Riddicisms

Sebastien plays "House"

2012-01-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

"Daddy, you want to play house with me?"

"Of course I'll play house with you!"

I start looking around for Isabelle's plastic tea cups and whatnot.

He grabs some legos stuck together to look like a gun and says "Ok - you shoot the bad guys when they come in, and don't worry - I have a bomb!"

Hmmm, girls are different from boys.

Battlestar Galactica, Costco, and Oatmeal

2012-01-15T16:06:00.000-05:00

My Dad has a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast everyday. When I was growing up, he thought it would be a great synergy to serve us both up some oatmeal in the morning. I, however, decided it was yucky. Around the same time as I pushed back on the oatmeal, I really (really!) wanted to watch a pretty lame show called Battlestar Galactica (old school style for you youngsters - not nearly as hip as the more recent incarnation). To this day, I can't stand oatmeal because he made a deal with me over 30 years ago that I could watch BG if I would eat a bowl of oatmal. That bowl would get cold and nasty and thick and crusty and I would make the pain of eating it last for the entire episode.

Now I have kids of my own, I bought a Costco variety pack of oatmeals because they told me they liked it. Of course, now that I have a boxful of the nasty stuff - they have decided not to like it. Sigh - I guess there was never smart play with oatmeal for me...

Stu and I

2012-01-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

For some time now, students have been happy to point out the fact that they think I bear a resemblance to Stu from the movie "The Hangover". I have yet to see the entire movie, but have seen so many scenes from it that I really don't think I need to.

When I was eight or so, I flipped while balancing on the top of some monkey bars on a playground. I cracked my tooth and, to this day, I have a fake tooth bolted to the root of my original tooth. The bolt has held up pretty well for over 30 years, but the fake enamel wears away faster my real teeth. The year before I got married, my dentist fixed up the corner of the tooth so I would look sharp for the wedding pictures.

We were out eating some lobster at a dim sum place over the holidays and I lost that chip, so now everyone at school thinks I recently chipped my tooth.

"How did it happen?" I just tell them "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

No plans to get it fixed, - I think it will look good with the monocle!

Two Tiered Society

2011-12-29T20:49:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-03T10:29:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-31T15:47:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-29T09:22:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-15T01:16:00.001-04:00

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

Things are what we think

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?

2011-09-27T21:18:00.000-04:00

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

2011-09-27T21:08:00.000-04:00

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 schoolsrevolution" you briefly site studies that conclude that "non schoolfactors" such as income are the dominant factors in a child's performancein school, but then go on to wave away the studies by cavalierly citing Chinaand Australia's good PISA results as a counter example.

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

Schoolsare reflections of the local society in which they are placed. Although there is much that can be donewithin the school walls, the real work for society is in addressing the pocketsof poverty which ultimately produce the poor educational results. Freeing schools of "governmentcontrol" may be the "most striking" element of school reform toyour writers, however, many charter schools in America only graduate a fractionof the students they admit. Whichstudents left the charters, and where did they go? In many cases, they were the lowestperforming students, and they appeared quietly in their assigned seat at a schoolunder "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

2011-09-27T20:57:00.000-04:00

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

2011-09-03T15:48:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-22T09:09:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-11T18:51:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-08T19:08:00.002-04:00

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?

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

2011-07-17T22:06:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-17T21:51:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-07-17T21:02:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-17T20:57:00.000-04:00

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)

2011-06-17T19:54:00.000-04:00

Ducks and Geese

2011-06-13T21:16:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-27T23:44:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-05-21T13:02:00.003-04:00

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

2011-03-26T10:19:00.001-04:00

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

2011-03-20T19:35:00.000-04:00

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

2011-03-05T13:58:00.000-05:00

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

2011-03-01T20:07:00.001-05:00

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

2011-02-26T16:49:00.000-05:00

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 severalyears 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

2011-02-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

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!)

Inappropriate Linear "Fits"

2011-02-15T20:48:00.000-05:00

Next week I turn 41. Bald spot, grey hair, trimming my eyebrows - these I am okay with. But the persistent weight gain and my inability to lose the weight simply by thinking about it really bothers me. In a nerdy attempt to gain a handle on this, I turn to analytics.

Many non scientists love to apply a linear fit to nonlinear data. In this spirit, I have graphed my weight as a function of age and determined the best fit line. As you can see, I will probably weigh 440 lbs when I am 85 years old. Also of note is that I was born weighing 20 lbs and that I am gaining about 4.5 lbs per year.

The red line represent the 6 actual data points (drawn from memory and last weekend's weigh-in as well as the logical zero point of 1969).

Travolta, Cruise, and Ford

2011-02-09T16:28:00.002-05:00

Long ago, I tried to convince people I was a nerdy teacher version of John Travolta:

Then I was told (by people who haven't met many white people) that I look like Tom Cruise, so I started to run with that (using his picture as mine on various teacher sites):

And, as of last week (thanks MK and CF), I have graduated to the ranks of Harrison Ford:

(Note the super-hip reference to a previous blog post!)

Finally, I have made it to the big leagues!

Indiana Jones, he diggin' up bones

I have my flaws, teachin' Newton's Laws

He has cool whip; into equations I dip

In front of others, I use white board marker

His cool hat, makes him taller, darker

But similarities between us can fill pages -

Dressed up in our Earth-tones and beiges

Red on the Outside, Gray on the Inside

2011-01-23T14:07:00.000-05:00

Long ago, I learned that hamburger meat (and other 'red' meats) were only red because they had been exposed to air. Obviously, it preserves better if you keep it air tight - but customers expect their 'red' meat to be red and so the butchers purposefully expose the meat to the air so the outside is red!

I hadn't thought about this for years but mentioned it casually at the dinner table the other night and everyone thought I was crazy. So I checked, and it's true (references here and here)!

What a crazy world we live in, huh? It's all about appearances: from the face we present to the world right down to the meat in the grocery store. Style over substance every time!

I want to open a grocery store chain called "Ugly, Safe & Tasty" - how's that for a new marketing angle?

Wilder, Progress, and Technology

2011-01-17T23:55:00.000-05:00

Every generation likes to think it faces unique problems (it's all going to hell in handbasket, right?).
How I enjoyed reading this passage in The Long Winter (set in 1880) to Isabelle this evening:

"These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves - they're good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em."

Amen, Pa - we still feel that way!

Supertasting, Languages, and Neuronal Development

2011-01-12T16:12:00.000-05:00

A while back, I posted about the advantages of exposing the young mind to different languages and the connection of that to the fact that infants are actually pruning the connections between their over-connected neurons. (Development for the very young is not the forming of new connection as it is for adults, but rather the abandonment of pathways not needed).

Now it occurs to me that the same thing might be happening for smell. Irene and I have noticed that our kids seem to be supersensitive to trace odors and tastes. (chop an onion near their open container of milk and Isabelle will tell you about it when she takes a sip later). Apparently the development of taste is not well understood and undergoing considerable research, but we do know that there are bona-fide supertasters among us. That might not have anything to do with neuronal development but now I can post another They Might be Giants video!:

Glocalisation and Coopertition

2011-01-09T18:40:00.001-05:00

Can we please stop trying to impress everyone with our cool new hybrid words?
So smartsightful, aren't we?
I think we are just being dumart. Or would it be smaumb?
Hmmm... maybe I'm just jealous that I don't have the skills to do the combo artfully?
I'm disgusted and intrigued at the same time... intrigusted?

Can't have enough Thomas

2011-01-07T21:25:00.000-05:00

Chongers can't get enough of Thomas the Tank Engine...

