Drag Racing Data

A new season has started for NHRA drag racing, which brings a new set of data from the Winternationals out in Pomona.

A run from Friday qualifying showed an average acceleration of over 5.0 g's over the first 60 feet, which makes the 3.0 g launch of the Space Shuttle look lame. A run on Saturday was even quicker at the start, over 5.1 g's, but two thousandths of a second slower for the full quarter mile. It looks like it will be quite a season if Sunday's elimination runs match what was done in qualifying, with six cars running over 330 mph at the top end.

Data first, then calculations and an explanation of terms like "Top Fuel".

What do the data show?

Friday: Right Lane: Antron Brown runs 4.495/330.07
Antron Brown's incremental times:
60ft-0.862 sec., 330ft-2.152, 660ft-3.059/278.40mph, 1,000ft-3.824

A time of 0.862 seconds for 60 feet (18.288 m) corresponds to a constant acceleration of 49.2 m/s² or 5.02 g (5.02 times the acceleration of gravity).

Antron Brown has moved from winning drag races on a motorcycle to Top Fuel. IMHO, the driver matters more on a motorcycle. Top Fuel is more about setup by the crew. The driver 'just' has to keep calm and the car straight at 300 mph while fighting the forces produced by such high acceleration.

Saturday: Right Lane: Larry Dixon runs 4.497/325.14
Larry Dixon's incremental times:
60ft-0.850 sec., 330ft-2.152, 660ft-3.053/278.98mph, 1,000ft-3.822

A time of 0.850 seconds over the first 60 feet corresponds to a constant acceleration of 50.6 m/s² or 5.16 g.

Note that these accelerations mean that there is a force of over 800 pounds pushing a 160 pound person back into the seat. Five times the force of gravity is trying to pull your arms back and your hands off the wheel. That is why the Beach Boys sing about "being pushed out of shape" so it is "hard to steer" in one of their 60s ballads about racing cars, only they were talking about 1 g acceleration, max.

Calculations:

Assuming constant acceleration, the formula is a = 2*x/t². You can do this yourself without doing any conversions by taking the 60' time T and evaluating 3.73/T² to get the acceleration in units of "g", the acceleration of gravity. The number comes from 2*60/32.17 where 32.17 is approximately g in ft/s².

Details:

Drag racing is about acceleration, not top speed. Quick at the start means you are at a higher speed sooner, so you cover the quarter mile in less time. The fastest run did not have the highest speed (which was over 334 mph).

You might wonder how it is possible for a car to accelerate at over 5 g's. If I told you that the car is going almost 100 mph after traveling just 60 feet from a standing start (roughly zero to 60 in just over 0.5 seconds), you would think I was making this up. One key is having an engine that makes about 1000 horsepower in each of its 8 cylinders, while another is having tires with really soft rubber that has a coefficient of friction (when in contact with a carefully prepared concrete surface) in excess of 5.

It helps that "Top Fuel" refers to the use of a mixture of 90% nitromethane and 10% methanol as fuel. (I think they are back to using 90% nitro.) Like in high explosives such as nitroglycerine, the nitrogen in nitromethane acts as an oxidizer. This fuel needs very little air to burn, so you can stuff more fuel into the engine than with gasoline (less air means more fuel, so they can burn several gallons per second) and it detonates almost like dynamite. Seriously, these cars literally explode off the line. You have to feel it (the shock wave hitting your body when the throttle opens) to appreciate it.

The real trick, however, is in the clutch. They simply drop the clutch with the engine at full rpm. The engine runs at a constant rpm corresponding to 330 mph, and the clutch slips at a rate that keeps the tires stuck to the pavement. This is done with a very complicated, yet entirely mechanical (no electronic computers here!) multi-stage clutch system. They first drop a tiny disk that slips a lot, then more, then more, until it goes to full lockup at the top end.

[Correction: See comment posted today. I was given misinformation somewhere along the line ... You can get a fair description of the centrifugal clutch described in the comment by looking at the lines about "racing karts" in the Wikipedia entry linked here.]

By the way, sometimes they literally explode, but safety rules and good engineering keep that to a minimum and kevlar blankets and straps help confine any debris. Nevertheless, they do have to rebuild the engine completely, including replacing all of the head bolts, after each 5 second run even when all goes correctly. During eliminations, this engine rebuild has to be completed and the car ready to run in 90 minutes. That alone is something you have to see to believe.

Other details:

Note:
Top Fuel cars must weigh at least 2300 pounds after the race, should you want to work out the forces involved.

Note:
I am using the standard acceleration of gravity of 9.80665 m/s².

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Why I Enjoy Teaching Physics

This article is motivated by Dr. Crazy's follow-up article where she explains that she enjoys teaching literature for reasons that are a bit different than the reason she thinks it is important to teach it.

Although my enjoyment when teaching was clearly part of my explanation for why I teach, there are some things that deserve separate mention here.

Yes, I enjoy helping them change their lives. I wasn't really aware of what a big deal that could be when I was teaching as an undergrad or in grad school, even when I knew someone was hoping to be an engineer, or go from being a nurse to a physician. I think I took it all too much for granted back then. The vast majority of the kids I started college with did not drop out and seemed to find their way to a goal even if it was not the one they started with. (I doubt if one of them planned to be a Provost!) I now know that is far from the norm.

I now know the difference between a suburbanite son of a doctor or engineer and the daughter of a logger. I know the difference between the kid who has no motivation other than going to grade 13 and the kid who was lucky to survive inner city life in Baltimore (making 6 years as a Marine look pretty comfy by comparison). It is no surprise that motivation beats background most of the time, but there are lots of kids in the middle who aren't fully motivated because they don't really believe that a kid like them can do it. I love every success story because I can use it as a seed to grow some more.

That is probably the very best thing about teaching physics at a community college, followed closely by the smaller class sizes and my ability to control the synchronization of lecture and lab. I really enjoy having a class where the lecture section is half the size of a recitation section at a university; where I know the name (not to mention strengths and weaknesses) of every student in the class.

I also enjoy making them think. Think hard. Work on a problem that might take several tries, where the answer is far from obvious. Help them realize that careful reading of a question is as important as algebra if you want to get the right answer. Make them see a familiar phenomenon, like a roller coaster or a flag hanging on the wall, in an entirely different light.

I enjoy making them really think hard when they read a problem. Forcing them to pay attention to detail. This was not a challenge when I was first teaching, either because my students had higher verbal SAT scores on average or because they had been taught critical reading skills in high school. (I have many reasons to suspect the latter, the biggest one being that I see this problem in students who I know have first rate verbal and math SAT scores.) I share Dr. Crazy's interest in this kind of problem, and sometimes have them see if they can write a precis' of a physics problem rather than of a story or article.

I enjoy opening their eyes to what is behind the curtain. Showing them what is inside a switch, or a TV set, or a microwave. Pointing out that size of the antenna on a cell phone is related to the frequency it transmits. Seeing the wave guide on a satellite truck, not just the antenna. Seeing the forces in a bridge, or in a grocery cart, or holding up a bookshelf.

I enjoy teaching calculus (and algebra and trig) indirectly, while teaching physics. I get to teach some things they don't cover in calculus class, like the real skill of applying math to the real world, and I get to reinforce the skills that will really get used. The skills they will need to be fluent in when they get to their junior-year classes in engineering or other science areas.

I love it when I get good questions, and love it even more when they appear perfectly timed to what needs to be discussed next. That is always a clear indicator that at least some of the students are engaged and thinking along with what I am doing.

I even enjoy taking roll in my head, so I can compare regular attendance with grades on exams. Its not all in the homework ...

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Why I Teach (Physics) - The Meme

I put Physics in parentheses because I was teaching long before I taught physics, but teaching physics is my current career and the topic of this post.

This article is a response to a suggestion at Free Exchange on Campus last month that was triggered by yet another of Dr. Crazy's interesting articles on teaching: why she teaches literature. I've been a bit slow joining all of the other responses, including Dr. Crazy's own addition to the meme, an early response from Sherman Dorn that was what first brought my attention to it, and Profgrrrrl's comments this past week that reminded me I still hadn't written about it. Too busy getting rolling through the first exam block of the semester and all the other little things of life.

It is also a very challenging topic to write about.

