At East Harbor State Park, we tried a chimney log fire.
Three hollow logs were stacked to make the chimney. I had cut a hole in the bottom log so we could start and feed the fire. Once it got going, firewood was dropped in the top. The fire got hotter and bigger pretty quick. It lasted for about an hour before it collapsed.
Here’s a creepy one for Halloween.
When Danish Physicist, Niels Bohr, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, Carlsberg gave Bohr a house with a beer tap directly from the brewery. That’s the kind of national pride I like.
Physicist Richard Feynman is a hero/celebrity in the world of physics. There are many great and interesting physicists, but Feynman had a clarity of thought and range of interests that makes any time spent learning about him is worthwhile. He makes you a better person.
During the Covid year, the first quarter was going to be remote. and that was about all we knew. Teaching remotely, I couldn’t give students the a quality show, so I thought that I’d produce lecture videos that are good in a different way. The intent was to renovate the curriculum while producing videos that would be a resource for my remaining three or four years.
By the end of the year, NoRo management decided that I was done teaching Physics, so the videos were never edited to perfection or to be seen by anyone ever again. I decided that I’d post them here. These are the lecture videos. There were homework explanation videos, practice problem videos and quiz videos. I may post those in subsequent years.
Since this is about the time when the Chapter 2 test would be coming up, these are the “Kinematics in One Dimension” presentations.
This is our first lecture on actual physics.
Then we get to velocity.
Acceleration, and we are done. Usually, students get killed on this chapter test.
I’ve recently been conversing with a couple of students that I had during the Covid year. Both are in engineering at The Ohio State University. I had both when they were juniors in Physics, and again, as seniors in AP Physics 2. Since I knew them prior to the Covid year, I didn’t need to introduce myself. For students with whom I was not acquainted, it seemed important to produce a video that gave them some sense of Physics and how I approached the course.
Both videos were produced a couple of weeks before school started. I had time, but not much of an idea how to edit videos.
For the Physics students, I wanted to get across the fun and wonder of Physics. In an online course, it’s hard to communicate the twin virtues of fun and dangerous. For the intro video, I tried to get across the fun, my unconventional nature and that diligent effort would be expected.
For AP students, the purpose of the introduction was different. AP Physics 2 students are smart and they’ve had a year of physics. They know the score. It’s important that they believe that even if I’m not smarter than them, at least I know physics better than they do.
An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data.
With so much of our culture already infected, science was bound to eventually be corrupted by diversity, inclusion and equity. Even before DIE ideology, incentives to get grant funding, published or notoriety caused some scientists to take shortcuts or use shoddy techniques.
Another problem is that scientists don’t or can’t always take the time to be scientifically rigorous. Noted physicist, Richard Feynman discussed this in his fascinating Cal Tech Commencement Address.
Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud.
It’s not surprising that scientific integrity is being defended by enthusiastic volunteers, rather than through governmental or institutional investigations.
Nobody likes being told what to do or how to live. Tell a teenager how something should be done, and the mental blast shields come up. That’s one reason why vegans, environmentalists and the WOKE can be so tedious. Everyone used to know that people learn from stories. That’s why the Bible has so many of them. A story is engaging, and allows the message to slip in.
Boys need stories about heroes to learn how to be men. For those with limited comprehension, I’m not saying girls don’t, it’s just different. Boys need men to live up to. Blessed is the man who was intimidated by his dad in his teen years, but eventually hopes he can be half the man his father was.
The genre of story doesn’t matter much. Westerns, sports underdog or adventurer stories can all show a man up against the wall. He chooses to do what’s right, regardless of the cost, and there is a cost. It’s grueling, painful or dangerous. He gets his ass beat, but it works out in the end.
Rocky and the first Indiana Jones are two great examples.
Teaching Physics, telling stories and showing examples of men was part of my hidden agenda.
Climate Change increasing the number of home runs in MLB.
This topic has been making the news, so it’s worth a look.
“As soon as it gets warm, the ball carries a lot better,” Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez told The Post. “I usually tell everybody, right about the middle of May, the balls will start flying out of the ballpark.”
That’s from a team manager, so it has to be true. More home runs couldn’t possibly come from the players getting into the groove as they get a month into the season.
Dick Fosbury, famous for the Fosbury Flop, passed away at 76 years old. Imagine being so innovative that a technique is named after you, but everybody forgets the name because it’s just what everybody does now.
What is Dark Energy? It’s a word we use to mean that there is more to learn about the nature of the universe.
The Big Bang Theory holds that the universe started from an infinitesimal point with nearly infinite energy that started to expand 14 billion years ago. There is evidence for this. For example, deep space is at about 3 degrees Kelvin. As the universe gets bigger, the energy is distributed over a larger volume, so is cooler.
The energy wants to expand, and gravity wants to pull it all back together. A big question in Physics was how the universe would end. Energy could win, gravity could win or it could be a draw.
There could be a fifth fundamental force, the four fundamental forces may be more complex than expected or numbers we call “constants”, may not be constant over long distances or time scales. Not comfortable for physicists, but it does gives them a problem to resolve.
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