as soup?).  Corn on the cob, I knew, was going to be tough. I sucked up my courage and spent an afternoon chasing down ever more exotic grocery stores; "On the cob? That is for the animals on the farm..." "But I can find it in cans and not just in the dog food aisle!" "Yes, well, that is for summer salads and to be served cold." Finally I was forced to surrender and made some form of something they tell me is called succotash (my version definitely did look like dog food).


My mother, with her intensive studies of southern lifestyle, sends an email with a simple "Fried green tomatoes would be nice."  Now I'm pretty sure my mother has never made fried green tomatoes and she has definitely never served it at any of her 26 thanksgivings I've eaten... but my table is missing some green so I go for it (how was I to know it turns out yellow after you roll it in cornmeal?)

Now I am a big pecan pie fan and I wasn't going to give on this one.  Pecans: Negative, not in season. Corn syrup: Negative, too disgusting to contemplate for the French. I substitute honey and walnuts. As I said, I'm no baker, so I didn't have it in me to fake it when my uncle came to check on me. Being a noble sort and not much of a baker either, he takes one look at my batter and starts adding flour and yeast. This is not good I'm thinking, but he looks so happy I say nothing...The pie winds up rising like a fluffy baker's hat in the oven and, after we cool it down and cut away the burned parts, we're left with something flatter than my cornbread (and with less sugar). I assure him this is normal and that all pecan pies are like this. He shrugs, looks happy and comments "At least it doesn't have corn in it!"


I'm starting to think of the plan of attack for presentation, distraction, running for cover, etc., when my Aunt comes in with a long face and says "My parents can't leave their house, my father's doctor says he is too frail to take the stairs." Okay, now there will only be three disappointed French people tonight. "I was thinking, we could just pack the whole feast into our cars and drive over to their house!" Thank god no one took a photo of my uncle and I slipping a 3/4 baked neutered rooster in an orange crate into the back of his Fiat Punto.


I'm reheating things at the grandparents' pad: in the oven, on the stove, on all the burners, when they start trying to help me "What order do we serve the dishes in?" "What are the traditional predinner drinks and what munchies do you serve with them?" "What's the traditional after dinner drink?" But now I'm on point, I'm in the zone, I can do and say no wrong, and so, effortlessly, the stroke of genius comes forth from my lips, "All at once; American whiskey straight up with lots of popcorn; champagne."


After getting tipsy on the whisky and filling up with heavily salted popcorn, the dinner looked and smelled grand and everyone was happy enough to think they were enjoying it. When I saw the warning signs, "No thanks, you can keep that mashed, puréed succotash thing on your side of the table...", I quickly yanked the dishes off the table and brought out the champagne while cutting the smallest possible slivers of the Honey & Walnut Pecan pie with gobs of vanilla ice cream onto everyone's plate. This technique of serving drinks on empty stomachs and filling everyone up with popcorn was so effective, they are still thanking me! Ha!


Hope you all have a nice, authentic thanksgiving as well next week. I will be leaving Corsica as planned next week, but Thanksgiving has already come and gone in France.


all the best,


Ken

Sir Isaac and His Seven Colors

Lately we've been rockin' out in the Riddy household to They Might Be Giants' "Roy G Biv", and it's got me thinking about Isaac Newton and the rainbows we have inherited from him. 

I say that we have inherited the rainbow from him because our actual viewing of real rainbows is filtered based on our expectations.  We "know" there are seven bands and we have seen them many times in various works of art.  Why seven colors though?  The rainbow is a continuous spectrum from the lowest frequency the eye can detect (red) the highest (violet) so nature has not divided the colors into bands. 

Human eyes, however, can only detect three different frequency bands based on the three cones in our eyes (commonly called Red, Green, Blue, although this is an oversimplification).  All colors are an interpolation of those three signals (remember we are talking physiology here not physics).  Take a good look at this close-up of a rainbow:

I can only make out five uneven bands without sharp borders.  It turns out Newton originally only identified 5 colors: red, yellow, green, blue and violet.  Maybe we see five because we get one for each of our cones plus one each for when two neighboring (frequency-wise) cones are being equally stimulated?  (All three cones equally weighted give us the "color" white, of course). 