I probably put it off at first because it is very hard to articulate an answer. It is easier to say why I enjoy teaching physics at a community college, which I will take up separately. Nonetheless, the fact is that I enjoy teaching and have always enjoyed teaching, but there is more to it than that. I'll follow Profgrrrrl's lead for two reasons: I think her approach of starting with history will make it easier to work my way into the topic, and I owe her an answer elaborating on the similarity in the way our stories start.

Background:

I also started teaching before I had any idea that is what I was doing. For me, teaching started in elementary school. I was part of a "pull out" program for gifted students, and we spent part of one year on algebra. That came naturally to me (I worked my way through the first 3 or 4 chapters of my Dad's College Algebra book in fourth grade) and I worked with some of the other kids in the very open classroom environment used in that program. We also team-wrote a play, by the way. That continued into high school, but I never considered myself a teacher. In particular, unlike a friend who wanted to be a teacher (but never did), I never took any opportunities to do a pseudo-student-teaching gig.

Except I did. I just didn't see it that way at the time. I taught one day of my physics class, introducing special relativity. It was actually meant as a learning experience for me, which it was on many levels. One lesson I learned right there was that it was much easier to understand (or think you understand) a subject yourself than it was to explain it to others.

I was a math major as an undergraduate, and got asked to be an undergrad TA in the residential college I was in. (Talk about leading edge; we had a learning community embedded within an Enormous State University before the people pushing them today were even in school.) Now I knew I was really teaching, or at least playing at being a math professor. I think I was still more effective at 1-on-1 assistance at that time, but I got excellent training before, and mentoring during, that experience that helped me transfer individual teaching methods to the classroom. That also was the only training I ever got in teaching! It was also the first time I taught an undergrad who went on to graduate school in physics.

I also participated in a really novel training program on interpersonal communication via my best friend, a dorm Resident Assistant. I still use those skills, when I remember that I have them.

Thanks to burnout in math, a recession in the sector that otherwise could have used a really clever programmer and applied mathematician, and well-timed recruiting by a physics professor, I went to grad school in physics. As I commented in some thread over at Dean Dad's, I was "lucky" enough to be in a research group that had more students than money for research stipends. Someone figured I had enough of a clue to teach recitations, and I got pretty good at it. (Really good according to the University, which gave me a teaching award, but I was still a hack by my present standards.) No training there at all, but some really excellent mentoring from another best friend, a fellow physics grad student who continues to be an award winning teacher at his university.

Best advice ever: Be yourself in the classroom.

I then spent a long time (almost two decades) as a post-doc or research faculty member, teaching a class or two or subbing here or there along the way. I even turned down a t-t job in a small department at a university (one with an engineering school at that) along the way. No, I was more interesting in doing research than teaching at that particular time. And, although doing a good job at research most definitely requires the skills of a teacher, when you try to communicate some really new result to people who are learning it for the first time, its not at all the same.

I was quite lucky to stumble on my current job as the contracts that my research position depended on led to a "change in emphasis" where I was working. In all modesty, they were lucky that I was there. I am back doing what I have always loved, if you haven't figured that out already.

Why Physics teaching is important to me

Lives depend on it. Physics is one of the basic skills, along with critical thinking and mathematics, upon which engineering is based. The vast majority of my students want to be engineers, so a bridge might fall down if someone does not do a good job teaching basic physics to them. (If you missed that memo, the I-35 bridge in Minnesota did not fall down because of poor maintenance. It fell down because of a design error made 40 years ago by someone figuring out whether the net force at a joint could be resisted by a particular piece of metal, and got it wrong.) There are some key skills that my students need to learn, and I mean learn for life (not just the next test), if society is going to survive after they graduate.

I take this pretty seriously. I first learned it in grad school when someone told me he decided on final grades in a pre-med course based on whether he wanted to find himself in an emergency room with that student standing over him. Same goes for driving across a bridge built from plans signed by a former student.

The original blog asked about academic freedom. You might think it odd that a well-established subject like physics would have that concern, but it does. There are preachers out there who would want a bogus version of thermodynamics taught so they could use it to justify their anti-evolution preaching. There are people who reject relativity because they think it leads to free love and abortions and would not like to see it taught. We all must stand for the right to teach the truth as we see it.

Why I teach

I teach because it changes lives, for the better.

I teach because my impact on society is magnified by every student I teach that goes out there and does an important job as well (or better) than I could if I had gone into the corporate world right out of college as I had planned to do.

I mentioned teaching someone in an undergrad calculus class who went on to graduate school. It was quite a surprise when he told me he had learned calculus from me, and a bit of an eye-opener. As an undergrad, I enjoyed teaching because I was helping my fellow students figure things out. It was fun to put my knowledge to use, and always rewarding to show off that I could do the hardest nastiest problem someone decided to assign that semester, but it was more than that. I'd help kids who were not in my class. Or some friend's girlfriend who was having trouble with chemistry. That old scouting "do a good turn every day" thing, perhaps. But it never quite crossed my mind that I could help someone get into grad school.

Then there was the day that I saw a picture of a former student in Time. A kid who was in my physics recitation had made a big splash in medical research as a resident. (He now runs an entire building at Stanford Medical.) OK. If someone learns like he did, and has the initiative he did, anything is possible. And I could help make it possible. How many lives has he saved, or enriched. It boggles the mind.

More recently, I saw that one of my better students had earned an MS in Engineering. (This would be one of those non-traditional students, who literally came out of the woods to attend our CC before entering a big university. She did not have any confidence at all when she came in here. Did telling her that she was as good as that guy 20 years ago, the guy now at Stanford, help her see herself differently? I sure hope so, because she is good enough to change the world, too.)

I get some students who are straight out of high school and could go to a university as their first step, but most of the really good ones are returning students. The group of Iraq vet Marines (you are never an ex-Marine) who formed the most interesting cross-cultural cross-ethnic study group I've ever seen. Really smart kids who, for one reason or another, never went to college. The cosmetologist who was brilliant at mathematics and is going to be a chemical engineer. Or the kid who earned a scholarship as a now-honest graduate of a "residential" school for delinquents. We see the great cross-section that the CC was created to serve, and some of them use everything we have to offer and more.

A big part of my job is the same as it is at a university teaching calc-based physics. We all are trying to give them an entirely different way of looking at the world and (simultaneously) the tools to enter a highly technical profession. Few students enter physics with the unique perspective the subject requires. Few normal people see vectors of forces when they look at a bridge, or think about the coefficient of friction and terminal velocity when watching automobile racing, but most engineers and physicists do. When Dr. Crazy writes about how going to college changed her in a way that makes it difficult to fit into her parent's world, I know what she is talking about. My students face that same challenge, in a more technical than philosophical sense, and I am here to help them with it.

I teach to help my students achieve their goals, if they are willing to work at it.

I don't teach to "help" students pass if their bridge would fall down without extra credit or a retry at an exam.

And I teach because I seem to have a talent when it comes to simplifying the complex and clarifying the opaque for kids who are willing to work at it. I've never understood how I make those connections for them, but part of it must be the same talent that helped me make some connections that changed how physics is done in a few narrow fields of little interest to hardly anyone.

And finally, I think I teach because it is in my genes along with building and designing things. My grandmother was a teacher, and one grandfather actually taught physics labs while studying engineering as an undergraduate. And my father taught me all sorts of things almost every day when I was growing up. Things like this week's factoid/ homework example: The average person puts out the same amount of heat as a 100 Watt incandescent light bulb.

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Watching History Not Being Made

I've seen a lot of football games, and every Super Bowl (IIRC), and I can't remember a Super Bowl that was nearly as good as this one: closely played right down to the end with every yard fought for as if the game depended on it.

Thank God, because the ads during the first half of the game were awful.

I imagine that lots of commentators will not like it because it was a defensive masterpiece on the part of the Giants, and defense just does not get appreciated by the folks who want NFL scores to look like NBA scores. At least the TV coverage showed some replays of the blitz packages that NY used to neutralize the totally superior offensive line of NE.

The one game it reminded me of, early on, was the 10-10 tie between Michigan State and Notre Dame that I saw in person in 1966. Every inch was contested, even on a 2 yard run. Exceptional plays were needed to evade the defense, like Manning's move that might have won the game. Every hit was solid with no cheap shots. The only difference is that holding is totally legal now, so the only way to beat your man around the end was what Strahan did: get far enough away that he could not grab on.

