Uh-Oh, Twelve Orders of Magnitude Different = Magic

1. Omega being the last letter of the Greek alphabet, that one goes way back.  I can't even remembered when I first learned the expression "from alpha to omega..." meaning from beginning to end.

2. Omicron came to me much later.  Not having studied classical Greek, I encountered it in math and physics classes where they regularly run through the Greek letters for variables and constants.

3. Metric prefixes is something that was taught to me over and over and now, in the modern computer world, are unavoidable.  Who doesn't know a Mega of something is big (10^6 precisely) and a Micro of something is rather small (10^-6 precisely)?

1+2+3 = This morning, Irene was reading about the latest variants in the Corona virus and she exclaims "Did you ever realize it is O-Mega and O-Micron as in Big O and  Little O?"  Oh my, I did not.  So obvious though, once pointed out - how could one have missed it??

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzlK0OGpIRs)

Turns out it is more like long o sound and short o sound, capital and lower cases are something else in Greek (unless it's the omicron, where there appears to be zero difference):

𝛀𝛚 𝚶𝛐

The OG sci fi movie

Just finished the marathon that is watching the 1968 Kubrick classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" with both of my kids.  Their incredulity, bewilderment, and begrudging enjoyment mirrored my own.  The scenes were even longer, ponderous, and slower-paced than I remembered (and I remembered them as painfully slow). 

In a surreal realization, I suddenly recalled that I only ever watched the movie all the way through once before and that was in the famous Atlanta Fox Theater.  My Grandfather, Dad, Uncle, and I went and saw it together on the 15 year (?) anniversary of the movie (making me my son's age today).  Another timeless moment connecting the generation after me with the generations before.  I remember that an MC introduced the film.  He came onto the stage from a lift below the stage playing on an organ.  I recall asking my grandfather what it all meant after it was all over and he said "I think it was about God." I remember being old enough to not agree and also to know better than to say so.

During today's viewing, we noticed so much inspiration George Lucas got for his 1977 Star Wars: the long shots of long ships, the landing bays, the heavy breathing soundtrack, the primitive digital displays, along with so much more...  There's the original, hard-to-access work of art and then there's the universal work of entertainment.

International sauces

I was reading an article about the old Roman garum sauce and how it used to be wide-spread throughout the empire but is almost unknown today.  When they were describing it, I thought, wait a second... isn't that just fermented fish sauce which is ubiquitous in asian cooking? (it is)

Then I saw, casually hanging out on the side of that article that that most American of sauces, ketchup, has, as its ancestor, the same fish sauce!  That sweet tomato-based (as new world as it gets insofar as condiments get!) gets its name from a Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap!  A quick internet search makes me feel like the last person on Earth to find this out.

Reminds my of how I was a teenager before I realized that the delicate french condiment mayonaisse that my grandmother would whip up from scratch just before the meal in France was supposed to be the same thing as what I knew as "mahnaze" in a jar from the store in Alabama.

Oh, now I'm thinking on one of my favorite scenes from the great Pulp Fiction:

I've got to try dipping my next batch of french fries in fish sauce, right?

Student Doodles

 I wish I had thought of this a long time ago!  Students will often doodle on the side or back of their quizzes/tests.  I will make a concerted effort to scan and upload some of them here going forward.  

2021

2018 (?)

Explaining how a rotating spaceship can simulate gravity (Nov 2021)

Mar 2022

Junior Semi

WHS courtyard transformed into dance floor and reception hall:

Something more than just masking up...

 Just another first block astronomy class...

(unfortunately it was only about half the class because of the way I scheduled it)

Note the pumpkin on the far right.  I let a couple of students (NN and SX) store their bootleg pumpkin for the day in the back of my room.  As payment, I demanded they carve it with a physics theme.

Voila:

Ghostly parabolic position versus time graphs

A free body diagram of the forces on an upside-down pumpkin on a pumpkin experiencing those forces.
So meta, it's scary.

Test Score Metrics

Both of my kids recently took science tests and felt they didn't do well.  I asked them each, "Well, how did you do compared to the class average?"  Basically, neither was sure. Coincidentally, I am in the middle of grading a science test I just gave and thinking about where the class average is, what the distribution looks like and whether (and how) I should scale it.

In talking to my kids, I realize that my instincts on thinking about how well you did on a test being a relative thing comes from (1) being a physicist and (2) being a physics student.  Physicists know better than most that EVERYTHING is relative:  Velocity, Energy, Size, Temperature, Time, Length, etc.  But, more on point, test scores in physics tend to be low.  I don't know that I ever took a single physics test in 7 years of studying physics that wasn't scaled or manipulated in some way.  It's not uncommon in college but it is actually commonplace in physics.

Here's my favorite story about this (you'll see why shortly ;) ):

First year of grad school, CMU.  Dr. Russ's Quantum Mechanics course.  First test.  He folds the tests lengthwise after grading them for some reason and very soberly handed them back to us one by one.  As each of us saw our percentages we slunk down low in our desks and didn't make contact with each other.  I can still picture that big red 67% in a red circle beneath my name on that folded packet of work and feel it as defining me as a failure.  I'm going for a PhD in this stuff and I can barely eek out a "D"??  Russ doesn't say a work about the scores, just dives into talking through each of the problems and pointing out the niceties of solving them elegantly. Finally, my friend Dan Cormier from the back row tentatively asks "Dr. Russ - how did people do on this test?  What was the average?"  The professor looked a bit sheepish and says, "Well, I don't know the average, people did all right - it's tough material and there was a wide range of scores.... the high score was a ... a ... umm, Ken - what did you get  - was it a 67?  Yes, the high score was a 67."

Well, it isn't often you feel such a reversal of emotion.  I think I probably sat up straighter in my desk immediately after his answer.  My buddy Phil Koran called me "The Quantum Cowboy" for a few months after that.  Wonder why that nickname didn't stick??

So, kids - how did you do on your test, in a relative way?