Two Tiered Society

Irene and I have often commented on how we do not have many (if any) friends who are out of work because of the recession.  However, I now realize that all of our friends are college educated and the jobless rates is a two tiered statistic:
College educated unemployment is 4.4 percent
High school degree only is 8.8 percent (high school dropouts are at 13.2 percent!)
(source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm)

Yet another example of how society is losing the middle and bifurcating into the haves and the have-nots.

Winter Solstice Season

First off, Season's Greeting from the Rideouts:

Next, my friend WW turned me on to the fact that Newton was born on Dec 25 and many have had their fun with this, but here's my favorite:
(from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/the-ten-days-of-newton/)

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver co-oins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of li-ight,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-Cu-Lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!

Turning Gasoline into Pancakes

The power went out and I finally got to break out the generator I bought a few years ago when the basement flooded.  We needed to use it to keep water out of the basement.  Since it was cold and we needed to eat, I hooked up the electric skillet and cooked up some pancakes on the back porch.

I really enjoyed noticing the generator strain everytime I upped the temperature setting on the skillet.  Also, it was pretty cool when I put a new dollop of batter and the skillet had to draw more power to maintain temperature.  It was as if the generator was complaining about the work involved making those pancakes.

What a great example of conservation of energy!  Does everyone think this way or is it just me?

Cognitive Science and Education

When I was in grad school, before I quit to make wine in France, I was pursuing research interests in computational cognitive science.  This is a really cool field at the intersection of biology, psychology, math, computer science, and physics. 

Nowadays, I am trying to be an educator, but I retain my interest in cognitive neuroscience.  I now wrestle with trying the fit the two together in a meaningful way:  click here to read a short article I am thinking of sending in to the physics teacher or some other journal that might be interested.

Descartes, Emerson, and Lakoff

DRock presented me some Emerson thoughts that reminded me of the writings of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff.  In talking with him, I made a realization about how much my thinking about thinking has changed through the years. Then I ran across a casual reference to Descartes when it fell into place:  I started my intellectual journey as Descarte, then I was Emerson, and now am I Lakoff?

 We think therefore we are

to

Things are what we think

to

We think with things

"Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist." - Descartes' Discourse

"It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic...that state of mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.  An enraged man is a lion...Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope...Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind"
-Emerson's Nature

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." "We are neural beings, our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."- George Lakoff

Faster than a Ray of Light?

Madonna sings about it, Length and time become imaginary when you do it, causality doesn't hold up when it happens, CERN claims to have seen it, but Einstein says "whoa, slow down..."

I think the famous xkcd sums it up pretty well:

As my old guru, Carl Sagan, used to say:  "Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof." 

I'm with Einstein for now.

Economist gets School Reform all Wrong

After reading a recent article in the Economist Magazine, The Great Schools Revolution, I was so upset that I fired a letter off to the editors. 

First, the part of the article that got me going:

"Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington claims that “non-school factors”, such as family income, account for as much as 60% of a child’s performance in school.
Yet the link is much more variable than education egalitarians suggest. Australia, for instance, has wide discrepancies of income, but came a creditable ninth in the most recent PISA study. China, rapidly developing into one of the world’s least equal societies, finished first." ...
 "schools free of government control and run by non-state providers are adding quality to the mix. To date, they seem most successful where the state has been unwilling or unable to make a difference. It is still not clear whether creating archipelagoes of Free Schools and charter schools will consistently drive improvement in other institutions, or whether that is wishful thinking."
[emphasis mine]

Now, my rebuttal:

SIR - In your article on "The great schools revolution" you briefly site studies that conclude that "non school factors" such as income are the dominant factors in a child's performance in school, but then go on to wave away the studies by cavalierly citing China and Australia's good PISA results as a counter example.

                China, the nation, did not take the PISA; Shanghai and Hong Kong did.  If you care to look, you can find single cities in America that beat them both.  Australia has an average score slightly higher than the mean OECD score.  However, if you look at the wide variations within Australia, you'll see that, not surprisingly to "education egalitarians", Australia's regional scores vary with their "wide discrepancies of income", ranging from far below the OECD average to far above.   Additionally, the administering of the PISA in Australia has been fraught with difficulty:  biased student sampling, teacher boycotts, etc.  Citing China and Australia to throw out the link between income and testing results is sloppy reporting by any standard.