And hearty congrats to Chad over at Uncertain Principles whose New York Football Giants won the game. He even got it almost right, saying it would be decided by a field goal in his anti-woofing pick of the Patriots. But one of my co-workers, from Rhode Island, is going to be very unhappy tomorrow morning.

Note added: She was very unhappy this morning. She even wore black.

For the record, my prediction was that it would be won by the last team to score, although I made that at halftime when it was clear this was going to be a defensive struggle with every score a challenge.

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Improving Student Success

My brother e-mailed me an article featuring a rather novel (in my experience) method of improving student success in science classes. It does seem that this method would increase retention rates for introductory biology, but there were some indications in the article that it does not increase student learning.

The headline to the story, teacher could face firing over giving test answers, suggests why this might be the case. The method itself, however, was novel enough that The Thomas commented "You just can't make things (like this) up" and I felt compelled to share it with my few readers below the fold.

You see, the teacher did not actually "give" the test answers to his students. He allegedly italicized (or bold faced or increased the font size) of the correct options on 29 of 34 questions on a multiple choice test. For those of you keeping score at home, that would amount to a grade of 85% or 87 (if he gave 3 points per answer for a max of 102) before trying the remaining questions.

A student quoted in the article said ""I think everybody was passing, unless they had attendance issues, but we weren't learning very much. At least I felt unprepared when I got to chemistry." Perceptive student!

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50 years ago today

Today marks an important anniversary: my vaguest memory of America's journey into space, the launch of Explorer I. All I remember for sure is the sense of relief that we were in the game, that the threat posed by the Soviet launch could be dealt with, picked up between the lines when my Dad read the evening paper to me the next day.

Yeah, my Dad read the paper to me every night. That is probably why I must read the morning paper before my day can start, and certainly a big part of getting a head start on school and all of that critical thinking and reading stuff that we make such a big deal about today.

Back to the main topic:

Those memories are vague, and might not be the earliest ones. I think it is possible that I saw the explosive failure of Vanguard in December of the previous year, since we would all troop down to the gymnasium in my elementary school to watch US rocket launches live on TV, and that very important one was during a school day. If not at school, then certainly on the evening news because we had a TV by then. However, my clear memories of watching launches at school start a few years later (including, of course, every one of the manned space missions), so I figure that was seen on the news rather than "live".

The first vivid memory I have of the space program is that of watching Echo I orbit overhead in 1960. This was a huge mylar balloon that functioned as a passive telecommunications satellite. (The signals were just bounced off of it, like off of a mirror.) It was brilliantly bright in the sky, easily seen with the naked eye while standing in the front yard. It was awesome.

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Sunday Breakfast

Grape jelly is
beak smacking good on a cold winter morning!

Not the best picture, since the ISO was pushed to the max to get enough speed in the morning light. (Shot hand-held by Mrs. Pion with a 300 mm lens on the Nikon D70.) Half the pixels were discarded to resize it for use here.

We think this same oriole has been visiting our yard every winter for the past three years. It first showed up two years ago in February, snacking on our hummingbird feeders. (We usually get some rufous hummers in winter, but not this year.) It has been showing up in January the last few years, which is still a bit late for this area.

We got the oriole feeder you see in this picture after the first sighting, but it still visits the hummer feeder that hangs directly in front of the kitchen window. We take the bee guards off in the winter. The hummers don't care and the oriole just pulls them off.


Mrs. Pion took this one (also cropped and resized by 50%) from about 10 feet while sitting on the kitchen floor. The oriole is only about 6 inches from the window.

Hint:
If you have a hummingbird feeder and find the base lying on the ground, you might have an oriole visiting your yard. I have had to reinforce the mounting plate inside the hummingbird feeder with epoxy because the oriole is too heavy for the original design.

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Colbert Classic!

The first main segment of The ColberT ReporT tonight (Thursday, 17 January) was a tour de force of Colbert at his best.

He did a book interview with Lou Dobbs of CNN (famously anti immigration) entirely in Spanish while staying in character as a sleazy spanish-language talk show host who wants to win the war on the middle class.

He must have spent hours working on that gum-chewing look, and hours more getting the grease out of his hair afterwards.

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Motivation

Today started out cold with gray skies and a light drizzle.

About one third of the wannabe engineers in my first semester physics class were absent.

Should have taken attendance to see how this particular measure of motivation relates to overall success in the course.

"I want a good job, but not badly enough to go to class when the sun isn't shining."

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You read it here first.

In passing, I was rather peeved that Big Media did not notice that Ron Paul soundly defeated Giuliani in Michigan. Paul got more than twice as many votes as Giuliani, almost more than Thompson and Giuliani combined. And I don't buy the excuse that Giuliani didn't campaign there. Are we to believe that people in Michigan have never heard of Mr Nine Eleven?

And I'll elaborate below on why they are ignoring the delegate story by simply looking at the "winner".

Anyway, over six months ago I predicted that the primaries were very unlikely to play out like they did in the past with a simple cascade of wins and dropouts so the race would be decided by February 6. (The idea actually goes back even further but I was not blogging back then.)

Suddenly everyone is talking about the race continuing well past Super Tuesday with a chance that it might only be decided on the floor of the convention. In my not-so-humble opinion, the Democratic nomination might even be decided by an old fashioned credentials fight over whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida. One wonders just how uncommitted those Michigan delegates actually are. It could be very interesting. I hope there is an Arthur Schlesinger somewhere inside waiting to write a history of what takes place behind closed doors at those conventions.

My new observation is that everyone seems surprised by Romney's big lead in delegates. Well, duh, they wouldn't be if they read their own news reports about how delegates are split up. Romney was ahead of Huckabee by 24-18 (and 24-10 over McCain) before he won Michigan. Solid second place finishes can produce more delegates than a win and a bunch of weak third-place finishes, but the horse-race fans on cable news shows seem unaware of the delegate counts. You need to go somewhere like cnnpolitics.com to see those data. These are not winner-take-all primaries.

On the Democratic side, Edwards trails with 18 delegates to 24 and 25 held by the two leaders ... and there are over 4000 delegates at the convention! They don't exactly have an insurmountable lead over him. He is only in trouble due to perception and money, not his place in the race. If he had money like Romney, he might be able to keep it a 3-way race until he got to a state where a win would put him in the spotlight.

OK, some of my June predictions were far from perfect. I also predicted that McCain might be screwed over when Bush starts pulling troops out of Iraq, just as he did after each previous surge. However, it is starting to look like McCain might be able to spin that to his advantage, but only if the insurgents don't suddenly attack next summer during the conventions. They have shown a pattern of lying low at times that correlate to US elections.

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Followup on Prerequisites

First, an update:

The student whose transcript was described in last week's post on prerequisites dropped (or maybe got dropped by our system) before the semester started so that is one less hassle to face. The karmic balance will be described at the bottom.

One of the comments to that article (by Patrick Lam aka Plam) observed that "It seems that the students at my institution now basically get 0 choices in courses (the wonders of engineering degrees), so I guess that this problem doesn't show up." Well, they have essentially zero choices at Nearby University (NU), but that is not enforced.

Since I never met her, I'll just have to speculate that her major is Biochemistry. That fits with all of the classes she has taken. Your first two years are taken up with 2 semesters of biology, 4 semesters of chemistry, 2 of physics, and 2 of calculus plus maybe a choice or two for the required history and humanities general education classes. That did not keep this student from not starting in chemistry as required by the prerequisites.

My other example, the student who showed up in my Physics II class despite having failed all four semesters of calculus, was an engineering major (OK, a wannabe engineering major) at NU! If there is no administrative system in place, many students will just treat prerequisites as an annoyance and fail to achieve their career goals as a result. (My thoughts on orientation for students fresh out of HS and on what is needed to be ready for college were blogged about last spring.) Fortunately, our college does it automatically and another nearby school (Wannabe Flagship) also does a good job. Only NU, where they appear to get no guidance on this, is a problem for me.

My first post was prompted by Becky Hirta's hassle with manually enforcing the prerequisites for the Calculus Circus. I can't imagine that. A minor snafu in our system let students without a math prerequisite into chemistry, and manual checks showed that something like 20% ignored what was in the catalog. Now I, myself, exploited my rights as an Honors undergrad to ignore anything if I could talk my adviser into it, but what works for Patrick and me does not work for most students.