So where did Roy G Biv come from?  Newton wanted to make the color spectrum fit with the music spectrum of seven notes (click here for Newon's color wheel with notes attached)!  Ever since, artists dutifully draw their rainbows with seven colors and we convince ourselves that we see seven (since it's a continuous spectrum I imagine you can train yourself to identify many arbitrary number of bands as you want).

Beware the difference between what you think you see and what you actually observe!

Innumeracy, Illiteracy, and the Digital Divide

I have for many years now noted the cultural bias that allows innumeracy to be acceptable ("I don't get math", "I don't know which is smaller 10^-5 or 10⁵") but illiteracy to be shameful ("I can't parse a paragraph", "I don't know the difference between a noun or a verb").  This is best argued by C.P. Snow in his famous "Two Cultures" essay on the acceptable nature of scientific ignorance as compared to the stigma of, for example, not knowing any Shakespeare.  I have for many years felt confident that science and math were on the losing end of some larger culture war. But...

It is true that students these days have very little sense of number.  A lot of it, I think, is due to lack of basic math skills: ask them what 6 x7 is and they will reach for a calcuator.  Why should students "waste" their time memorizing math operations when calculators of all kinds are so readily available?  I always argue that a sense of number is built precisely out of having these basic skills and have always imagined that our culture of "innumeracy is okay" has enabled this behaviour. 

This week I discovered that I am wrong.  My freshmen are taking turns presenting to the class using google doc's presentations.  It turns out there is no spell checker built in.  I have been a fool - it's not that students can't mulitply without computational help: it turns out they can't spell either!  Word processors have done to them what calculators have been doing to them for years.

I wanted numeracy to be raised to the level of literacy.  Instead literacy is being lowered to level of numeracy...

Maybe the digital divide that everyone talks about will not be between those who have access to the technology and those who do not, but rather it will be between those that use the technology as an enabling tool and those that use technology as a blinding crutch.

Origami, Betrand Russell, and Muggings

Tuck-Tuck made an excellent origami shirt out of a dollar bill in class the other day.  After I displayed it to the entire class and commented on what a nice shirt it was, he said it "wasn't real".

I thought tangentially about the money and how it wasn't "real" and just a societal construct.  Some words of Bertrand Russell from years ago came to mind (I wish I could remember which book!) and I paraphrased him (without giving due credit I confess) by saying "It's true the money isn't real - I can't use it for shelter or eat it but I find these people working in stores called cashiers who seem perfectly willing to accept these useless bills in exchange for yummy food and other things I can actually use!"

Writing these words now, I had a flashback to 10th grade health class when we had to take turns doing skits of threatening situations.  My partner and I decided to do a skit on a mugging.  When I threatened him with "his money or his life" (quite menacingly as I recall) he responded with "money?"  I then sighed with exasperation and explained "Yes - money: a modern instrument of exchange designed to replace the ancient system of bartering."

(photo from vintageverity.wordpress.com)

GPS and Louis Malle

Last summer, while we were travelling, I used a GPS device extensively for the first time.  Normally, I have a fairly decent sense of direction; take a look at a map and then keep track of where I am and I don't even sweat when I have to take a detour.

But, with GPS, I didn't prep, I didn't track, and I was completely lost all the time.  Of course, it didn't matter - because we had GPS! 

The double edge sword of technology - it makes our lives easier but it insulates us from reality.  Since I was uninvolved with the navigation, my brain just didn't engage and I was lost until the GPS device came to life.  I remember gently mocking friends about a year ago (before I used GPS) when I saw them pulled over in the parking lot after meeting them for a meal.  "Just waiting to find a few satellites" they said.  "Weirdos!" I thought.

All this reminds me of one of my favorite moments in Louis Malle's "MyDinner with Andre":  when they are talking about electric blankets.  On one side they are such a boon - they keep you warm no matter what the outside temperature is.  On the other hand, the potential empathy that might have been brought about by the cold is gone.  Is the person next to you cold?  Are there people who are cold and can't find shelter in the world? 

GPS: my enabler and my disabler.