Soiree Croque Monsieur

2010-12-25T18:08:00.000-05:00

"Soiree Croque Monsieur"

sounds so much nicer than

"Ya'll want some grilled cheese?"

Graphing the Last 200 Years

2010-12-25T18:00:00.000-05:00

Now, this is the way to learn and think about things! My father-in-law sent me this link and I shared it with my brother who then found the original web app: http://www.gapminder.org/world/
where you can slice and dice the data yourself anyway you want. Every time I watch it, I notice something new!

Flukes, Flounder, and Handedness

2010-12-08T21:47:00.000-05:00

You'd rather "flounder" around (right eye fish) than simply be a "fluke" (left-eye fish), correct? Or, should I say "right?"

You'd rather be adroit and dextrous (french and italian for right) than gauche and sinister (french and italian for left), wouldn't you?

In many cultures, you only shake hands with your right hand (the left being reserved for "dirty" jobs (see bullet point #4 here)).

How about that poor minority group, the lefties: forever being thwarted by the placement of handles and utensils?

I'd rather be your "right hand man" than "out in left field"!

It turns out that life on Earth is left-handed! So maybe all this bias against leftness is just our attempt to make up for the gross imbalance at the molecular level. No one knows for sure the reason life chose left-handed DNA over right-handed, but then again - no one knows why the universe chose matter over antimatter. No only is life not fair and balanced, but the universe itself is not. I should forgive these cultural biases, all left already!

Sueing and Sewing

2010-11-21T20:18:00.000-05:00

We are reading out way through the Little House books at the Riddy household and today I had a little trouble with this line "...we setted by the fire and did some sewing and crocheting."

Now I know what crocheting is, but I said crotcheting instead. Irene looks up with a "Are you kidding?" look and I (realizing my mistake) respond "What, you think they can't sit around and complain while sewing away their afternoon in the middle of the prarie?"

According to Chongers:

2010-11-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

"Mark, get sick - GO!"

Loveys and Ether

2010-11-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

I have always been a little creeped out by the attachment my kids have to their loveys. Sebastien has taken to sometimes wearing it over his face and he inhales it deeply as if partaking of some illicit drug.

It turns out, he is self-medicating! The infant sense of smell is very strong and they draw comfort from the familiar scents trapped in the loveys. Isabelle. at five, is just imitating her younger brother though for this picture. I think she now keeps her lovey around more as a psychological crutch (as opposed to an olfactory one).

The thing is, I keep remembering those pictures of ether-users in the 1800's who drew comfort from inhaling ether from a soaked towel placed on their face (or used it to pass out for surgery).

Now, am I right to be creeped out or what?

Moyers, Zinn, and the Plutocracy

2010-11-11T09:44:00.000-05:00

This chart shows something that has been bothering me for years:

How can one person be worth 800 other workers at the same company? Just doesn't seem possible. Another way of looking at it is to imagine what minimum wage would be if it had tracked CEO pay:

Which brings me to a really great lecture given at BU recently (thanks for bringing it to my attention, CES). Bill Moyers is delivering the first annual Howard Zinn memorial lecture. The speech starts 7 minutes in:

http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=20ZaW9PO

Princesses vs. Fairies

2010-10-28T20:15:00.000-04:00

I was talking to my students today about the Halloween plans: "Well, Sebastien is going to be Lightning McQueen and Isabelle is going to be Tinkerbell" Then one kid says "Who's Chongers going to be?" I give him the Look and say "Chongers IS Sebastien!"

I mean, c'mon - it's one thing not to understand me when I talk about physics, but you have to go and not get my kids' nicknames straight?

I then launch into an unprompted speech on how fairies are better than princesses. "Fairies have skills and jobs. The Princesses just sit around in pretty dresses waiting to marry rich Princes. Which role model do you want for your little girl?"

Feeling pretty smug, I then notice a girl in the front row slump down and mutter under her breath, "Thanks, you just ruined my life..."

My First Prezi

2010-10-24T08:33:00.000-04:00

When I'm teaching, I sometimes wish I could show the students how the information is organized and interconnected in my mind. Obviously, this would not be a good thing even if it were possible - but I have the desire nonetheless.

Just the other day, a fellow science teacher (thanks, KW!) showed me how 'prezis' work and I thought to myself, hmmm... this could bring me one step closer. Here's my first attempt at a representation of projectile motion that comes close to presenting how I picture the information in my head. Well, it doesn't really come close but I am using it to test the software out.

Projectile Motion on Prezi

Degrees of Separation

2010-10-24T08:21:00.000-04:00

Recently I got my one degree of separation with the governer down to zero. (used to be one degree because Deval Patrick's former high school physics teacher is a professional acquaintance).

This gets my degrees of separation with President down to one since he is a friend of the governor.
(Irene and I were attending a fundraiser at the MFA when the governor made a surprise visit).

As my sphere of influence grows, I will use my power to influence the future of public education to be:

"All Physics, All the Time, K-12"

(insert evil laughter here)

Pumpkin Pi

2010-10-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

Notice the pumpkin Isabelle is touching - that one is Irene's (in honor of our late friend Stephen). Just to Izzy's left is the one she drew and I carved.

This was a Rideout household first (the entire carving experience), but I wanted to be sure that everyone was spooked by the "transcendental" nature of the event - irrational, scary stuff indeed.

Resonance: Respect the Natural Frequency!

2010-10-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

I plan on making this video my entire lesson when we get to the unit on resonance and natural frequencies. Please note my dismayed "not working" comment near the end!

Nonplussed by the Penultimate Redoubt

2010-10-05T20:40:00.000-04:00

In science education we speak of the problem of prior misconceptions. Those pesky ideas that everyone has wrong and are so hard to educate away. Like that the Earth is closer to the Sun in the summer time. Or that heavier object fall faster than lighter ones. We find that students will learn the right answer for your test, but then go right back to their old bad habits afterwards.

Just recently I made a connection with my own bad habits regarding certain plain-old regular words. For whatever reason, I learned some words incorrectly at first and now it takes work every time I use them to use them correctly! For instance I might read this entry's title to mean "Not impressed by the better than best look-out" when it really means "Baffled by the next-to-last stronghold". Some part of my brain knows that the second phrase is correct, but I can't stop myself from reading it the first way initially. I can not clear my prior misconception of those words - something about the way our brains lay down memories really does justice to the old "initial impressions matter most".

Unlike science misconceptions, I could just continue to misuse these words and hope that society changes their definition to suit me. One the other hand, the axial tilt of the Earth and the planet's gravitational field are probably less likely to change to accommodate my students...

Speedy Rap

2010-09-23T20:48:00.001-04:00

Hi Ho Hi Ho
I wear Speedo
Laps I'm swimmin'
Races I'm winnin'
Distance accumulatin'
Displacement annhilatin'
Hi Ho Hi Ho Hi Ho Hi Ho

You say spedahmeter
I say speed-o-meter
Tomato tomahtoh
Potato pahtahtoh
Let's call this whole rap off

Ridin' up on ya easy
Arrowin' like velocity
All the eyes are on me
Direction/Magntiude's Key
Speed's just a value
Without direction, can't find you

My slope's so steep' it's mighty fine
You so slow look like a flat line
Hi Ho Hi Ho, off to class we go
Rideout Raps, we need some mo
Hi Ho Hi Ho Hi Ho Hi Ho

Failure to Communicate

2010-09-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

On our first teacher workday of the year, we had an icebreaker activity. The staff wanted a chance to catch up across departmental lines and so they did the old draw-numbers-out-of-the-hat. The idea being to get random groups together to talk about their summers before the school year inevitably separate us into departments again.