I think one of my great teaching successes is that I manage (with the help of former students) to convince my students that they need to learn (actually remember) physics to make their life in engineering school go more smoothly.

Small world shout out!
Patrick is at Waterloo. I still have (somewhere) a button given to me by a Waterloo CS student at a July 1 party celebrating Dominion Day along with a pre-July-Fourth party in western Michigan, back in a previous century. [The button said something about beware of trojan horses.] Awesomely crazy kids; I hope you have lots more like them. And I have a cousin working at the MIT AI lab, although I suspect he went there after Patrick left.

Karmic balance:
A student added my Physics I class with the glorious record of two F grades in Physics I from another institution. Of course, said student has not done any of the homework this semester. Must think our CC classes will be easier than those at a large university where no one cares if students learn. Bad guess.

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What My Students Think They Need

moar funny pictures

Thanks for pointing me to this one, Bro.

The link points to a quasi-demotivation poster, SMART, that reminds me a lot of Bucky in Get Fuzzy.

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Will this be a good semester?

I hate to be overly optimistic and then get let down, but the semester has gotten off to a good start. I log into my course management system (the anti-Bb, if you must know) to check enrollment updates and see that all was in order. And do my versions of the problems to be sure they all have the right answer.

What do I see?

One of my Physics 1 students had done the first homework set before the class had even met! That is initiative. Santa put a real serious student in my stocking.

And two of my Physics 2 students had also hacked through the first few problems in their first assignment! !! Even more impressive because one of those students was never known for doing his homework early. New Year's resolution, maybe?

They simply thought to log in and see if I had anything for them to do. Awesome. Now I have to be sure to live up to my part of the bargain tomorrow.

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Calming Music?

Profgrrrrl asked for some recommendations of calming music.

My all-time favorite is "If I Were a Bell" as performed by Miles Davis on the "Relaxin" album. (The 20-bit remastered version released by Prestige is a fantastic recording.) It exists on YouTube with a bizarre mix of photos of Davis and the musical "Guys and Dolls" that the song comes from.



The video-maker's choice of still photos is as strange as the section around 4:30, the piano in duet with a walking bass line, is sublime.

Other Davis albums from that era, such as "Kind of Blue" and "Birth of the Cool", are also worth a try.

While looking at what else might be on YouTube, I found two versions of "Take Five" by the Dave Brubeck quartet (from the album "Time Out"). Every piece on the album has a different time signature. This one, in 5/4 time, is fantastic but neither of these live performances is the same as the one on the album.



The drum solo in this first one is intense, while the second one (below) is fairly mellow in comparison.



[Addendum: The album version is unlike either of these in that it does not have a drum solo at all. Instead, there is a duet of sorts between drum and piano. The piano repeats the theme ad nauseum while the drummer works sparingly around it. A classic example of jazz where the silence between the notes is as significant as the notes themselves.]

Just for grins, you might contrast that very corporate looking group from 1961 to another from that same year, one where the sax gets a more serious workout: John Coltrane performing "My Favorite Things". This live version is (IMHO) quite inferior to the original recording in several respects. (The recording of the flute is awful, plus Eric Dolphy on flute is no Coltrane. The album version adds about another 3 minutes to the piece and does not have Dolphy in the band. It is all Coltrane, plus McCoy Tyner.) Anyway, the piece goes from mellow to extremely (extremely) complex and back again in its full form. The first and last minutes might mix into what PG is looking for.



That song is also one of my all-time favorite recordings, but does not fall in the realm of calming music! It does, however, have that effect for me. Having heard it many times, the complexity is familiar and expected ... and all of it still has Julie Andrews singing in the background of my mind.

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Prerequisites

I really enjoy reading the Learning Curves blog, written under one of the great pseuds I have ever seen, Rudbeckia Hirta. But I digress. Her job is coordinating the Calculus Circus at a large research university, leading to a lot of the same kinds of problems I have to deal with (albeit on a larger scale).

Reading about her problems can be a bit therapeutic at times, and quite helpful at others. One can always use new ideas. But she has one problem that I do not encounter very often, because her university does not have any automated mechanism for enforcing prerequisites.

One of our nearby institutions has no policy on prerequisites, so I have seen the consequences of letting students loose in that environment. Her observation "It's like they spin a wheel to pick their classes" is right on the mark.

Fortunately, Prof. Hirta's university does have a policy that allows administrative drops of students who lack the required prerequisites, but that is a labor intensive process. She has brilliantly automated mailing the offenders to get them to change classes before they get manually dropped on the first day of class, but I wonder if any of them even read their e-mail!

Digression:
My usual problem is that students sign up for my class (calculus-based physics for engineers and the physical sciences) who really belong in a different class (trig-based physics for life science majors). They can do this, of course, because their majors generally require calculus. And some need to do it, because their goal includes a grad school that requires my course. But most do it because the other class is not taught in the spring semester, and have no clue that it might be, oh, five times harder than the alternative. E-mail never gets this across, mostly because they don't read their e-mail. (Maybe our new portal will improve that.) The next best thing seems to be to actually teach physics on the first day of class. That gets their attention.

My prerequisite problem is actually someone else's problem. A sister university does not have any mechanism at all for enforcing prerequisites. None. Not only does their registration system literally allow any student to register for any class (want to take 3rd semester calculus? sure!), they don't even allow faculty to drop students who do not meet the stated catalog requirements. They are truly "student centered".

My apologies if you don't believe me. I would not believe it if I had not seen the transcripts myself. Worst case ever had to be the student whose math grades were Calc I F, Calc II F, Calc III F and showed up in my 2nd semester physics class without having even passed physics 1 at his home institution. (OK, maybe the kid with a C in each of three calculus class and differential equations who could not take the derivative of x² was worse.) And I've got another one this semester.

You see, our system makes it pretty easy to pull up your class roster and click a button next to the name of a student and see their transcript and advising information. (Great way to see where a new kid is coming from, or why some kid can't do enough algebra to get out of a paper bag.) So, one of the things I do between mundane pre-semester tasks is see what new faces have shown up in my second-semester physics class or the associated lab. Here is what I found this week:

The student passes Bio for majors I, but failed Bio for majors II the next semester. No surprise there, since the student had not yet taken any chemistry, which is required for these courses because of the biochemistry used. Krebs cycle and all that. (First example of where this "student centered" institution hurts a student who does not grasp the concept of prerequisites.) So what does she take in her third semester? Chem II. Amazingly, she passes. Maybe she had the person who gave a C to the kid who could not take a derivative. Who knows. Anyway, she fixes that problem by taking Chem I in her fourth semester, along with Physics II. (Second example, although she does have the math prerequisites for physics, just not the physics one.) That is where I come in. She manages to pass the lecture class, but fails the lab. (She also manages to fail the Chem I lab despite having passed the Chem II lab, so maybe she had an attendance problem.) In her fifth semester, she fails Bio II again, so maybe the chemistry was not her real problem. Or maybe it was, because she next fails Organic I along with Physics I.

So there she is in my lab. Her institution says she is qualified to take my lab, even though we require a grade of C in both lecture and lab for Physics I as a prerequisite for the second semester lab, so we have to take her. Our computer system ignores special students like her. And she might be OK. I've encouraged the Dean to let someone take Lab II with only a D in Lab I and repeat the D later, and she got a D in Lab II. She should have learned enough about proper use of significant figures in the chemistry lab she passed and the physics and chemistry labs she failed to handle the lab part, although she might have to relearn the physics she has forgotten since she passed Physics II. Did I mention that she passed Physics II seven years ago and failed Physics I two years ago? Yeah, she will have a lot of catching up to do.

PS - I don't actually have first-hand knowledge of their administrative drop policy, or lack thereof, but I have that info from two different people in two different departments who have also worked for us. I have seen way too many insane transcripts to wonder what SACS would say if they actually cared about this subject.

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Ready to Roll

In some sense I've been back to work for more than a week, since the major tasks I had to complete before the start of the semester required some of the days after Christmas while I was up in the Great White North spending the holiday with my brother and his family. That got done Friday, so everything I and another professor need when classes start on Monday is in place. I think.