                Schools are reflections of the local society in which they are placed.  Although there is much that can be done within the school walls, the real work for society is in addressing the pockets of poverty which ultimately produce the poor educational results.  Freeing schools of "government control" may be the "most striking" element of school reform to your writers, however, many charter schools in America only graduate a fraction of the students they admit.  Which students left the charters, and where did they go?  In many cases, they were the lowest performing students, and they appeared quietly in their assigned seat at a school under "government control".

Ken Rideout,

Boston, Massachusetts

Sources:

http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html

http://www.stltoday.com/suburbanjournals/metro/education/article_bb02d2ab-331c-5583-ab30-8ee2f221b97e.html

 http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_38262901_1_1_1_1,00.html

 http://www.acer.edu.au/ozpisa/geographical-location

 http://www.btu.org/hot-issues/charter-schools/mta-study-looks-at-charter-school-success

Cupcakes and the Model Minority

UC Berkeley Republicans made headlines this week when they held a cupcake sale to protest a new admissions policy designed to help improve racial diversity.   "Baked goods were sold to white men for $2, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1, black men for 75 cents and Native American men for 25 cents. All women received 25 cents off those prices." "We agree that the event is inherently racist, but that is the point," Lewis wrote in response to upheaval over the bake sale. "It is no more racist than giving an individual an advantage in college admissions based solely on their race (or) gender."(CNN)

Okay - reality check.  White people will be helped out and Asians will be hurt by any attempt at racial balancing at UC Berkeley.  The dominant race at the school is Asian (data here).  Hello, College Republicans, do the math before you price your cupcakes:  Asians should pay the highest price for those cupcakes!

The media has focused on the pricing by race - but I find it more interesting that the pricing points don't correspond to the reality.  If their point is that some people are getting an unjust helping hand, flip the pricing for "White" and "Asian"!

Clocks and Northern Dominance

Clockwise and counter clockwise are common terms that come from, well, clocks. 

And those hands on the clocks move that way because... the shadows in a sundial turn that way! 

However, sundials in the southern hemisphere have noon pointing south and the shadow moves counter clockwise as you look down on them.  Once again, something we all take for granted as fundamental is just an accident of fate (northern hemisphere folk invented the first clocks and watches I suppose and thus got to determine "clockwise" and "counter clock wise" for all time thereafter).

Divided on Scallops

When I was little, I often thought things in France were uniquely French and had nothing to do with the things I knew in America.

For example, in the U.S., I knew I liked scallops:

In France, I had a different favorite:  the coquille Saint-Jacques.  When I grew older someone told me they were the same thing.  But how could they be when in France they were always tinged orange at one end and in America they were always all-white?

I admit to just living with the mystery (until today), enjoying both depending on which country I was in.  Today, though, I discovered that in America, we systematically separate out the roe to leave only the white muscle part whereas in France they systematically leave both the muscle and roe attached!


This is what a scallop looks like if you slice it open fresh out of the ocean:

Why didn't I even figure this out before?  My brain never seemed to try to integrate french-experience with american experience until after my 20's - before then, I was simply two slightly different people...

Ken, meet Ken and get it together, man!

Butterfly Spirit

Listen carefully, kids!

At the Smithsonian - Butterflies landed on me three times, much to the kids amusement!

"Once, I, Chang Tzu, dreamed that I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself but I did not know that I was Tzu. Suddenly I awoke and there I was, visible Tzu. I do not know whether it was Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that it was Tzu."
Chang-Tzu, III - II a.C., Chinese philosopher, Book of Chang-Tzu 

Star Wars and Your Inner Struggle with Good and Evil

Check out this artwork by a nephew of mine who is around 5 years old:

Our hero is fighting our villain.  But the hero IS the villain!  This kid is deep - wise beyond his years.

Beer Brewing

Years ago, Irene had asked me if I was interested in doing some home wine-making.  Very haughtily I replied "Certainly not!"  (C'mon, I used to make wine 1000's of gallons at a time from the grape, how could I reduce myself to making 2 or 3 gallons from a grape concentrate?).