I drew 25, which I signalled to the room at large with my fingers as in the istock photo on the left. Of course, my good friend Paul who also teaches physics, shares 3 classrooms with me and has a desk next to mine in the science office also drew 25 and came right over. We scanned the room looking for some more group members and saw someone waving to us from across the room. He flashed the same sign and insisted we join him. So we worked our way across the room and said "you guys are 25 too?" and they looked at me like I was crazy and said "No, we're group seven".

R.I.P. S.E.G.

2010-09-09T14:16:00.000-04:00

Stephen E. Graham 1969-2010

Stephen has been a friend of mine for 26 years now. We met in band where we had both found refuge from the stress of P.E. class (marching band got you out of PE in those days). I tell people now-a-days that I was the next to worst trumpet player and Steve, well - let's say he kept me company down there at the end of the line.

I found in him a kindred spirit. We were quite different but we shared those common teenage feelings of not quite belonging coupled with a great desire for change. He single-handed created the Math Team, and in his last two years of high school, he taught me all the tricks of being a "Mathelite".

Looking back, I don't think I ever quite put it together that I dropped out of band my senior year in part because he had left and gone to college. Who was going to make snarky remarks with me and mock everyone else, if not Steve? Who else would look at me as we both dropped out and simply pretended to play during the difficult passages?

I have been lucky enough to continue crossing paths with Steve through the years: in Huntsville, in New York, in Georgia, and, for the last 8 years, in Boston. Along the way he has taught me what it means to be a good friend. Being a good friend takes work; it takes effort to maintain a connection through the years, over distance, through life's changes and challenges. How he understood this so long ago I will never know, but I do know that I am thankful he did.

Stephen, always one step ahead of me, now has gone on and taken the final step and shown me something remarkable once again. His legacy is all around us: his friends, his family - all those he touched with his kindness, his wit, his understanding... he leaves us all the richer and the wiser.

I take comfort in knowing that these final months have been his happiest, his most peaceful, and that he knew he was surrounded by friends and family near and far who loved him and counted themselves lucky to be loved by him.

Rest in peace, Stephen Emerson Graham, and thank you for being such a good friend.

A mug Steve gave me for my 40th birthday.
The faint writing you see on the left is a copy of a funny note (long forgotten by me)
I gave him for his 17th birthday
"Rules for how to stay cool"

One Token Each

2010-08-09T10:02:00.000-04:00

As we say in the Riddy house: "Tank U Chuck E Cheesits"

Do the Living outnumber the Dead?

2010-07-31T14:17:00.001-04:00

In a word, no.
However, it is an interesting thing to think about. For so long, the population of homo sapiens sapiens was extremely low, then the scientific revolution came along, allowing modern medicine & agriculture to develop and BOOM! the population explosion we are in happens. Check out this graph from http://www.sustainablescale.org:

Even if you were to extend the time axis backwards to around 200,000 BC when we think our subspecies evolved from the simpler, archaic homo sapiens, the populations were so low that there would not be much area under the curve. However, the popular number for all homo sapiens sapiens dead is around 60 billion (that's for around 7500 generations between you and the first "modern" man). That's less than 10 dead for each one of us alive today. Kind of creepy the way we are swarming the surface of this planet, eh?

Yes - life can be this good!

2010-07-23T21:14:00.000-04:00

Chongers sees the next wave coming

Moonths

2010-07-21T08:15:00.000-04:00

Time for Earth to orbit the Sun: 365.25 days

Time for Moon to orbit Earth: 27.3 days

365.2/27.3 = 13.38

And therein lies the problem. There is no neat way to make lunar –based time (“moonths”) mesh with solar-based time (“years”).

I have blogged about various aspects of time ( days of the week, lunar vs. solar calendars, origin of 60 seconds and 60 minutes as units of time), but Irene brought my attention to another arbitrary unit: that of 12 months. Since the Romans decided to go with a solar calendar, I always wondered why they didn’t go with a nice, round ten months. Well, they did:

1.Martius (March)

Mars - god of War

2. Aprilis (April)

Aphrodite- goddess of love & beauty

3. Maius (May)

Maia - goddess of spring

4. Junius (June)

Juno - goddess of marriage

5. Quintilis (July)

Fifth Month, renamed by Julius Caesar

6. Sextilis (August)

Sixth Month - renamed by Augustus Caesar

7. September - the seventh month

8. October - the eighth month

9. November - the ninth month

10. December - the tenth month

A nameless winter stretch of days followed to round out the solar year until Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome circa 700 BC, added the two winter months at the end of the year:

Januarius "January" (Janus is the Roman god of gates and doorways, depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions) and

Februarius "February" (Februa is the Roman festival of purification).

The nameless stretch of days needed to keep the seasons lined up was kept at the end of the year (after February). This “filler” period was not used every year and was sometimes called Intercalaris "intercalendar" or Mercedinus (“payment for work” was the time when property lessees paid rents due to their landlords). This is the reason leap days come at the end of February even in modern times.

After the introduction of January, Romans began to transition the beginning of the year to Jan 1, but the process took 100's of years to become standard and official.

In modern times we still have to work hard to keep our lunar cycles and solar cycles lined up. We have our complicated leap year rules and our leap seconds

They let me teach this stuff?

2010-07-10T21:35:00.000-04:00

During a very successful pilgrimage to Storyland, I noticed the rear hatch of the minivan (AKA the "Swaggerwagon") would not stay up. Upon our return, I decided to change out the supporting struts myself.

Of course the friction force between the hatch and the supporting plank is dependent on a strong normal force at that point of contact, duh!

Of course the glass in the hatch window is thin and will break as the plank slips and hits it!

A little shaking of the car while replacing a strut and you get this:

In the end, my insurance covered the window replacement. Next time, I'll draw a force diagram first!

Well, Put Me in the Zoo!

2010-06-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

A bedtime favorite at the Riddy house is Robert Lopshire's "Put me in the zoo".
We own the one below subtitled "A book of Colors". In a store today, Sebastien spotted the book on the left.
Oh my! All these years, we have been missing parts of the story and the colors were so different. Apparently, the "Bright and Early Board Books" are abridged and scaled down in more ways than just size! .
Foolish me, I had always assumed it was the full book, just in a different format.
Buyers of books for little ones, beware!

Invisible Gorillas

2010-06-22T16:43:00.001-04:00

There is a new book out, brought to you by the same people (Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) that brought us the famous "count the number of times the ball gets passed" experiment (see video below).

I haven't read the book, but just from this review from Scientific American, I know these guys are on the money: (all italics lifted from the SA review)
We think we see things as they really are, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness,” [the authors] write.

They cover the illusion of memory, how often our memories are born from our own embellished stories; the illusion of knowledge, we think we know much more than we actually do; the illusion of cause, we quickly assume correlation means causation.

Perhaps the worst illusion of all, the failing that leads to others, is the illusion of confidence. We profoundly overestimate our ability to see things as they are. As the physicist Richard Feynman famously said: The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

If that one was too easy for you, try this one:

Bohr vs. Hegel

2010-06-18T09:34:00.000-04:00

I made a timeline for my class of the "light is wave / light is a particle" battle, started by Huygens and Newton; ended by Bohr over 200 years later:

Bohr is often quoted on this subject:

“There exist two sorts of truth:

trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and

profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.”

This strikes me a slightly more profound and deep version of old Hegelian Dialectic:

Sometimes there is no satisfactory synthesis - the thesis and antithesis stay opposites while both remaining true. The interesting thing to me is the apparent contradiction is only in our own minds, not out there in nature...