Best of all, all the paperwork is done: I have all of the copies of the syllabus and other handouts for the classes I teach and the labs I oversee sitting in nice neat stacks in my office. That got done back around the 20th. Thank goodness for little miracles.

I think I am finally mastering the planning part of this job.

Now all I need to do on Sunday is clean up some of the debris left from the fall, shake this silly cold/laryngitis thing I got for Christmas from a niece, and remember what it is I need to teach on Monday. It will be fun to see the returnees for the second semester, and see what Santa brings me for the first semester class.

More on that in the next blog entry. Not all the news is good.

Got a good start on the cleanup process at home, filing all of the class-specific notes and making neat piles of what can be be recycled and what has to be shredded. Nothing like some NFL wildcard games to deaden the mind for this sort of work. What I don't look forward to is the mess in my office. Its not as bad as it was last May, but it is getting there.

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Christmas Catalog Count

Final update:
Below is a graph of the data collected during this exercise. Details are all below the fold. (Publication date shifted with each update. The initial version was published back in September.)

Graph of "holiday" catalogs (blue) and "winter sale" catalogs (pink) received through January 2.

August

3rd week - 1

September

1st week - 2
2nd week - 1
3rd week - 1

All of those arrived before the first day of Fall!

4th week - 1

October

1st week - 1
2nd week - 2
3rd week - 9
4th week - 5
5th week (to 11/3) - 6

November

1st week - 6
2nd week - 12
3rd week - 13

Peak day so far:
7 catalogs received on Wednesday, 21 November, the day before Thanksgiving! (And only 1 on the following Friday and Saturday.)

4th week - 11

December

1st week - 10
2nd week - 1 !!

They are not going to waste money once it is almost too late for delivery by Christmas.

3rd week - 0
4th week - 12 for winter sales

The last block includes mail that would have been delivered on 12/31 and 1/2 as well as the week that included Christmas Eve and Christmas, but later deliveries suggest it all came right after Christmas.

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Happy New Year!

Another year gone by. I think what amazes me the most about 2007 having passed by is that we are now 70% through the first decade of the millenium and 80% through the "oughts". Why so amazing? Because in October of 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis) I had serious doubts I would make it to 2000, or even make it home from school between warning and total conflagration. [Later, we learned it was even closer than it seemed at the time, yet now we have a Presidential Press Secretary who is ignorant of the 10 days that brought us closer to nuclear war than at any time since Nagasaki. Sigh.]

It has been a good year, but I won't blog about those details right now because I have work to do to get ready for classes next week.

Next week!

That calls for ...

... a Mimosa (champagne and OJ) and a day of football.

Or, if there are others around, maybe Orange Blossom:

Two 12 oz cans frozen OJ
Three 6 oz cans frozen pink lemonade
Two liters of 7-Up
1 fifth gin

That recipe goes back to the 70s when you could buy a fifth rather than one of the metric sizes that alcohol is sold in today. [*] As the quantities suggest,it also goes back to when a lot of fellow grad students would come over to watch football. Lots of Vitamin C to cure whatever cold you might have picked up from the people at the party last night, or today.

An older one (circa 18th century) would be my reconstruction of Syllabub:

1 pint (2 C) of heavy whipping cream
1 C of wine
3/8 C of sugar
2-3 T lemon juice
1-2 t lemon rind

Premix the sugar and the wine, if convenient. (It is easiest to start with warm wine so the sugar dissolves easily, then refrigerate it until you are ready to make and serve this edible drink.) You can also include the lemon rind, but save the lemon juice for the final step. Starting about a half hour before you want to serve the Syllabub, whip the cream until it is, well, whipped cream. No pre-made shortcuts allowed! Fold in the other ingredients and chill for 10 or 15 minutes. Serve in parfait glasses (if you have those and servants preparing this for you) or plastic drink glasses (if not) with a bit of nutmeg ground on top.

Syllabub is like eating rich, alcoholic air. This would be served during a Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve party, but you could do it today if you wanted to.

[*] Alcohol converted to metric because they could sell 750 mL for the price of a fifth (757.08 mL) without anyone noticing. In contrast, soda converted to metric because they could market 2 L of what is basically water as a better deal than two quarts (1.8927 L) without really putting anything more of value in the bottle.

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Merry Christmas!

A bit belated, but not much time to blog when you are having fun!

We have been in The Great White North (literally and figuratively) since Christmas Eve, enjoying time with The Thomas and The Parents, among others.

We got a late start on the trip because Mrs. Pion had been seriously under the weather, but a real doctor and some rest took care of that. Fortunately, we had built in a lot of slack in our schedule so we really did not miss anything. Even more fortunately, the weather was even better for our drive north than it would have been on our original plan.

Even better than that, it was all white when we got here!

It is not Christmas in the Pion family without food. Suffice it to say that we arrived at 3 pm, Parents arrived by 4:30 pm (barely enough time for us to unpack the car), and the ham dinner was served by 6 pm. SisInLaw had knocked herself out as usual, with a choice of 4 pies (chocolate cream, pecan, banana cream, and lemon meringue) and banana pudding, all home made, along with Christmas cookies and ice cream. I settled for a half slice of pecan and a half slice of chocolate cream, with ice cream on the side.

Santa arrived while we slept. (The great bulk of the gifts exchanged within The Brother's family are piled around the tree by Santa. They don't accumulate them under the tree during the weeks - or days- before Christmas like we do.) Oddly, Mrs Pion and I were well rested during our trip, so we were first to get up and have breakfast, but resisted the temptation to unwrap and rewrap the gifts. The others were all worn out from getting ready for us to visit.

We were all well remembered. The gift that keeps on giving, a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, has kept me and their kids entertained for the last few days.

Christmas dinner, a huge turkey and trimmings, was as good or better than the night before. Although I could complain about the lack of sage in the stuffing, I really can't because Mom can't enjoy spicy food like some of us can. Besides, the stuffing was highlighted with the addition of cherries, which add their own special flavor.

Boxing Day was spent on the road, to visit Mrs. Pion's big brother in the even greater, whiter, north woods. Close to Hemingway country, if you know where I mean. We had a special delivery to make: part of our grapefruit harvest. These came from a tree that his wife had started from a grapefruit seed, and gave to us after we had moved south. It rather amazingly has survived enough winters to bear fruit. Great visit, and a beautiful drive through the north country. Once again we were favored by good weather and clear roads.

Finally, we worked in a day for a family dinner at my Parents new home, a townhouse that is part of a wonderful retirement community. I'll have to blog about being Homeless (for the first time in my life, I don't have a bedroom or even a bed in my parents home) some other time. For now, I'll close by being thankful for yet another pleasant evening with family, including a brother who should be immensely proud of how his kids are turning out.

Hope you all had a great holiday as well.

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Efficient grading (physics and math)

This will have to be the short version, since I have to do some real work tonight.

My experience is with quantitative subjects like physics and math, but since it seems to have some value for stuff that requires reading (like lab reports), it can probably be adapted for other subject areas. Details below the fold.

The starting point is that you only grade one problem (or even sub-problem or portion of a report) at a time. That was a given when grading 750 final exams in one day, because each person does one problem while piles of papers get pushed around a big conference room table, but it is also how I grade exams solo.

Here I will assume you are grading the entire exam of 40 or 50 papers yourself, maybe 400 distinct problem solutions. There are some differences when you are only going to grade one problem on 750 exams, so I will summarize those at the end.

My exams all have a cover page for the total, version, etc, so the first step is to turn the page to the first problem to be graded and invert the stack so the first papers turned in are at the top. If not, just set it up for the first problem, which might not be problem 1 on the test. If there are multiple versions, set them up so you are grading the "same" problem on all versions. This is key.

I always start grading with an 'easy' problem. I never start with one that might have N-8 distinct wrong answers. Too depressing, and it defeats the key step.

Sort the exams by answer. That is, make one pass through the tests looking only at the bottom line, the answer and its units. Completely correct answers go in one pile, ones with minor numerical variations or missing units go in another, and ones with wrong answers go in a third. Keep exams with the same wrong answer together.

