Meme Day

Today all the juniors are dressing up as memes.  One of my students (MC) decided to promote me to meme status and dressed like me:

Who's Who?

Maybe we can defeat our robot overlords with sarcasm!

Looks like Google's AI for email auto responses can not handle sarcasm.  Look at the reply prompt suggestions (usually so impressively, disturbingly good) to Seb's sarcastic reaction to Isabelle's email link to the classic xkcd plot on the climate crises:
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Maybe there's a silver lining here:  Once our robot overlords save the planet from us, they'll decide to keep us around for sarcastic entertainment.

Sounds good to me!

Chess, Clumsiness, and Institutional Memory

Every four years or so, I'll dust off the trusty old chess rap (the institutional memory of a high school is only four years after all!).  Graduating Senior EM told me that she remembers my performance at the talent show her freshmen year. For that reason, I had the honor of playing her in the inaugural game of the set she designed and made in art class this year.  Here we are playing during lunch on the last day for seniors:



Before we played, I was admiring the pieces and I pointed out that the protruding swords of the knights seemed like they might be fragile.  Five moves into the first game, I knock over one of my knights and break its sword (she specifically recommended NOT to knock over any pieces during play). Nice job, Chessmaster! (she superglued it back on later and was very gracious about it)



Since the school's institutional memory is about to be reset, time for me to get my game on for next year!

Thanks for the game, EM!

The Four Musketeers

Some friends are friends for life.  Here is a picture of me and my best childhood friends (well, that makes them my best friends, period!):

We are 15-16 years old in these pictures.  I haven't seen any of these guys in over 15 years. One is in Germany, another in Texas, a third in Ireland, and my brother (not pictured here) is in California. But a recent funny sequence of events and the power of the internet to keep us all in some kind of tenuous contact despite the distance and time issues has landed a real blast from the past from these guys.

In astronomy, I give the students wide leeway to pick a fourth quarter project to research and present to the class.  As I was allowing students to pick, one said "Carl Sagan" and then another said "Neil deGrasse Tyson" and the MM said "I'll do you, Rideout."  I looked at her incredulously and then shrugged and said "okay."

She proceeded to reach out to friends and family to ask them to relate stories about me growing up so she could make a video out of it for her project.  Very little science but such a gift for me!  Listening to these stories is heart warming and life affirming in a way that is hard to describe.  It reminds me of one of the strange joys of teaching - you have an effect on others that you never get to realize (or you usually don't get to hear them talk about it 30 to 40 years later!).

First up, my brother (Phil) sets the stage:

(You can spot his wife, Ramya, ducking in and out in the background)

Next up, Bill (left-most in both pics above):

Next a series of short from Jack (top in the top pic, far right in bottom pic):

And rounding our the foursome of nerds, Erec (far right on the top, second from the left on bottom).  His video is "OP" as Sebastien would say: a sci fi montage filled with inside jokes that only the others on this post could really get:

We are all turning the big 5-0 next year and I can't help but think that this is some kind of early gift from the Universe!



  

Always Lock Your Door

People are always asking why I keep my door locked all day long.  Here's a great reason.

I'm just minding my own business, doing some work on my computer while rocking out to some Bee Gees.  Mr. Blue sneaks up from the hallway and snaps this video on his phone.  I look up after he chuckles gleefully and when I make a questioning face, he says simply "Senior Show material" and walks away.

There is considerable debate whether my foot tapping is on the beat or not...

Lock the door, Rideout!

Naming your Penguin

For those of you who don't know, Seb has a bit of a Penguin obsession for some reason.  Recently, he was struggling to name his 10th penguin.  I had recently told the family how, every year, during the final exam, a student or two will call me over and ask what "opackway" means.  Confused, I look down at the word in the question and see "opaque."  I usually roll my eyes unhelpfully and say "you mean 'opaik'?" and they usually look a bit sheepish at that point.

So I was super-thrilled when Seb gave this fella a solid, block-the-view kind of name!

Seb and Opackway

Ouch!

"Why don't we watch it in class, Mr. Rideout?"

Don't dish it out if you can't take it!

Students are always commenting that I roast them too hard, but I am generally surprised by this as I'm thinking we are all just joking around.  But today, JW (who has been campaigning hard for a blog post mention BTW), roasted me but good and now I'm thinking maybe I should be more gentle and kind... (wonder if there's a book I can read to teach me how?)

Someone mentioned the movie E.T. and how they had never seen it. I then talked about how that movie falls into the category of "Big-Time-when-it-came-out-but-does-not-hold-up-well-over-time" category.  JW said she loved the movie.  However I suspect that it was actually her doppelgänger lovin' on that movie, not the real JW (running inside joke in class, don't ask).


I said: "That movie is slow and boring!"

She retorts: "This class is slow and boring!"

She remains unapologetic as I gasp in astonishment and pain.

I just wanted to phone home ("Mommy, the students are being mean to me!")

I haven't been so belittled since that old episode of The Flash!

Prom 2019

When the lovely ladies of The Hive ask you to chaperone their Prom, "No" is not an option.

Tangent, Me, mgsin𝜃, Quanjamin

Preposition Discrimination

Seb came by the classroom the other day and saw some left over notes on the white board:

"LASER:  Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"

He said "That isn't right!" and wrote

"LABSEOR"

on the board.