A picture is not a graph

2010-06-12T16:48:00.000-04:00

We were talking about refraction in class the other day. I drew a straight line down the middle of the board to separate our two mediums (imagine water on the left and air on the right). Then I drew a horizontal line to represent the normal to the surface (our reference line for measuring angles). Finally I drew an incoming ray and its refracted ray.

Shortly after, a student referred to this picture as "a graph." I was actually confused, trying to think of a real graph I may have shown them. When I realized what she was talking about, I said "a picture is not a graph - this is a picture." She responded by saying it had a y-axis and an x-axis and it looked just like a Cartesian coordinate system. I am now recalling an incident last year when a math teacher came and told me that I was teaching the kids the wrong thing. Apparently my students told her that I had insisted the range was the horizontal axis (making the domain the vertical one by default I suppose). I explained that, in projectile motion, we call the maximum horizontal distance a projectile attains its "range". Only now do I realize the students were once again confusing a picture for a graph:

My Brother, Biblical Hero

2010-06-12T08:48:00.000-04:00

The Bro is published; he has a book out on programming the iphone and ipad with 3D graphics:

I have been showing the book off to family and friends. One person remarked, "Hey - how come he didn't just write a whole bunch of apps for people to download and make money that way?"

I responded "My brother could sell the fish, or he could teach people how to fish..."

Quantum Mechanics and False Dichotomies

2010-05-24T20:56:00.000-04:00

We just finished up our unit on Quantum Mechanics in physics. I was going on and on about Bohr's Principle of Complementarity (Is it a wave or a particle?). I was getting all fired up and calling their attention to the fact that we are limited by our linguistic repetoire. I called our feeling that we must choose between describing fundamental particles "waves" OR "particles" a false dichotomy (we think we are so smart with our fancy words but nature doesn't care - waves and particles are just anthropocentric words; nature does what nature does). As I smugly stepped back to admire my sophisticated grasp of the problem, a couple of students spoke up. "You're beating a dead horse, Mr. Rideout - we get it, move on."

Of course, they are correct, everyone know language is fallible - Bohr himself said it himself long ago (1920):

"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."

But, what I would like to leave my student with is this additional quote from Bohr:

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it"

This is the precise opposite of most of physics - usually once you understand some principle of physics you think, how could it be anything but this way?

Numeracy and Home Ownership

2010-05-17T20:53:00.000-04:00

Recently, The Economist Magazine had a little blurb on a study regarding subprime mortgage borrowers who lost their houses.

It turns out that those who did better on a simple math test regarding percentages and interest rates were much more likely to hold onto their house during the downturn (even after normalizing for income & type of loan, etc). Take the test here.

What good is all that math you take in school? Well, it may allow you to be a home owner one day...

Art and Science of Illusions

2010-05-13T20:18:00.001-04:00

In the last few years I have taken to doing a very short unit on human vision and illusions after finishing up basic optics in physics. Mostly I focus on how much processing goes on in our brain when we "see". I emphasize that what we think we "see" is really the result of a LOT of signal processing and assumptions built up from experience.

In the neuroscience community, it has become something of a fad to construct optical illusions that illustrate this point. The embedded video below is getting a lot of press for winning an award recently and is a fantastic illustration of this fact of human vision.

Look at the angles of those ramps and that very high central pillar. Those balls are rolling up hill! We know gravity pulls things down, but our brains use these clues about the construction of the ramp to make us think the balls are rolling up hill.

Take a careful look at around the 30 second mark and the "trick" is revealed. The "long" pillar is not vertical and the ramps are not angled the way you thought they were...

These types of illusion bring to mind M.C. Escher and, indeed, there is a whole school of thought about Art and Physics (see Shlain's book of the same title) which posits that Artists start seeing and playing with perception in a new way that just precedes what scientists are about to do in the scientific arena. When society is ready for the next level of abstraction, artists lead the way and the more cautious, constructionist scientists follow. If this is so, then perhaps we are about to have a breakthrough in theoretical physics based on our new understanding of the illusory nature of our own perception...

Placebos, Diets, and the Power of Avoiding Negative Things

2010-05-09T13:54:00.000-04:00

After a recent piece on the radio about another diet craze (Paleo Diet), a thought that has been bouncing around in my head for a while crystallized (at one point in the piece, a guy on the paleo diet said something like "I am allergic to eggs, so now that I am on this diet - I am much better off" and I remember thinking "well, couldn't he just avoid eggs without this diet?"):

All diet plans seem to work because they force you to pay attention to what you are putting in your body. That can only be a good thing, right? Then, it is just a matter of finding the diet plan that works for you in the sense that you to stay with it so that you pay attention for a long period of time! That might explain why different diets work for different people - even though the diets are antithetical to each other (think no carbs and all-carbs!).

Maybe this is what's up with the placebo effect in medicine. As long as you think about getting better and think that you are - you are paying attention (in a positive way) to your body and that can only help things along...

I'm not really talking about the power of positive thinking here - I'm talking about the avoidance of eating random things or engaging in activities not conducive to healing. I AM on a diet, I AM taking medicine that WILL make me feel better are thoughts that may not heal you on their own, but they certainly could help you make better decisions...

Arabic (?) Numerals

2010-05-02T13:35:00.001-04:00

My entire life, I have thought of our numeral system as Arabic Numerals - that is how I was taught. Now, I find out that these numerals are Arabic in the sense that turkeys are "from turkey" - which is to say, not really. I was skimming the book "The Babylonian Theorem" by Peter Rudman from the local library (I tend to check out too many books to read and skim the nonfiction ones for fun - sloppy; I know, I know) when I read something along the lines of "when they invented the zero in India". Huh? I thought zeros were from the Arabic civilization.

Turns out the west found out about this cool system of numerals from the Arabs who got it from the Indians, but I was only taught one layer deep... Check out these pics from Wikipedia:

(First Century AD Indian numerals)

I am immediately struck by the the first three characters being the same as in Chinese:

(chinese chart clipped from http://mathematics.gulfcoast.edu/leolusk/4_1.htm - see comments)

I've been pondering the roman numerals being for 1-2-3 being vertical strokes (I II III) whereas the chinese ones being horizontal for some time now, but what I didn't realize until today is that our western hindu-arabic 2 and 3 are formed by connecting the 2 or 3 horizontal lines from the ancient Indian script.

Here's another picture from Wikipedia showing a phone with modern Western and Easter Arabic numerals :

The French may think that their turkey are from India ("D'ind" - see link above on turkeys), but really their zero's are. As a convoluted bonus we say "love" for zero in tennis because it sounds like "l'oeuf" (egg) in French. Wonder what they say for zero in tennis in India...

Crackers, Entropy, and Time

2010-04-24T20:36:00.001-04:00

Sebastien broke a cracker the other day. Lately, he has been trying to put the broken ones back together before eating them. This invariably frustrates him and he looks to me while making that pouty face. I tell him "Sorry, you just can't fight entropy - it's always gonna win in the long run!"

All the different ways that cracker could break - so many possibilities. Yet, only a very few, carefully lined up ways to put it back together. Statistically, it's just not gonna happen with the two of us pushing the pieces together with our fingers. Statistically, it's much more likely to remain broken, or, to break further as we try. I know this from experience - he's just finding out the cruel nature of entropy for the first time.

We are going "forward in time" for the same reason: entropy. The only thing giving a "direction" to time is that statistically crackers are more likely to break than they are to be made whole again. Break a few more crackers and now you are 40 years old instead of 20 months old.

