Curious George and The Stockholm Syndrome

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

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

On My Way to the Monocle

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

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



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

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

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

A Prezi on Energy

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

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

Energy on Prezi 

Unions, Letters, and Stewart

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

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

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

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

Triumvirate of Dictators

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

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

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

"Khadafi"

"Gadaffi

"Qaddafi"

Lightweight Ninjas

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Inappropriate Linear "Fits"

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).