***years pass***

I was driving around a bit randomly on Father's Day with Sebastien and we saw a "Beer and Wine Hobby Shop".  And I thought "hmmm... I'm not so snobby about beer-making as I am about wine-making."  (Who talks about the quality of the barley harvest that year?).  So I asked Sebastien if he wanted to buy Daddy a nice father's day gift and he said "Yes!"

So here are the details of my first trial run (following a recipe for "A Dark Beer" supplied with the kit):

1.  The kit brews 5 gallons a shot, so you need a lot of bottles.  And those bottles need to be clean:

2.  Next you've got to extract some body and color from some specially prepared malted barley ("Crystal malt") ("mashed" is the technical term for what has happened to the barley:  heating the germinated barley to convert some starch to sugar and soaking it to extract the good stuff)

In front of the pot you see a white bag that contains the malted barley

3.  Now, in goes the hops (flowers added to beer for taste and their preservative properties) and the syrupy malt extract (malted barley extract - malted barley is just germinated barley that has been dried).  Grains should be germinated a bit in order to be able to convert their starches into sugars. (need the right enzymes)

This goop is called the "wort"

4.  Add enough water to get up to 5 gallons total and then add some yeast ("pitching" the yeast).  Yeast is a type of fungus that eats sugar and makes carbon dioxide and alcohol
C6H12O6   ====>   2(CH3CH2OH)  +  2(CO2) . 
The mixture then foamed and had a lot of activity as the yeast reproduced and generations of those little guys lived the good life in that vat.  After 3 days I decided to separate the fermenting brew from the yeast sediment ("racking" the beer). 

siphoning from the primary fermentation bucket into a glass one

Note all the sediment left behind by all the fermentation activity.  Vegemite, anyone?

Outgassing of the carbon dioxide via the fermentation lock on the top of the primary fermentation bucket.

5. A few more days and the beer was done fermenting.  No more bubbles of CO2 visible and the density of the liquid was stable for 3 days.  The density of the wort is higher than water in the beginning (1.088 kg/liter in my case) and lower when finished fermenting (1.022 kg/liter for me).  One sugar molecule is heavier than two alcohol molecules so the mixture become less dense while fermenting.  The difference in density (0.066) gives me an approximate alcohol content of 3 percent for my final beer.

 7.Time to bottle.  Add a bit more sugar to the beer and then line up the clean bottles, the new caps and the capper:

Nice bald spot, Dad!

6.  Two more week for secondary fermentation in the bottle.  This will give the bottled beer some natural carbonation (just like how they do it with champagne!) and we have produced our first home-made beer:

The in-bottle fermentation leaves a little sediment in the bottle. Commercial brewers force carbonate their beer like soda pop to avoid this.

Special thanks to Isabelle for all her help!

Me Caveman

While on vacation this month, we visited the Smithsonian in DC.  In the human evolution exhibit, there was a display of a human face morphing into a prehistorical ancestor's face.  Turns out there is a free ipad app that does this!  So here I am as caveman ancient and caveman super-ancient:

(the app just keeps your eyes and mouth and uses the same picture for the rest)

More on Rainbows

In earlier post, I talked about the questionable nature of the "7 colors of the rainbows".   But I failed to talk about why the bands of colors are uneven, never mind how many there actually are.  In the picture below I have overlayed an enlarged picture of a real rainbow and a graph of the sensitivities of our three cones.  As you can see, the narrow sharpness of yellow and the wide blending of blue into violet and red into orange come from the ranges over which the individual cones are sensitive!

There is some evidence that a few women (need two X chromosomes for this theory to work) are born with four kind of cones (like most birds!) and can discriminate even more bands of colors that the rest of us.

Dogs, on the other hand, only have two types of cones and so are partially color blind.

Existential Reflection on the Human Condition or Just a Bakery?

This one goes out to my buddy E.D. who will probably lecture me about why this is NOT funny next I see him:


The Daily Pain of French Existence?

From Within or Without

While on vacation on the beach, I observe an extremely sun-burnt man smoking a cigarette on the beach.  I lean over to my cousin and whisper "Cancer - either from within or without!"