"Aha," Sebastien may be thinking, "I will cheat time by making a cracker factory in which we turn cracker crumbs into crisp new crackers!"

That is all fine and well inside your factory, but the cost to the outside universe! You will be dumping waste heat and sowing disarray with your discards at a rate exceeding your cracker making capacity. Global entropy increases and time moves forward.

Sebastien scratches his head (very cute) and then thinks "What if I am very, very small and I don't interact at all with the rest of the universe? Then can I cheat time?"

Hmm, he has a point there. If you completely isolate yourself and don't break any crackers yourself then you may indeed have made time an irrelevant concept. That's what's happening with different quantum states for subatomic particles when we say "we know they're in there somewhere but we don't know exactly where until we go looking for them". Those isolated, non-cracker-breaking subatomic particles are not "buzzing around, skipping from state to state" - there is no sequence of events to them. For time has no meaning to them and all their options stack up on top of each other into one big past-future-now stack called a "superposition". No remembrances of things past and no excitement for the future in that world.

Maybe breaking crackers is a good thing?

Deciduous/Evergreen

2010-04-19T18:56:00.001-04:00

Struck again by sparse dark branches naked on a blue sky

A canvas upon which I sometimes project my thoughts

My younger self grasping for the imponderable

An older version of myself will someday do the same

This image threads together the stages of my life

Scattered white clouds; gentle swayings in the breeze

These lonely, dead branches will be/once were lushly green

At those times, I wonder about their future/past stark barrenness

Deciduous thoughts leading me to contemplate the Evergreen

But those trees are ever-changing

They will/were not always be here

Even the sky was not ever so

Am I pondering the Eternal

or the Changes that make me pine for it?

Creating Energy as We Roll Downhill to Iron

2010-04-10T20:21:00.001-04:00

If you put a bunch of random nuclei in a box and rattle very hard and for a very long time, eventually all the atoms would transmute into iron. The lighter elements would undergo fusion to fall into lower and lower energy states while the heavier elements would undergo fission to fall into lower and lower energy state. All the energy being created in the universe since the big bang is coming from this big squeeze. The iron nucleus has the strongest bonds between its nucleons and is thus at the bottom of the energy hill that other nuclei can roll down by fusing and fissing.

Something has long bothered me about the classic binding energy/nucleon chart we all first see in chemistry class:

The problem is, simply, that this is upside down. I have written before about the problems people have with bond energy and the problems that people have with negative numbers, but it didn't click with me at those times that this chart is a classic example. The top of this curve represent the most binding energy, which means it take the most work to tear those nucleons apart, which means they are sitting at the bottom of a very deep well (negative potential energy). When you look at this chart, it is not clear that everything lighter releases energy when undergoing fusion and everything above can releases energy via fission.

The curve should be presented more like this all the time:

(from The Essential Cosmic Perspective, Bennett et al.)

Why is the first chart more popular? Because people want things to be taller when they are stronger, not deeper. This is yet another example of the deep problems people have with negative numbers. Read the first few paragraphs of this great New York Times blog entry for more examples. Sorry folks, bigger bond energy means a bigger negative number and things just make more sense when you picture it that way.

Simple Wisdom, the Beauty of Work, and Tarrh

2010-04-09T22:09:00.000-04:00

Year ago when I worked in the family winery in Corsica, I worked very closely with an old Moroccan guy named Etari Ahmed (nicknamed "Tarrh" by my uncle). Tarrh is on my left in the picture. Saltana is the chubby fellow on my right. Saltana drove one of the tractors so I only talked with him briefly while he was dumping out the grapes at the winery. Tarrh worked in the winery so I spent all day with him. Saltana is the one who told me that planes had "hit those big building in New York" on 9/11 just a few hours after it happened. How he found out before me when he was in the middle of a field in Corsica I will never know.

But Tarrh is the one I was thinking about today. When I asked him how old he was, he said, "My mother said I was born in the Year of the Good Fig Harvest". He had two or three years of schooling and literally signed his name with an "X" on legal documents. Seventeen people back in Morocco lived off his minimum wage salary. He lived in an actual shack so as to save money and sent home almost every dime he made. His one indulgence was to buy Marlboro Reds for himself (which he would smoke when he was tired, cold, or hungry) . He would give me cash folded in a paper napkin on certain nights, and I would stop at the store on my way to the winery the next morning and buy him a new case. My uncle said this meant he liked and trusted me. He went home for only 8 weeks a year and was apparently worshipped by his extended family for supporting them.

He once asked me why there were time zones ("Why is the time differerent in Morroco, in France, in America?") and I had to start my explanation with, "Well, the world is round, a big sphere sitting in space." He nodded vigorously and I continued. "Everyone wants noon to be when the sun is overhead, but it's not overhead at the same time for everyone so we change the clocks from zone to zone to make it noon for each zone when the sun is overhead". He grunted and shook his head in wonder then smoked another cigarette in contemplation. A few weeks later he would ask me the same question and we'd do it all over again. Tarrh spoke in bad French with a heavy Arabic accent and I would answer in bad French with a heavy American accent. My uncle would tell us to knock it off and get back to work.

Every day started with a handshake; if someone's hands were dirty then you grasped the other's wrist and shook that instead. The handshake was nonnegotiable.

If an elderly person was sick, Tarrh would ask, "Does he eat?" If the answer was yes then he would declare, "He will get better."

He told me, "Never throw stones at the elder, for one day you will be old too."

When we were in the 14th hour of a 16-hour work day and I would give him a suffering look he would shrug and respond, "The work is the work."

If my uncle complained about spider webs in the corners of the winery, Tarrh would smile while grabbing the broom and say, "He [the spider] works the night, I work during the day!"

If I wanted to know where a tool was, Tarrh would respond, "You look - you find."

Tarrh had a theory on race: women from different races had hotter or cooler wombs so the babies came out different colors. (White women must have the lowest temperature.)

One day I dropped a bucket right into a vat of fermenting red wine. The outgasses of carbon dioxide was so strong my eyes were watering and I almost fainted while trying to reach it. (I could see it perched on top of the crust of pressed grape skins and seeds floating on top of the liquid.) I asked Tarrh to help and he had me lower him by the ankles into the vat while he grabbed the bucket and I pulled them both out. When my uncle found out he called us both idiots and bummed a Marboro from Tarrh.

Sometimes, the three of us would enter into a "dance of work" that I think few have experienced where one would be on his way to start a pump and grab a wrench the other needed to complete his job and silently slide it into his hand without breaking stride, signal the third guy that the pump was about to turned on so that he would open a critical valve downstream before heading up the stairs. The three of us were so in tune with the operations we were carrying out that we would be doing 5 to 6 things at once, processing tons and tons of grapes and never exchange a word. A look here, a nod there and we were making wine.

I count myself lucky to know the simple wisdoms of Tarrh; the greatest of which is the bliss of work well done learned by working beside him.

Pulling for You!

2010-04-01T06:27:00.000-04:00

Some students you know will stay in your head for your entire life.

Erinn "2N" is one of those students; she validated my choice of career early on and is one of those people that lifts everyone around her with her sincerity and humanity. After I wrote letters of recommendation for her to get into college, she reciprocated by writing letters for me when I moved on to other high schools.

She made this pillow from scratch when Isabelle was born because "every little girl needs to have her own pillow". She has gone on to do great things and will, hopefully, go on to do so much more. But, today, she is in a coma (has been for a while) after being struck by a car and her future is uncertain. I just wish I could let her know that I am thinking of her, thanking her, and pulling for her.