Physics Rap Part Deux

Newtonamania

Lean in close - I ain't gonna hurt ya
All I wanna do is talk inertia.
what it is is a property of motion
Measured by mass, big like the ocean -
Could be small, like your IQ quotient
hoverin' near zero / Newton is my hero

Your natural state
is to sail sweetly
not come to stop
oh-so-neatly
Aristotle was wrong
Galileo was right -
to stop takes a fight
Wooo - this rap's outta sight!

"Look at me -
How fast I go!"
Universe don't care;
No  - no - no.
If V is constant -
then A is zero / Newton is my hero

Listen up, follow my flo -
To the moon we shall go.
Little ole "g" is smaller you see.

On the moon, weight is puny
Tiny tiny forces, kind of cartoon-y
Stubbed your toe, kind of lame -
Forget your mass is the same?
Shame shame shame-
So lighten up dear-o / Newton is my hero


What's up with all these crazy crazy forces?
Like U2 - riding wild horses:
Speed it up or slow down,
Twist or turn - you still a clown!
All that changin'  V over delta t?
It's force over mass quite simple-y
Nothing to fear-o / Newton is my hero
Hurt and confused, need amelioration?
You got forces, but no ex-celioration?
For you - might be big conundrum;
Simple equilibrium - humdrum humdrum:
Net force is zero / Newton is my hero

I push you - you push me
We're a happy family
With a pair of forces
one for each
We push equal opp'sitely

Standing on giants' shoulders
Seein' further over boulders
Keep these laws near-o /Newton is your hero

A New Twist on an Old Grading Paradigm

"You all have A's at this point" is a not uncommon opening day remark in school.  I am not one of the teachers who say that because I don't think of grades this way (I think of it is as an accumulation of effort and performance as the year goes along).  However, I do like to a play a little game with this concept near the end of the first marking period.  Here's how it usually plays out:

Me: "I have been thinking of a new way to do grades"
class looks slightly intrigued
Me: "I was thinking of starting everyone off with 100's and take away points rather than adding them"
some students looking serious, some looking disturbed
Me: "As the years goes on and as you make less than perfect scores the 100 would go down"
some students (seeing where this is headed) look distraught, some still going along
Me: "And then that fateful day would come when you would get down to the 89 and know that the A was never coming back"
all students looking horrified but some now realizing it is a joke
Me: "What do you think, sound like a good idea?"

Plato's Cave and The First Science Lesson

If you are not familiar with the allegory (or just want a refresher), click here for a three and half minute intro to it. This should be the first lesson in science.  Forget the scientific method or proper measuring technique or interpreting graphs:

We experience directly only narrow slices of the rich universe we live in:

Colors we see: red through blue

(but nature goes much lower than red and higher than blue)

Temperatures we feel:  from about -20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees 
(but nature goes as low as -270 and up to the 100's of billions in Supernova explosions)

Speeds we experience:  from zero to 350 m/s (the speed of sound)
(but nature goes as high as 3,000,000 m/s - the speed of light)

Timescales we notice: 0.2 seconds (human reaction time) to 80 years 
(but nature goes from 10^-44 (the Planck unit of time) seconds to 15 billion years (the age of the universe))

sounds we hear: from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz
(but nature creates pitches into the billions of Hz)

Distances we can experience directly: .000001  to 10,000  meters
(but nature goes from 10^-35 (the Planck unit of length) to 10²⁶ (the size of the observable universe))

We really are just stumbling around in the dark without science to help us out!

Rules, Impulse Control, and Dune

In years past I have shared with some of my student my "three rules for life":

1. Don't Rush
2. Balance
3. Live within your means

Of course, as I usually point out, all three of these are really all about balance.

The "Don't Rush" rule is about balance in time:  Enjoy the stage of life you are in. If you keep rushing to get to the next stage... well, we all know what the final stage is, don't we?

"Balance" I usually explain in terms of short term happiness vs. long term goals, selfishness vs. living for others, planning vs. carpe diem etc.
Rule #3 is self-explanatory but useful to point out in a society consumed by debt.

Lately though, I've been thinking about replacing the short list with "Impulse Control".  There is a great scene in Frank Herbert's Dune where the main character must survive a trial of pain (the gom jabbar): his hand is placed in a box where the nerves are stimulated with incredible pain but he must leave his hand inside as he knows the test giver will kill him if he pulls it out.  Rational intelligence over animal instinct.   Impulse Control. 