From the NIH:
"While the symptoms of sunburn are usually temporary (such as red skin that is painful to the touch), the skin damage is often permanent and can have serious long-term health effects, including skin cancer." and
"Smoking is a leading cause of cancer and death from cancer."





What if people could see these microscopic events in real time, would that help?

Oh, Shnap! (shot)

Ducks and Geese

Why is Duck "lucky" while a Goose is "silly"?  An internet search reveals no satisfying answers.  However, an image search does offer some clues:

(first hits of an actual animal doing a simple picture search with google of "Lucky Duck" and "Silly Goose")

Lightning and Nightmares

The place:  A bunkbed in a college dorm room in West Lafayette, Indiana
The time: Fall 1988
The characters:  KR and JZ

A few weeks into college, I was finally settling in: getting along well with my roommate, getting used to being away from home, falling into a routine, etc.  Then, one night, I was awoken from a deep sleep by a very creepy voice calling my name: "Kehhhhhn".  It sounded like some weird combination of the devil coming to get me and a desperate cry for help from someone who had just had surgery on their jaw.

Disoriented at first, I thought it was a nightmare I was having, but then I heard it again while awake, and it was coming from directly below me: "Kehhhhhn".  Pretty confident that my roommate was being possessed by evil spirits I leaned over in the dark and called him "John!".  He sat up instantly and he awoke from his own nightmare with his face only inches from mine.  He yelled in surprise and I yelled too as I yanked my body back to the top bunk in fright.  Several minute later, I timidly asked "You awake?" and he said "Yeah - what just happened?" So I told him how he was creeping me out.

He then figured out/ remembered that he was having a nightmare in which he was paralyzed but knew he was sleeping, a condition known as Sleep Paralysis.  He was trying various ways to wake himself up when he thought of calling out to me to help him wake up.

Turns out he had had several of these incidents since being stuck by lightening the summer before.  He was camping with his brothers when the tree he had pitched his tent under was struck by lightning.  Apparently some of the lightening went through a root under his tent and went into his body at his shoulders and out through his feet.  He woke with his body making a arc in the air, pelvis thrust skyward, grounded by shoulders and feet.  When the electricity had passed his body fell back to the ground and he was actually temporarily paralyzed.  (I suppose all the muscles were completely messed up and had to re-establish ionic equilibrium or something).  He and his brother thought they were dead at first but they slowly regained control of their muscles starting with their necks and they eventually got control back over all their muscles over a period of a few hours (or maybe minutes, he wasn't really sure).

I decided that story was worth the fright and luckily he didn't have any more incidents of sleep paralysis (at least that I knew of!). Little did I know that someday I would be a physics teacher and this story would become an integral part of the "an amp is a coulomb/second" lesson plan...

What's in a Name?

Ken = Kenny = Kenneth

BUT

At work recently, people thought it was funny that I was referred to as "Kenneth" in a widely circulated document.  They all know me as "Ken".  But I am, of course, both; here is the evolution of my name:

0-12 years old :"Kenny"
13  years   old: "Kenneth" (thought it made me sound older)
14-26 years old: "Ken" (seemed easier & less formal)
27-28 years old: "Kenneth" (there was already a "Kent" at that job who went by "Ken" and I was ready for a change)
29-?? years old: "Ken" (except for some french relatives to whom I will always be "Kenny" and two children who call me "Daddy") (Also, in 2006, I start work at WHS and my department chair goes by Ken so I offer to go by Kenneth once again, thus many of my school documents have me as "Kenneth" - however "Ken" sticks)

A lady down the street asked me what the kids' names are.  When I reply "Isabelle and Sebastien", she says "Oh, fancy names!"

In fact, when we were choosing names, having many possible diminutives was a major factor:

Isabelle: "Izzy", "Belle","Izzybellybooboo"
Sebastien: "Seb", "Sebby", "Bastien", "Bas", "C-BAS" (my personal fav), "Chongers"

Wait a sec!  "Chongers"?  Huh?

Sebastien's middle name is Wen Chiang so Chinese people will call him "Chiang Chiang", which I apparently can not say correctly.  While he was still an infant, everyone was making fun of my pronunciation: "It's not CHONG, Ken!"

So I exaggerated my mispronunciation in a mature, noncontrarian way and took it to "Chongers" (I told Irene it would one day be his frat boy name).  The day I knew it was sticking was when I heard my mother-in-law call him Chongers.