Self Confidence and Younger Siblings

2010-03-29T21:21:00.000-04:00

Today I watched Sebastien (20 months) follow Isabelle (4 1/2) around. Clearly, she is super cool and whatever she is doing is fascinating. She, being so young, is oblivious to her brother's hero-worship.

I flashed back to years ago. My brother Phil is 8 years younger and I can clearly remember him following me around and looking up to me. Suddenly, a lot of things clicked into place: My self-confidence and narcissism - could it be as simple as older child syndrome? Always before I had thought older child syndrome was all about being an only child for the first few years and then being treated differently by your parents.

Maybe my brother's youthfulness helped shape me into who I am today! Perhaps it is naive to think the younger children live in the firstborn's shadow. It is we, the first born, who define ourselves in the gaze of our younger siblings! Isabelle - take the confidence Sebastien gives you and run with it!

3.14

2010-03-14T22:03:00.000-04:00

I disapprove of pi day. I like to eat pie too and I get that pie's are circles, but pi is not pie and this rationalization of irrationality should bother you too!

First off, pi is an irrational number (it never ends when written in decimal form). Why confine our celebration of its transcendental nature to three whole numbers? Also, we do not commonly separate the month from the day with a decimal place - we actually write it down as a fraction! So 3/14 does not even make me think of 3.14....

Second, if we were going with the Europeans (which we should in this regard) and list day first, month second - then we would be getting closer at least! Not on March 14 (14/3) but on the 22nd of July (22/7) which is known, most appropriately, as Pi Approximation Day. (I say the Europeans have it right because day-month-year is going from small to big whereas month-day-year is just plain weird.)

Finally, a never ending, non repeating number that represents the ratio of circumference to diameter and, as a result, appears in most of our fundamental equations - is bigger than a one day celebration. Sure, let it blow your mind - but don't stuff the Greek letter with a power punch inside of a little 3.14 box.

Chopstick Skilz

2010-03-08T20:16:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, long ago - A prospective son-in-law needed to impress his mother-in-law to be.

She had concocted a most cunning test: Slippery chinese food with nary a pronged utensile in sight. Mysterious slivers of meat glisten on a layer of even more obscure vegetables crying out to be identified. Taunting the son-in-law-to-be to foolishly ask "Why, what's this? Is it edible? Perchance is it not yucky? What are these strange wooden sticks next to this very tiny bowl?"

No, not so easy! Our fearless and undaunted son-in-law-to-be-hero calmy eats with the chopsticks. Confidently going in for seconds and thirds with no questions coming forth from his lips. In fact, he boldly makes eye contact with the mother-in-law-to-be.

Overconfident he begins to talk while diving in for a particulary hard to reach slippery piece of mystery meat and (oh! the horror), the savory sliver slips right off from the chopsticks as if plucked by the devil himself. Luckily for our dashing hero, the piece falls neatly into his shirt pocket.

The miracle! Eyes go wide all around the table. What will he do? How will he handle this?

Calmly, I pat the shirt pocket while reaching for a new piece and proclaim: "So good, saving some for later!"

James Joyce, John Lennon, and Art

2010-03-03T20:46:00.004-05:00

God (from the movie "Imagine")

Way back, in my AP English class, we read "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I remember thinking how cool is was that Joyce felt he had to tear down all his youthful influences to release his inner muse and become an artist.

Seems to me John Lennon is sending the same message in an entirely different medium with his song "God".

Is it always necessary to leave something behind in order to look at it? Maybe not - but if you are not looking for a new perspective then you are not an artist, are you?

Judging Books by their Covers

2010-03-03T14:21:00.000-05:00

On NPR this morning, Frank Deford had a nice the little piece on how athletes are held to a higher standard that other public figures. Their private screw-ups are said to shame their entire sport. He closed with this great observation :

"It's almost as if we expect politicians and entertainment celebrities to be venal and flawed, but despite all historical evidence to the contrary, we keep expecting better from athletes. We keep saying that Woods has let golf down — because we don't want to admit that he has let us down."

I have often wondered why we confuse the artist and the art. For example, why should I expect John Lennon to have conducted his personal life in a manner in which I would approve just because I love his music?

Is it that we are so superficial that we expect a single aspect of a person to represent the entire person? The song tells me all about the author? The athlete executing practiced motions perfectly represent some inner beauty?

Yes, I do think we are just that superficial...

(Lennon pic from http://daddytypes.com/ / Tiger pic from www.outofmygord.com)

Requiem for a Seedless Grape

2010-02-17T20:30:00.001-05:00

Not an Ode for Joy, but a Requiem for Loss? Is the seedless grape not sweet and good with no offsetting bitter seed to mar the experience? Indeed, good reader, but I think not of myself but of the poor, neutered grape.

What an abomination, how contrary to nature: the entire point of the vine's endeavors is to procreate! Using the fruit to entice us animals to eat and, in the process, sow the seeds so more vines can grow. The impulse of life encoded in those very seeds, we have ripped from thee. Oh, eunuch of a plant; you genetic dead end. The seedless grape has made the ultimate sacrifice: to die in vain. Oh, surely we enjoy thee and I will continue to eat the seedless ones, but their loss needs a voice - someone must mourn the passing of their evolutionary impetus. No selection from environmental pressures amongst your random mutations in the seedless ones' future. We will breed and graft you to our perfection, perfect your existence in relation to us alone, and rob you of any meaning independent of our will.

I shed no tear as I pop another of your smooth, cool globes of joy into my mouth. But I do wonder what your seeded cousins think of you. Are they jealous of your 21st century freedom from the shackles of genetic trial and error? Or do they snigger at your loss of genetic possibility: the sentient grape that never will be?

Sad, sad seedless one - doomed to have no fruit of your fruit. I hope you find solace in the happiness you bring us eaters of 21st century grapes...

Jaunty Tilt

2010-02-16T23:09:00.000-05:00

What craziness is this? Am I advertising to the world that I am an out-of-the-box thinker with my rear-view mirror tilted in such a jaunty manner? Don't you just want to climb into the Rideout Minivan and straighten the mirror out - restoring rectilinear orthodoxy once again?

Well, first off, I must confess to not coming up with this myself but was one day following a car on 128 during heavy traffic. I noticed the man in front of me had his rear-view mirror inclined as in the picture here. I wanted to shout at him: "Buddy! Get a clue - how can you not notice that sucker is way out of alignment?" Then, I saw the hint of a car seat (as, indeed, you can see in this picture as well) and, like a bolt of spring-time lightening, I got it.

When you are a solo parent driving with a pre-verbal kid in a car seat, you keep tempting death by periodically glancing back - you just can't help yourself. I have in the past resorted to re-angling the rear-view mirror so as to render it worthless for traffic (but very helpful to see if Sebastien is smiling, sleeping, pouting, in pain, etc.). This genius of a dad in front of me had found the optimal solution: see kid on one side of mirror, see traffic on the other. Would that I had come up with the solution myself...

Case closed.

Horse or Tiger - either way, a Donkey!

2010-02-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

One of the first non-food related Chinese expressions that I learned was the great "MaMa HuHu" (literally: "Horse Horse Tiger Tiger"). It mean "so-so".
It calls to my mind an old Pied-Noir (french-algerian) expressions that I have known all my life "Kif Kif Bourricot" (literally: "same same donkey") used to mean "it's all the same". I love the combo of arabic and french. And why a donkey? Pourquoi?

I want my kids to someday combine these expressions into some super-hybrid pan-world "horse, tiger, donkey: kif kif" for when all their choices are of similar mediocrity...wouldn't that just be the bee's knees?