Revolutions, Islands, and the Melting Pot Names

Bemelmans can't count!

I grew up with Madeline and her two straight lines in her house covered in vines, but I never discovered an error until reading the book to my daughter.

After visiting Madeline in her recovery room (a bed with a crank!), the eleven remaining girls go back to their old house to break their bread, brush their teeth and go to bed.  In that three picture sequence (bread-brush-bed), the number of girls goes from 12 to 11 to 11.  Careful inspection reveals Madeline sitting at Miss Clavel's left at the dinner table but absent subsequently.  Perhaps Madeline went home with the other girls but upon eating dinner, suffered a relapse and was rushed back the hospital before the brushing of the teeth?

Also, is it just me or does Madeline's curly red hair look suspiciously blond and straight in several pictures?

'Tis a child's story, I know.  Maybe the Hollywood movie filled in the gaps?  I doubt it.

Subtraction and the Number Line

5-3

or

Five minus three

or

Five take away three

Same thing? Only if you are counting! If you believe in numbers as abstractions (which you do if you believe in the number zero, the concept of infinity, or negative numbers), then 5-3 is NOT Five take away three!

Lately, my friend PS and I have been discussing the wrongness of this idea of subtraction as "taking away". The conversation started with a TMBG video we show our kids about Zeroes and resurfaced recently when he fell asleep at a kindergarten curriculum night looking at the number line. Years ago I read a book called Where Mathematics Comes From which has really informed my thinking about math concepts. Out of these influences I have decided that we should throw out the old ways of "5 take away 3 leaves us with 2" to be replaced with the correct "marching 5 units to the right along the number line and then marching 3 units to the left leaves us exactly 2 units to the right of where we started".

(image from ehow.com)

The idea of subtraction as an act of "taking away" is sloppy thinking which most people get away with because they don't have to think things through. Not, that is, until they get to vectors in physics. What we find is that students think of negative acceleration as always meaning slowing down. This is because they think of negative meaning "taking away". The fact is if you are already heading in the negative direction, a negative acceleration will speed you up! (imagine going in reverse in your car and then stepping on the gas) Only now will the student begin to think of negative signs properly - as an indication of direction along the number line NOT as an act of taking away.

There is no subtraction.  There are only positive and negative and these mean: "going to the right" and "going to the left" respectively.

"5 - 3" is short hand for "(+5) then (-3)"

If this were how students were taught to think of the minus sign then when we introduce them to negative accelerations they will think "that is an acceleration directed to the left as opposed to the right" and kinematics would be a lot easier for them (and for us to teach).

Learning is only hard when there is a lot of unlearning to do first.

Mooncakes, Suncakes

The upcoming Mooncake Festival has me thinking about lunar calendars again.

All civilizations eventual commit to either the solar calendar (where the revolution of the Earth around the sun is primal and the Moonths just fit in as they can) or the lunar calendar (where 'years' are always a integer number of lunar revolutions (usually 12 or 13)). Since the Chinese and Islamic holidays are on a lunar schedule they do not occur at the same point every year on the solar calendar. The Chinese calendar cheats with intercalary days to keep it relatively even with the solar year. Of course if I'm going to call that cheating then we have to call leap years and leap seconds (added to solar calendars to keep the 24 hour day in line with the solar year) cheating too!

This is all beside the point - what is on my mind is writing language right to left versus left to right. It seems like there is a correlation between lunar calendar cultures and writing right to left versus solar calendar countries writing left to right. My cursory research reveals no definitive answer why some cultures settled into left to right versus right to left. I am fairly positive there is no real correlation with writing and the calendar choice but I want there to be one so I post this anyway...

Physics Rap in Progress

Going from the D to the V to the A
Kinematics, that’s what I say
Those equations be child’s play
Thinkin’ with my noggin, the price I pay

Finding rise over run so patiently
Tracking units so diligently
Doing Calculus conceptually

You outside – jumpin’ rope
I rhyme physics – really dope
Ya’ll mopes, just take them slopes!