Reassemble into one big stack and work through them starting at the top, or in the middle if your rubric has a key intermediate result or formula identified for that problem. Just because the answer is right does not mean the solution is right! This goes quickly for 'simple' problems, but requires a bit of care for ones where there are ways for two wrongs to make it right. It does take some experience to know which problems are likely to have 'magic' algebra steps where negative signs mysteriously change as needed, for example.

[Side remark: It is crucial that the solution be checked along with the answer. Many of the algebra weaknesses I see could only have made it into physics and calculus because an algebra or trig teacher did not check that they took the square root of a negative number and just made it into the correct real answer. I don't want that kid designing a bridge I have to drive over!]

There are two advantages here. One, the exams that deserve the same partial credit are next to each other. I may make a note on my key to say how certain errors are dealt with just for future reference, but I rarely have to consult them or look back to see how some weird thing got graded. Two, the exams are usually in the optimal order when it comes time to grade the next problem.

Next problem, same process. However, now the odds are that you have correct answers already at the top. The fact that you see a lot of correct exams before getting to the dregs is great for grader morale, which improves my efficiency. You do have to be super careful not to overlook errors on good papers or be too tough on the bottom. When a "top" paper has an error, it goes to the very bottom and when a "bottom" paper has the right answer, it goes to the very top. Sometimes I cut the deck, as it were, just to be sure I am fair (particularly for a long exam like a final).

The key is that you do not look through the entire solution for every paper, just the ones where you need to figure out what they did. Even then, you often get the efficiency of knowing that four papers all made the same kind of error in step 3 or 4 of the solution. You only have to figure it out once. After that, your eyes go directly to the error, flag it, and move on.

Handling each exam twice is more than made up for by less time spent on each one. I am also less likely to overlook an error in units or significant figures if I check that detail in my first pass. That means I also save time by not having to go back and look at an exam that was already graded.

Changes for Really Big Classes:

We would pre-grade a few dozen exams, picking out specific students from our own sections if that was practical. That would set up the rubric and give us some idea of what we had to watch for, but we also kept a sheet of paper with wrong answers listed along with the partial credit it got (and the reason why) when new ones showed up. This makes up for not being able to sort the exams. The basic idea was still the same: work from bottom to middle to top (or bottom to top to middle) of the solution to check the answer, the algebraic process used, and the physics.

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Grading

Profgrrrl has a thread about how people compute their grades. I commented there, but thought I would elaborate here.

Like her, I use a spreadsheet ... but I use Quattro Pro to do the grade computation rather than M$ XL. I also use an old fashioned grade book, which stays in my briefcase. The grade book is only for transient records (I don't carry a computer around with me), answering student questions, flagging something that will need correction (whether late assignments or a grading error) and a bit of permanence should something crash.


There was a gap where I only did research, so I can't tie my transition from paper to a spreadsheet to any specific change in the available tools. My history doing grades is quite a long one:

• Undergrad TA: All grades were calculated by hand, since calculators did not exist at the time and slide rules can't do addition. Exams and quiz scores were added up by hand, as were final averages. Some habits carry over from those times. I still keep a grade book in that style, and I still transfer the sub-total for each page to the front of the exam for final computing. That was when I was teaching math, and lots of math faculty still do it this way.
• Grad Student: I had a calculator, so most serious arithmetic was done that way. Exam scores were usually added up in my head, because I could do it faster than a calculator. Never bothered to write a grading program in Fortran because they already had one (or was it in COBOL?) for the really big lecture classes that did not have any homework grade.
• Side comment: That was where I was taught how to grade exams really efficiently. It was only recently that I learned this had a name: rubric. But it is more than that, it is an assembly-line-like process. I may blog about it if asked. Once you can grade one problem on 750 exams, accurately and efficiently, you can grade anything.
• Research Faculty: I taught some classes while on a full-time appointment that allowed that in addition to doing research. That was where I developed a grading spreadsheet in Quattro Pro that I still use today. It had three sheets (summary, homework, exams) just like mine does today.
• CC Faculty: Nothing much changed, so nothing much changed. Once you have a PC, there is not much else to do but put it on your phone. But the security issues if that phone got lost? Priceless.

My comment on Profgrrrrl's blog about not having to remember how to do formulas comes from this experience. I have not built a totally new spreadsheet since the first one, maybe 15 years ago. I've only had to make minor adjustments as my grading formula changes.

So my grading process has two stages. I first enter grades into the grade book, even if I am home where the computer version lives. They go in the grade book with the same pen I have in my hand, and are easily entered in random order. (I alphabetize exams before handing them back, but not labs or homework, so that is an important detail. I can see an entire class in my grade book, but can't see the entire list on a computer screen.) I then copy them into the computer, now alphabetically, and cross check if it is important, like an exam.

At the end of the year, I "print" the final spreadsheet info to pdf and keep it on two different computers (home and work) and in two separate hard-copy files (one with the final exams at work, the other is the actual gradebook).

I can't imagine not using a spreadsheet. Besides the advantage of getting the numeric grades as soon as the final exam numbers go into the computer, it is also easy to generate midterm and other grades for the students. I don't use Bb for this because I use a different course management system and our college does not automate grade transfer from Bb to our on-line grade entry system. I'd have to transfer too much info from one place to another to make that work.

A big part of the grade comes from HW managed through a non-proprietary course management system. I print its gradebook for each block of HW when I give an exam, and use that for two things. One, it is a hard record of those grades that get transferred into my grade book and computer, and two, it is a way to keep records on possible correlations between specific exam questions and HW performance on related problems. Are they learning? I've learned that it matters more whether they tried the problem seriously than if they got it right. Kids who get it right by using their book, notes, or (more likely) advice from friends might not do as well as kids who got it wrong but figured out what they were doing wrong after they saw the answer. In fact, I have evidence that this is exactly what happens.

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Good, Bad, and Ugly

Well, the semester is over so it is time to look back. Unlike some of the bloggers I read regularly, the end of the semester did not bring out the cloying annoying students that some had to deal with.

The Good:

My students. Not because I had a high pass rate, because I didn't. Last fall was outstanding while this fall was just above average. Because the ones who passed did a really good job. This was a class that was going to be either A or F. And since the F students will not be in my 2nd semester class, it looks like spring with this group is going to be a lot of fun.

But mainly because I just did not have any of the annoying ones that Profgrrrrl and RH were blogging about. But it was not that simple.

More of the Good:

Facilitating instead of doing. I tend to just do it. The sage on the stage. But a few weeks ago I managed to pay attention to a side comment at an engineering lunch meeting and put it to good use. A former student is part of a team building something for a national engineering competition. The guy at my table mentioned that he had been in the same competition 10 or 15 years ago. After lunch was over I introduced one to the other and watch an electric moment. You don't actually have to do the teaching to be a teacher.

Starting an ed research collaboration with an old friend from grad school. I think this is going to be really interesting.

The semester started and ended on a high note. During the pre-semester faculty meeting, my Dean closed by reading an e-mail he had gotten over the summer. He said he did not usually do this (he doesn't), which is a good thing. I could barely handle that one instance. After the first sentence I knew who wrote it, and so did the chemistry prof sitting next to me. This was a returning student, mid 30s career woman, going back to school to become an engineer. There were six of us who changed her life. I did not mind that I was an afterthought at the end, because it was the other five who got her to my classroom prepared to succeed. And just yesterday I got a note forwarded to me by one of the math faculty, a note thanking him for his clarity in teaching vector calculus and mentioning my efforts (the previous spring) as well. Most of the time they just walk in the door in August and walk out in December and you never really know whether you had an impact.

Yeah, and there was the Iraq war vet I ran into in the supermarket just last week, who is showing that an average CC student who put an emphasis on learning can kick butt when put up against those kids who started at the university. He even has one company ready to hire him after just on summer as an intern. And there was another vet, an ex-Marine (as if there is such a thing) from the inner city slums of a northeastern city who stopped by in August to tell me he had graduated and was off to take a job in Washington DC. Every one of those stories helps dispel the myth that CC students are inferior and helps the next group do even better.

Oh, yeah, and profgrrrrl is well on her way to earning tenure.

The Bad:

Too many meetings. I knew serving on a major (actually, the most major) college committee would be a strain, but you never know for sure until it happens. To those who know, there is nothing more that needs to be said.