Misconceptions About Teacher Benefits

2010-02-14T10:44:00.001-05:00

Everyone always assumes that, as public employees, teachers must get great benefits. People say it all the time, after finding out that I'm a teacher. But, truth be told, Irene and I have both had private sector jobs and public school jobs, and, hands down, the private sector paid better AND had better benefits.*

The Boston Globe ran an article last week about how cash strapped towns in Massachusetts are having trouble meeting their public employee pension obligations. I read the article carefully to see if it addressed a common misconception regarding teacher retirement benefits. It did not. Since teachers are the largest slice of a town's employee costs, average readers may falsely assume that teacher pension costs are a primary drag on their town's pension obligations.

Towns pay zero dollars for teacher retirement pensions in the state of Massachusetts. In fact, all teachers are required to contribute 11% of their salary into a mostly self-funded pension fund (which is separate from other municipal employees); the state of Massachusetts only contributes 0.61 percent of our salaries towards teacher retirement. By 2025, the system will be fully funded and teacher contributions will more than take care of the whole thing.

(* but weren't nearly as satisfying!)

(related post on health insurance benefits here)

Rideout's Hideout

2010-02-11T20:05:00.000-05:00

Hangin' out in my hideout

Doin' my rap write out

No need for any white out

Tell the fans i'll be right out.

Armed with bald spot and crooked nose,

I go forth to fight my foes.

My actions: seem kind of flighty

But the thoughts in my head: mighty mighty

Some days extroverted,

full of fun;

Sometimes introverted,

sort of glum.

Changing moods got your head spinnin'?

Your love for physics is what I'm winnin'!

In your head, tryin' to make connections -

Spreading out jokes across the sections.

Read those equations, like a novel

Before The Physics, we all grovel

Out of malaise I will fight out

For education, I get the might out

Come join me in the hideout

Hangin' out with mister rideout.

Yam or Sweet Potato?

2010-02-04T16:32:00.002-05:00

A sweet potato is neither a potato nor a yam.

The yellow variety of sweet potato causes the confusion, for it is sometimes marketed as a yam in America to differentiate it from the white variety - but they are both sweet potatoes (genus Ipomoea - family Convolvulaceae; more in common with the morning glory flower than these other foodstuffs).

However, a yam is a completely different beast (genus Dioscorea - family Dioscoreaceae) and most traditional eaters in the US have probably never eaten one.

A potato is a Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (more in common with a tomato or eggplant than either of the other two).

All three may hang together in our consciousness as starchy tubers we like to eat, but that does not make them all hang from the same evolutionary vine. But being good to eat probably helped make them as populous as they are on the planet. Being tasty to humans can sometimes be a good survival strategy even if we humans then get them confused with each other.

(pics from wikipedia: top: sweet potato; middle left: yam, Bottom right: potato)

Rappin' about Economics

2010-01-25T19:34:00.000-05:00

Heard about this one on NPR. When I grow up, I want to do for physics what these guys are doing for economics:

Nick Cave, Haiti, and the Age of Weeping

2010-01-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

"Father why are all the children weeping?

They are merely crying son.

O, are they merely crying father?

Yes, true weeping is yet to come."

-Nick Cave, The Weeping Song

I wouldn't categorize myself as someone who lacked empathy in my youth, but I wasn't really moved by abstract disasters - I pretty much had to see something for it to affect me.

Then, I had kids. Now, I seem to be extremely sensitive to certain things. I teared up the other day when NPR was playing MKL's "I have a dream" speech. Certain "Law and Order" episodes drive me from the room. And, lately, I can't bear to watch the disaster footage from Haiti.

I first heard "The Weeping Song" while a freshman at Purdue. I was newly turned on to Nick Cave after hearing and seeing him in Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire". I remember thinking what a cool abstraction it was; the difference between crying and weeping.

I don't think I really know the difference yet, having had such a fortunate life, but my imagination can now take me there...

In Series or in Sequence?

2010-01-24T14:03:00.048-05:00

In Physics, we talk about having circuit elements in "parallel" (current splits to go through either but not both) or in "series" (same current goes through one element and then the next).

In plain english though, we do the steps of a project in parallel (at the same time) or in sequence (one after the other).

So what is the difference between series and sequence?

In Math it is the difference between an ordered set (sequence) and the sum of that ordered set (series).

For everyday usage, dictionary.com supplies the following:
"Series is applied to a number of things of the same kind, usually related to each other, arranged or happening in order: a series of baseball games. Sequence stresses the continuity in time, thought, cause and effect, etc.: The scenes came in a definite sequence."

The Latin roots of the words are "connection" (series) and "to follow" (sequence).

It seems to me that the best alternate to "parallel" (from the greek "side by side") in the physics sense is actually "sequence" not "series". In both series and parallel circuits, the resistors are similar and arranged relative to each other as well as being connected so there is almost not enough distinction between "parallel" and "series"!

So why do we say "series circuit" instead of "sequence circuit"? It turns out that the total resistance of a bunch of resistors in series is the sum of all the individual resistors - so it looks like a mathematical series (being added).

I wish the parallel circuits had a formula for total resistance that reminded one of geometric parallel-ness, but (as far as I know) they do not. So there is no good parallel for a parallel circuit, be it series or sequence...

Melville on my Mind

2010-01-24T14:02:00.001-05:00

Just back from a Barnes & Nobles run on their last day of Teacher Appreciation Week (25% off!). I hold in my hands a copy of Moby Dick. I turn Forty (40!) in a few weeks and Melville has been on my mind.

First off, both my brother and I have attempted the reading at various points only to inevitably fizzle out. It calls us back for we both know the book as "the only work of fiction that Dad has read twice".

Then, last December, in one of many "my favorites" lists, a contemporary writer listed Moby Dick as one of his favorites but with the caveat "no one under 40 should really read it since they wouldn't get it".

A few weeks back there was a brief blurb I read somewhere about an artist who was drawing his way through Moby Dick, a page at a time. I haven't checked out the blog of his work, but I am thinking of checking on it as I read the book.

Finally, just this morning, in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe there was an interview with the author of a new book on whales. But the interview seemed to be all about Moby Dick once again.

Call me Foolish, but I think the Universe has launched me on a quest. Certain enlightenment awaits, no?

Or, maybe, it is all about the journey and not so much the result.

War & Peace & Obama & MLK, Jr.

2010-01-18T08:00:00.006-05:00

Finally got around to reading Obama's much lauded Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. One should read the whole thing however you feel about Obama - it is a rich and stimulating speech. However, on this day, I would draw your attention to this particular portion:

"...But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached - their faith in human progress - must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith - if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace - then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."

Amen

Starlight, Sunsets, Equations, and T.S. Eliot

2010-01-17T23:21:00.001-05:00

I sometimes tell my students a tale of how Irene had a math professor at M.I.T. who wrote an equation on the board, looked at it, and told the class "This equation is why I believe in God." The equation is

e^iπ = -1

e: the natural logarithm - the perfectly increasing curve
i: the imaginary number - the square root of -1
pi: the cyclical number - the ratio of any circle to its diameter

Why should these three irrational & imaginary numbers combine in any meaningful way - much less in such a simple, elegant way? The universe must be carefully crafted indeed goes the argument.

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."
- Richard Feynman

Several years ago, an erstwhile student of mine (MF) came back from college newly empowered by higher level math courses and proudly proclaimed to me: "Hey - all that e to i pi stuff you used to talk about? That's just Euler's equation."