Finding rise over run so patiently
Tracking units so diligently
Doing Calculus conceptually

Up & down graphs I pantomime
Areas under curves have a sign
Vectors or scalars – I don’t mind

Finding rise over run so patiently
Tracking units so diligently
Doing Calculus conceptually

Goodnight, Water Dumplings, and Neuroscience

I was trying to get Sebastien to say "go to bed"(shui jiao) in Chinese for his grandparents (I thought it meant 'goodnight'), but he was uncooperative and the grandparents just started laughing at me. I asked what was so funny and they said I was saying "water dumpling" (shui jiao). It turns out that in Chinese, an emphasis on a different part of an otherwise identical sounding word can mean an entirely different thing. Even after several repeats of the two variations, I couldn't really tell the difference.

(image from http://www.worldfoodieguide.com)

As a baby learns, it turns out they are mostly pruning connections from their brain. A baby's apparent confusion and inability to parse the world is due to an over-connectedness of neurons in their brain. For this reason, if a baby in not exposed to certain sounds from a language at an early age, it will be extremely difficult for them to ever speak that language as a native speaker would. Certain connections within the brain would have already been deemed not useful and severed, making it difficult afterwards to differentiate those foreign sounds.

As a baby I was filled with potential and could differentiate between water dumplings and going to bed, but, in a quest for simplicity, I lost my way...

My Friend Chuckles

When I was in high school, my math teacher said something like "figure this out" but, for some strange reason, I though he said "big fat jerk." Since I felt pretty comfortable in his class (we called him 'coach' since he sponsored the Math Team), I blurted out "Did you just call me a Big Fat Jerk?" He paused - looked confused and then started to laugh. The rest of the year he would affectionately call me "BFJ".

Years later in college, some of us were trading misunderstood lyrics in the dorm and all agreed our favorite was Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

Last year in school I was telling a story about Ton-Ton Roger ("My French Uncle") to one of my classes. Perhaps it was the one where he had turned his car window washers out 90 degrees in order to spray pedestrians on the sidewalk (he had replaced the window washer fluid with plain water). Or maybe it was the one where I was trying to hide the fact that I had been dangling a winery employee by the feet into a fermenting vat of red wine to retrieve my glasses. Or maybe it was the one about the rat in the Chardonnay. Who knows... the point is, at the end of my story, one kid turns to another and says "Who's his friend 'Chuckles'?

MCAS and Slippery Statistics

Scot Lehigh had an interesting editorial recently in the Boston Globe defending the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the required-for-graduation standardized test). He cites some interesting statistics comparing how well current students (class of 2011) are doing on the MCAS compared to the class of 2003. He, like almost everyone, compares the scaled scores of the MCAS which has cutoffs for being “Advanced”, “Proficient, “Needs Improvement” (but passing), and “Failing”.

The problem here is that the MCAS is a moving target; to be proficient this year only required a raw (unscaled) score of 47/72 on the English portion, but in 2003 you needed a 52/72. To pass, the cutoff has been lowered from 2003’s 38/72 to today’s 31/72 (that's a 43 % to pass!). By moving these cutoffs around and changing the content of the questions on the test, the MCAS can make public schools look great or lousy at will.

Here are some specific statements in his piece that I take issue with:

"Teachers, too, have stepped up...overall they've done a good job helping students master the required material." Good performance on a test is frequently simply a reflection of good prep for that particular test, not necessarily an indication of mastery of the subject material.

“When the MCAS actually started to count, the passing rates went up dramatically.” I personally have seen the MCAS given to students for whom the test does not count: they make pretty designs on the answer key, they purposely try to get the answers all wrong (surprisingly hard to do), they answer all ‘C’, or they simply leave the entire test blank, etc. No surprise to me that the score on any test taken by teenagers goes up when “it counts.”

“Since we’ve implemented high standards here [meaning MCAS], Massachusetts students… have been turning in top-notch performances. That’s just more evidence of the value of strong curriculum frameworks and standards” What’s the ‘more evidence’? If there is improved MA performance on national assessments post-MCAS then that would be something, but improving MCAS scores is just inside baseball.

On the recent poor results on the Science MCAS: “To some, that may mean delaying or lowering the new standard. That, however, would be precisely the wrong reaction.” Lowering the standard is exactly what the state did (see my second paragraph) when it became a real possibility that thousands of otherwise eligible high school students would be denied graduation because of a poor English MCAS score.