He left and then my next class came in and, when they asked what a "LABSEOR" was, I said it was Seb defending prepositions against discrimination.

In support, mgsin𝜃 drew a picture of Labseor under it on the board:








Relegated to being on the diagonal when diagramming sentences, it's a cryin' shame! Prepositions, we know you've long been oppressed by those nouns and verbs, but we know you can run around them, through them, over them, under them, behind them, and above them!  Use your labseor and fight!

Haiku of a Response

Recently, AC asked me a perceptive question:  "Isn't your blog too much?" meaning is it too much content, too personal, over-sharing, etc. for the student-teacher relationship.  Okay, she didn't really say that but that is what I got from it.  I've been thinking about it a lot as the blog really has been an organic and idiosyncratic thing in my life. Then, today, a haiku came to me and I wasn't sure why.  I then realized the haiku is my response.
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Our skin, our redoubt.

Failure feeling so unique;

Everyone has doubt.

Learning from Failure

So often we tell our students, the best way to learn is to try something and fail.  Learning from failure is the truest type of learning.

Mostly, they simply don't believe us for we have scaffolded lessons and learning in such a way that at each step along their learning path, they proceed with confidence.  Down the carefully manicured walkway that we have prepared for them, they blithely stroll - unaware that their lack of struggle is a lack of learning.  Then they wonder why they must work so hard the night before the test to prepare.

Just as the learning of science must include many failures, so too does the progress of science itself.  Consider the following two famous "fails" in physics:
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In 1887, two experimentalists set out to monitor tiny changes in the speed of light as the Earth changed directions.  At the time, it was understood that light was a wave.  A wave in the aether to be precise.  Try as they might, they could not measure this difference.  They did measurements in the middle of the night on a vibration insulated table in the basement of a stone building during different times of the year, in different directions.  They could only find an effect about 1/40^thof the expected signal.  Eventually they gave up, published their work, and turned to different experiments.

In 1907, Albert Michelson was awarded the Nobel prize "for his optical precision instruments...” and his “failed” experiment (with Edward Morley) is now considered a profound result about the nature of light and one of the supporting pillars of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

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In 1964, two experimentalists were working for Bell Labs to find the source of mysterious radio waves discovered in the upper atmosphere.  In order to even detect these waves, they first had to eliminate all the noise in their radio telescope.  They cooled their telescope down to 4 degrees Kelvin and yet they could not get rid of a persistent signal seemingly coming from everywhere in the sky, day or night.  Frustrated, they could not even begin to analyze the original signals they were supposed to investigate.  

Luckily, a friend of Arno Penzias told him that some cosmologists were proposing that there should be some left over radiation from the Big Bang in the frequency range of their "noise".    In 1978, Penzias and his collaborator Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their “discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation” now considered to be the most definitive proof of the Big Bang origin of the Universe.

Physics Improves your Life in Every Way

A member of the Hive told me a funny story yesterday.

Some classmate (not a student of mine!) was trying to throw some shade her way by admonishing her “Don’t talk so loud  - I could hear you talking before I could even see you!”

Not only was she upset about this unsolicited advice, but she retorted about his lack of physics knowledge: “Well, it’s not my fault you use such short wavelengths of light to see with and such long wavelength of sound to hear with!" 

Silence.

  

"Diffraction!”

A+ in physics roasting!

Diffraction - I hear you around the corner before I see you

Entropy, Pruning, Neurons, and Camus

I've posted about the nature of time before and it's something I think about a lot (like a lot of middle aged physicists do I suppose).  Lately I've started thinking about the nebulous concept of "now" as being a sort of pruning point where (when?) the possible futures are being eliminated down to the one path we are choosing (free will?), thus leaving the single thread of the past.

The future is unknown because of the multiplicity of paths.  It is disorganized, has high entropy.  The past is known because it is unique: so organized; low entropy.




Just the other day I mentioned in class that I had once read that one of the reason babies are so helpless is that their neurons are actually over-connected and that a large portion of youthful brain development is the pruning of connections.



Getting old and becoming an adult is, in large part, the cementing of personality-forming memories.  I just shared my old favorite film classic Mon Oncle d'Amerique with a few students (shout out to YL, AA, MC, ML, & AP) and Isabelle. I realized that watching this movie as a teenager was the first time I was exposed to the idea that 'who you are' is simply an accumulation of individual memories.

I'm feeling a connection between the abstract concepts of "who you are", maturing, and time itself.  They are all about the replacement of possibility, uncertainty, and the unknown with having a definite identity, a unique trajectory through time, and just generally pruning away possibility until there is no more pruning to be had...

I once asked my mother where to go for insight on the meaning of life and she responded "I suppose it's really Camus and the Myth of Sisyphus."  I've always gotten a lot out of that Camus treatise  but now I realize that all I'm talking about here is Sisyphus again!  He is out of time itself for his future and past are one and the same: the ultimate act of pruning!  As he contemplates his fate, he is always caught in the NOW...


The secret to being youthful then is to continue to be open to possibility, savor the unknowns of the future, and to not wallow in the past.  But if 'now' is the actual act of pruning then living fully is inevitably the reduction of possible futures.  One must simply enjoy the act of pruning itself!

 "The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart." - Camus