Curious George and The Stockholm Syndrome

Watching some early morning Curious George at the Riddy household and I started thinking, "Isn't the 'Man in the Yellow Hat' George's kidnapper?"  But Curious George LOVES the Man!  I think the little monkey is suffering from Stockholm syndrome ("A term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors.")

What am I doing to my kids?  Not only are they sympathizing with a kidnapper but the perpetrator is literally "The Man" (albeit with a humanizing fondness for yellow).

On My Way to the Monocle

Often my students have heard me say "I just wear them to look smart" whenever I am without my glasses.  ("Mr. Rideout, are you wearing contacts?")

If I am feeling generous I go ahead and tell them the full story:
  How my right eye is actually 20/20 but my left eye is weaker.
  How, if I don't wear glasses, my brain tunes out my left eye and the optometrist told me I could eventual lose the sight in that eye if I never force it to work.
  How I start centering everyone in my right field of view toward the end of a day without glasses by rotating my head to the left.
  How when I am older and hair is growing out of my ears and my eyebrows are out of control, I look forward to wearing a monocle and breaking it out when a freshman asks me to look over their work. "Hmmm... let me see here, sonny-boy..."



Last friday I added a new one:
  How I wear the glasses to hide my super-hero identity, Clark Kent style.

Fate* has punished me for this latest claim by breaking the right rim of my glasses.  Since my glasses are always dirty, the funny thing is I see better without the clear glass over my right eye.  So I plan to go to school on Monday looking like this:

*by Fate I mean Sebastien because he is the one most likely to twist my glasses in shapes it was never meant to hold.

A Prezi on Energy

I've been thinking about the best way to help clean up the confusion that is Work & Energy for years now.  Feynman is the only one who does a decent job in his textbook, but I've tried to pare it back to the bare bones here.

This is my latest attempt to point out what the differences are between Kinetic, Potential, Thermal, and mass-energy from special relativity... (go full screen to be able to see the details)

Energy on Prezi 

Unions, Letters, and Stewart

Apparently I am part of the problem.  My mean teacher's union which has managed to get me lower pay and worse benefits after 9 years of teaching than when I worked in the private sector 14 years ago is the source of all fiscal woe in the USA.  I actually fired off a letter to the Boston Globe after reading an especially viscous op-ed piece attacking unions the day before and the Globe published parts of it last Sunday:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2011/02/27/bay_state_unions_have_shown_willingness_to_compromise/

(my original letter was "it takes two to tango")

However, a couple people today brought my attention to the fantastic piece by Jon Stewart that totally trumps my boring little letter:

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - Message for Teachers
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Triumvirate of Dictators

There's this country called Libya that's been in the news lately and, apparently, it's been ruled for a long time by trio of really bad dictators - who knew?

I really resent it when the pundits just assume you already know stuff (like there are really three guys in charge - maybe they are brothers?):

This conspiracy on the part of the press is as bad as the one several years ago when China moved their capital city from Peking to Beijing!  Why can't they just tell us these things?

"Khadafi"

"Gadaffi

"Qaddafi"

Lightweight Ninjas

Last week I gave a simple quiz to one of my classes on momentum.  Here is a problem quoted directly from the quiz:

2.    If a .55 kg ninja throwing star embeds itself in a stationary 3 kg block, what will be the speed of the block + star after the collision?  The star slams into the block at 5 m/s.

And here are the questions that followed:
"Don't we need to know the mass of the star?" ("It's given!" I respond)
"Why do you give us the mass of the ninja - we don't need that, do we?" ("That's a very small ninja!" I reply)
"This question is very poorly written." (*sigh*)

In the end, about half the class was confused by the question and the other half (including me) was mystified by their confusion until I realized the confused half never encounter the word 'ninja' as a adjective...

For the record, this is the first result when image googling 'ninja throwing star':


For fun, I googled ".55 kg ninja" and I did get this result:

Hmm... next year I will add a picture of the throwing star.  For the sticklers out there, I made the star very heavy so I could count points off when some students inevitably neglect the mass of the star when calculating the final momentum.  (experience & ease of grading trumps realism every time!)