The kid who had more persistence than sense of reality. The odds of passing the course with a great final exam are not good if you averaged 65 on the hour exams. He did not even make 50% on the final. I suspect, from what I saw in the lab, that he confused understanding how to do a HW problem with getting it right after someone told him how to do it. That might help on an hour exam, but it won't work on the final and he proved it. But maybe he will be in the 'good' category after next semester. I have seen that happen, and maybe he needed to fail the final exam to really learn that his approach will not work.

The Really Ugly:

One of my lab TAs did not turn in his grades on time. No trouble with the students, but trouble with their teachers! That was a completely new experience for me. Sigh. I suspect graders block or terminal procrastination. I saw some hints of trouble but never suspected it would turn out this badly. The worst thing is that he is a really good teacher in the lab. I see a stressful spring.

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Grading Playlist

Pretty good progress grading so far. Got all of my final lab reports and lab exams graded so they could be returned at the final exam for the lecture course, and wrapped up the final exam for one class (the small one). That took me through

• Cream: Strange Brew
• Beach Boys: Made in the USA
• Heart (the debut album)

...

• Jethro Tull Original Masters
• Led Zeppelin
• Beatles: With the Beatles

which carried me through on-line grade entry for those three classes.

On tap is my larger class, where I still have to "take" the exam and write out the grading key. That will probably look like

• The Beatles: Love (to work the exam)
• Led Zeppelin (reprised due to recent concert)
• Jimi Hendrix: The Ultimate Experience
• Les Negresses Vertes: Mlah
• Temptations: 17 Greatest Hits

If that does not do it, I'll add an update.

PS - Gotta love the tune "Zobi La Mouche" from the debut album of Les Negresses Vertes, a French band whose use of folk instruments (including the accordion) produces a sound that reminds me of Cajun music. Great energy for grading. The only problem with it showed up when I asked a young french post-doc to translate the lyrics. She was too embarrassed to tell me more than what the title meant.

Addendum: I did have to add a few disks to finish that last exam. Since I knew that I needed to think hard about the N-8 distinct wrong answers to a problem some of them found particularly hard, then slam through the last few problems and add them up, I went with

• Beatles: Rubber Soul
• Miles Davis: Relaxin'
• Yes: Fragile
• Beethoven: 9th Symphony (Dresden Philharmonic with the Berlin and Leipzig Radio Choruses)

That did it.

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Holiday Music

Time to destroy those childhood mythologies: Check out this remix of Alvin and the Chipmunks that has been slowed down so you can hear the original vocals. From M-1.US.

On that thought, need some Mashups with your mashed potatoes?

Check out SantasticIII in 3-D.

If you like that, go back a few years to SantasticII: Clausome! (2006) and Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings (2005).

Motivated by an article by Dean Dad complaining about lousy christmas music. He's never heard "Dreidel All The Way".

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FSM at a national meeting

There is an amusing report in a blog about a session devoted to the subversive value of a parody like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you have never heard of it, FSM was invented in much the way Intelligent Design was invented, but for the opposite reason.

The FSM is quite popular around our department, since some of the biology folks regularly encounter kids who have been taught bogus biology in Sunday School. We are now seeing it spread to geology and oceanography (somehow global warming is against the bible) as well as physics (radioactive decay and entropy).

One office has a "What Would FSM Do?" sign on the door, and another of my colleagues went so far as to make up a Christmas decoration featuring a stylized FSM made of LEDs. The latter is quite pretty.

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Enchanted!

We saw Enchanted this weekend, and highly recommend it to anyone, whether you have children or not. Indeed, I'd guess that half of it is wasted on children unless they have been raised on all of the Disney classic anime, but particularly Snow White (1938) with a strong bit of cross-polination from Cinderella (1950) and perhaps Sleeping Beauty (1959).

The movie was great fun. (Possible minor spoilers follow, but some might enhance your viewing experience.)

It's about time that Disney take a chance by poking fun at their competitors in addition to their own movies. I mean, was that a Troll or an Ogre that Prince Edward (!) captured? Could have been Shrek's cousin. And are they suggesting that the other Prince Edward is a bit dim? I'd love to hear a UK audience watch this movie!

As a fan of Disney animation, the opening scene was a delightful surprise. The long zoom through the woods was not quite at the level of Pinocchio (1940), but it was brilliantly done. (If you have never seen that movie, check it out.) I also found the ballroom scene interesting as a tribute to the dance scene from Beauty and the Beast, which was an early triumph of 3-D computer animation rendering the chandelier.

If you watch the entire frame, you might catch a glimpse of Totoro. I missed it, but my wife says a Totoro toy was in the lower right corner of the frame during a scene in the daughter's bedroom.

A real test of any movie is whether a scene is so good that it is not spoiled by having seen clips of it in the ads or in a trailer. That is definitely the case for the scene where animals (and insects!) clean the apartment. The actual scene has much more than they gave away in the trailers, and the ad version was pretty good. Best of all, even though it was obvious how it had to turn out, it was far from clear exactly how they would get there. As expected, they live happily ever after, but the details are entertaining as can be.

Susan Sarandon rocks as the evil queen. She looked like she belonged in NYC.

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A Disc for PG

This is not a compact disk, it is the real thing, posting inspired by Profgrrrrl's blog this evening about listening to an "old" CD by Billie Holiday.



I wonder if her digital CD will be playable when it is over 60 years old.

My Mom bought this 78, and others, with money she earned from her first job while in high school. This side, "Am I Blue", is a classic, her signature song. The "B" side is "Long Gone Blues" with Lips Page on Trumpet.

I find it interesting that this song is described as a Fox Trot, because it does not swing like the big band songs one would normally associate with that dance.

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Finishing the Move

Monday will be a special day, as my parents move out of their home of 30+ years and downsize into a townhouse in a retirement community where many of their friends already live. (I think part of their anticipation of the move comes as they realize that they know more people within a few blocks of their new place than they know in their current neighborhood, as long-time residents have made room for young families. It is also a really nice place.) But that is for another blog entry.

Today (Saturday) was an even more special day. My brother finally moved the last boxes from his college days out of my parent's basement and into his own. It took two trips in the family minivan, I am told, although that included some items from the house that are going to him. But only some.

Just in case you can't guess how long they might have been down there, his oldest child graduated from college about 2 years ago. Yeah, those boxes have been down there about a quarter of a century. The word from my parents is that he has found all sorts of treasures he had forgotten he even owned.

All I can add is, just wait until Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know for a fact that he is going to get some really priceless gifts this year, since I got some great ones when my parents were here last month. I did not blog about any of it because I don't want to tip him off about what might end up under his tree, but one of them left me speechless.

Exactly where they are going to go in his house is the real puzzle, since the 2-car garage and basement are pretty well packed with ... well ... with a quarter century of accumulated stuff, mostly the prized possessions of his three kids along with all of the usual necessities of suburban life.

The interesting question for the future might be: How long will his kids keep their stuff in his basement after they get their own homes and families?

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Shakespeare never said this ...

I can't resist time-wasting junk like this (from Dr. Crazy via Profgrrrrl), particularly when it does not take much time to do it:

It is the physics,
The physics above us, govern our conditions.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Heck, that was so easy that I will try another:

Come not between the Dr. Pion and his wrath.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Heh, heh. That one is priceless!

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Veteran's Day

Or should I say Armistice Day, as it used to be known?

In any case, Monday may be the official holiday, nationally and in some states, but today is the real one ... remembering the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when the guns fell silent at the 11th hour.

So give your favorite veteran a call today. You never know which Veteran's day will be his or her last one, and it is not just the WW II vets who are fading away. Plenty of Vietnam vets are getting on in years along with the vets who got the Tom Brokaw treatment. Which reminds me: I really should give my brother-in-law a call.

I'm glad I know the story of how he won a major combat medal while doing what would seem to be the safe job of a court reporter at a field court martial that got a bit hot. He, like most men who have seen combat, doesn't talk about it much. Similarly, a good friend did not find out his father's combat history in the Pacific until after he died. For good reason, I suppose. If you ever happen to see the film shot by combat photographers as the Marines landed on Tarawa, you'll get the general idea that the experiment might be hard to explain.

My grandfather, who served in France during WW I and told a priceless story of Armistice Day, also said little about his service as a combat engineer. I only know about the time he took a shrapnel hit in the helmet and when he got a "touch" of mustard gas that sent him to a rear-echelon job driving an ambulance. Although this gas was not one developed by Fritz Haber, I still find it outrageous that Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. Oddly enough, his contribution to using chemistry for mass killing during WW I is not even mentioned in the bio on the Nobel site.