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works–that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Technically, he was right, but I knew he was missing something, though I wasn't sure what exactly. Now I realize that our appreciation of profound truths is cyclical and he was simply at stage two:

At first we are awed by its mere existence;
Then we dissect its truths into constituent parts and feel we understand it;
Only then can we come back around and be awed once again in an even more profound way

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploroing
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
- T. S. Eliot

Educational Mercenaries and Socrates

2010-01-14T16:01:00.000-05:00

"If we're seniors, why should we learn anything if we're not taking the final exam?" asks JB in class today. All teachers get this question (or versions of it: "Will this be on the test?"; "Should I write this down?"; "Why do we need to know this?"; "When will I ever use this?"). Since seniors leave early, we don't give them a final in science.

Feeling feisty today, I launch right into my "You're just an educational mercenary" speech.

Learning is not the goal of an educational mercenary - their theory of education is "High school grades get me into college" then "college gets me a good job" then "A good job earns me good money" and finally "Money lets me buy things and services that can make me happy". Just in it for the money. A mercenary.

I went into my "true searching for understanding leads to a richer, more satisfying life - the other path just has you going through the motions and trappings of life". As a friend put it recently: occasionally, rats trapped in a maze may find a piece of cheese and experience happiness, but it's so much better to simply get out of the maze!

I had a good rhythm going and felt pretty full of myself (imagine that!) and some of the other students were nodding and enjoying my tirade. Then, when I was done, JB and his friends looked up and said "Wait - you didn't answer his question - why do we have to learn it if there's no final exam for us?"

I was so happy with myself at this point, I didn't even get depressed.

"The Unexamined Life is not worth living" - Socrates

(pics from clog.dailycal.org (graduation)and www.poligazette.com (mercenaries))

Derivative Entertainment and the Swinging Pendulum

2010-01-06T15:06:00.000-05:00

NPR had a nice piece this morning on music and film: Basically saying that the number one movie (Avatar) and the number one song ("Tik Tok" by Ke$ha) are completely derivative (just recycled old ideas put together; a "montage of tropes" as NPR put it), but very skillfully produced. They seem like they should be great all-around but they are actually unoriginal. They are great productions only.

I thoroughly agree with their analysis (but please note that I like watching and listening to highly produced things - it's just entertainment though, not art). It got me thinking about the cultural pendulum swings: bell bottoms in, now bell bottoms out only to be back in-style next decade; facial hair in, now facial hair out followed by side burns and goatees; slick productions now soon to be replaced by naturalist Cinéma vérité and back; synthesized voices followed by acoustic guitar back to sampled hits of yesteryear; etc.

Thus is ever was so - history shows us these patterns of taste oscillate back and forth over time. So, at first I was going to blog about how perhaps this NPR piece is an indication of the end of the highly produced derivative era we have been in: We should expect retro-grainy black and white movies with no CGI next year with lots of acapella singing and acoustic guitars.

But then I started thinking - the cycle time for the cultural pendulum swings seem to be getting shorter. We may be the first generation in a position to actually feel the oscillations. At some point, perhaps the oscillations will simply stop and we will enter a new dialectic. Or perhaps, just as a real pendulum winds down eventually, we may be entering an era of no oscillations - everything will just be mashed together as self forming groups sample their own "montage of tropes" at their own pace.

(pics of Kesha Sebert and James Cameron)

Gravity Rap

2010-01-04T12:12:00.001-05:00

What’s up with gravity?
Who’s down with gravity?
Listen to this rap and,

Blind man, you’ll see -

Inverse square laws scare you?

What is the m-one, m-two?

From these fellas, take your clue:

Kepler – he showed the ellipse

Explained the eclipse

On a ton of data he sits -
Into planetary motion he dips

And Solar System nectars he sips

Newton – he’s so versatile
Made others look infantile
Saw gravity fields universal
Mass: more than just inertial
Action at a distance:
Controversial

Einstein – his mind so fine
Showed gravity warps space-time
1919 eclipse he predicts
A star’s light-stream slips
Down a bowl in which the Sun sits
Punchin’ holes through space and time -
Black holes – no friend of mine!
Tidal forces pull me thinner than a fork tine

Big G little g
What begin with g?
Gladly Grounded by Gravity
Jordan had hang time
Seuss made the words rhyme
For you, I can’t make the time -

You thinkin’ little g is small

But the 9.8 makes you fall
It’s not small at all!
On facebook you try to friend me
I deny before you hit send key

Big G: so very, very small
Trying to reach out, gravitational?
Can’t feel your gravity, hardly at all
Got Caller ID: I don’t take your call

Need mass on a planetary scale
To keep me down, close this sale
I deleted all your voice mail

To Mother Nature, I say “Yes Ma’am!”
To 3 body problems, I say “Shazam!”
Your urgent emails: tagged as spam

(photo credits from top to bottom:http://knol.google.com/k/gravity-how-mass-attracts-mass#, NASA, & http://astro.physics.sc.edu/selfpacedunits/Unit57.html)

Dostoevsky, Nietzche, and Nightmares

2010-01-03T13:38:00.001-05:00

When I was a Junior at Purdue, one snowy morning I awoke from an extended dream that was so intense and vivid that I thought it was an actual memory. I think this kind of thing is not too rare, but this incident was disturbing because in the dream I had killed someone in the distant past. As I was trudging across campus, I was completely depressed because I knew the authorities had finally figured it all out and connected me to the murder from years ago. I had no remorse for the unmotivated killing (a clue!), only sadness for my life behind bars that was coming. As I tried to remember the details of why I had actually killed some random person so long ago, I started to realize something was not right. Just before I got to the Physics Building, I realized that there was no logic to my "memories" and that I probably didn't kill someone actually. Then, like a fog lifting, I figured out, several hours after waking, that it was all just a dream.

Sometime later, I think a few years, I was telling this story to someone and a subconscious part of my brain connected the dream to Crime and Punishment which I had read at the beginning of my senior year in high school. The novel had an enourmous impact on me. (I remember an early conversation on a date with Irene when we discussing literature and she put some good, but not excellent book in its place by casually saying, "I mean - it's no Crime and Punishment, but it's still good." - as if I needed any more reasons to fall for her!) But to cause me to have a nightmare three years later that was so intense as to be taken for a memory? Wow, Dostoevsky certainly had gotten his hooks in me!

For years this story of mine has ended there: A "gee, isn't that interesting?" kind of anecdote on the power of literature. But today a final piece that I didn't even know was missing fell into place while reading the Boston Globe's Ideas section. The writer of a new book on Russian literature casually throws this out at the end of the interview:

"Take “Crime and Punishment”: Raskolnikov is asking, “How does Nietzsche apply to me, a destitute student living in Petersburg? Can I maybe become a superman by murdering a depressing old lady?” That resonates with us, because it’s an experiment in applicability taken to the furthest degree, and not in an abstract way, but in the most concrete, concretely observed way."

Nietzche and Dostoevsky? Of course! I had taken a course in existentialism my freshman year and had found the readings and discussions on Nietzche very intense. Just like Dostoevsky is my standard bearer for literature, Nietzche is for philosophy - many is the time I have watched or read a pseudo-philosophical work and thought "That's just watered-down Nietzche!"

I had never, consciously, associated the two. But, thanks to Ms. Batuman (the interviewee of the article), I now realize that my subconscious had made the connection all those years ago...

Will to power, Raskolnikov - will to power.

Ten Year Anniversary of the First Date

2009-12-29T07:53:00.004-05:00

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

2009-12-28T08:12:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-23T21:19:00.000-05:00

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"

2009-12-21T21:56:00.001-05:00

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?

2009-12-12T08:41:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-10T20:17:00.004-05:00

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?