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Space Shuttle Reentry Track

The Space Shuttle will be landing at the Kennedy Space Center tomorrow (Wednesday) just after lunch. It will land at 1:02 PM EST if it comes in on orbit 238, and about 2:36 PM EST if it has to wait for orbit 239. The reentry track will take it across the continental US, offering some great viewing opportunities.

Information on the shuttle mission and maps of the reentry tracks can be found on the NASA shuttle web site.

The primary track will take it across the midwest (central Nebraska, NE Kansas, SW Missouri) at very high altitude, then across central Alabama, possibly right over Columbus GA, south-central Georgia, then heading south just west of Daytona Beach to KSC. It should be over Alabama and Georgia about 10 minutes before landing.

Based on past experience, you should hear the distinctive double sonic boom a few minutes before landing. It takes it a long time for sound to travel down from something like 200,000 feet (40 miles) plus whatever your sideways distance adds to the hypotenuse; meanwhile, the Shuttle is making pretty good time towards Florida at over Mach 10. If you are close to the track, the sonic boom is thunderous and unforgetable.

The later landing path takes it across Utah and Texas and then along the Gulf Coast, crossing Florida a bit south of Ocala.

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Grading Jail

Prompted by Profgrrrrl's article about her grading jail. Mine is not nearly as fancy as hers ....



... maybe because I do this (grade lab reports) every week, not just for a few exams during the semester.

Note the distractions, which are necessary to maintain sanity when reading a dozen or so versions of the same thing, each with their own annoying errors.

Interesting that we both have a remote control in there. My "background music" is usually football or basketball. I really like to grade during Monday Night Football. You can work along and only have to look up when there is something worth watching in a replay.

One thing of note: These students are doing a really good job of preparing their reports. The nicely organized cover page with an executive summary of the results that you see is actually a typical one for this class, which is the second semester I have had them. I always have to remind myself to tell them that they are doing a good job of getting ready for the advanced labs (and massive reports) they will encounter in engineering college. They have come a long way. They don't even whine very much any more.

This also reminds me that I really need to get back to a pair of articles on teaching labs, and the role of reading and writing in physics and engineering. Later ...

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First Century

One hundred posts.

The statistics sure show the effect of a CC teaching load.

March (16)
April (20)
May (17)
June (18)
July (10)
August (7)
September (6)
October (5)
and this one in November.

There was a bit of early enthusiasm and a backlog of ideas at the start, but it is also the case that the only thing to do towards the end of the spring semester is grading related. All of the prep was done a long time before, and only a few exams remained to be written or fine tuned. I was even teaching during the first half of the summer, but that light load left lots of time for other things. The drop off in July was when I started prep for Fall semester.

Students don't realize that our work load is totally out of synch with theirs. They work the hardest toward the end of the semester, studying for exams, while we work the hardest early in the semester, or even before it. That is particularly true when coordinating courses (which is part of my additional duties, not counted in my contact numbers or teaching load). Everything has to be planned out in detail several weeks before the semester starts so syllabi can be printed and outlines given to the people teaching the courses I coordinate.

That is why faculty are so punch drunk about now, since we are finishing up the last exams for the year, grading, but also preparing for Spring semester. That has to be done before Christmas break, since the few days after New Years are not enough to prepare anything that has to be in either the student's or the instructor's hands by the first day of class.

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Funk Shui

Need to do some catching up. This photo is from a couple of weeks ago, after we had finished cleaning up the dining room for a visit by the Parental Units, as my brother put it in a comment on another blog.



I suppose it is obvious that this was not the result of any interior design planning on our part!

The glasses are a relatively new acquisition, intended for beach (or wish-we-were-on-a-beach) use, as is the plant container. I was intrigued by the way they sort of fit into the usual rule of three for fung shui design.

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Practical Nobel Prize

It is about time (said even though I am a theorist)!

This is the time during the semester that we get to magnetism and the physics of important practical phenomena such as the Hall Effect (which is used to measure magnetic field strength, characterize the properties of semi-conductors, and, in its quantum version, establish a standard voltage). I always point out to my class that the mundane physics of such things as magnetic disk drives, like the mundane chemistry and physics of batteries, is as crucial to modern technology as the silicon chip ... and much more important to the functioning of our economy (or military) than electro-weak unification and other cool subjects of high energy particle theory that got all the press back when this work was published.

It is great to see a practical discovery related to magnetic data storage rewarded with a Nobel Prize.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was given to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for discovery of the Giant MagnetoResistance effect. This effect is used to read the tiny changes in magnetic field that signal the difference between a zero and a one when data are stored on a magnetic disk storage device. It has made possible the rapid (to someone as old as I am, spectacular) decrease in size of computer disk drives. For once, the media are not exaggerating when they say that this recent (late 1980s) discovery from basic research made the iPod possible.

One simple example: We own a half terabyte disk drive that is smaller than a Harry Potter novel. That is 500 gigabytes, for those who don't yet know the nomenclature, essential to backup all the data generated by a digital camera. A bit over 20 years ago, just a few years before the GMR discover was made, I used a computer system that had a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage mixed between disk and automatic tape drives. That terabyte of storage took up a space larger than our house.

I won't elaborate on the physics, which is way outside of my personal expertise in nuclear physics, because general information on the discovery, as well as links to pdf files suitable for the general reader as well as physicists, can be found in the press release from the Nobel committee.

Addenda:
A comment over at Uncertain Principles included a link to an IBM corp article on R and D that puts GMR to work.

When talking about this to my physics class, I remembered that a computer I used for my thesis research had a 1 megabyte (0.001 gigabyte) disk for key programs (operating system, compiler, device drivers) that was a beautifully polished platter about 2 feet in diameter. A factor of a million in data with a reduction in volume of maybe a factor of 10, not to mention an increase in reliability and a drop in cost by what is probably a factor of a million in current dollars.

I also pointed out in the lab how important it is to have reliable contemporaneous lab notebooks in ink to help document your independent discovery that might lead to a valuable patent if not a Nobel Prize.

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Cranberry Relish

Profgrrrrl's sick-bed comment about waiting for cranberry season so she can make cranberry sauce prompted several comments, including one about cranberry relish. That would be the real thing, made with orange rind, not the oversweetened commercial stuff that comes in a can. Tart and yummy (as garnish or spread on toast or waffles) and with enough Vitamin C to cure what ails Profgrrrrl.

The recipe from dear departed Mother of Mrs. Pion follows below the fold.


Cranberry Relish

• 3 pounds fresh cranberries
• 6 to 8 large apples
• 6 oranges
• 1/3 C sugar for each cup cranberries
  

Core apples to remove all seeds, chop apples and oranges into pieces, grind all ingredients (including apple and orange peel) into relish with food grinder. Add sugar and mix well. Refrigerate.

Comments:

This relish is uncooked, so wash everything you use. These days, I'd recommend a second rinse.

This is the original recipe. The reference to "large apples" is maybe 50 years out of date. Back then a large apple would be more like today's normal ones. In addition, she used the thin skinned juice oranges rather than thick skinned navel oranges and removed the seeds while chopping them into a size that will fit in the grinder. If you use oranges with a thick skin, you might want to discard some of the white part of the peel, which can be bitter. You definitely want the yellow peel!

Best used after it has been refrigerated for a few days to blend the flavors.

We use an old hand-cranked food grinder, alternating between berries, orange, and apple as we go. Don't overdo it if using a food processor. It should be fairly coarsely ground, just enough to shred all the skins.

This makes a lot of relish, enough for the entire holiday for a large family! A more plausible size for most of you would use one orange and one apple to a half-pound of berries, which is probably about 2 C (plus or minus). You can vary it to taste, of course, and no two batches (or recipes) are the same. For example, the "Joy of Cooking" uses 1 orange, 4 C berries, and 2 C sugar (a lot more sugar than our recipe, which is tart rather than sweet), while the Mennonite "More-with-less Cookbook" uses 1 orange (seeded), 1 apple (cored), 2 C berries, and 1/2 to 3/4 C sugar or honey, plus (optionally) 1/4 C nuts.

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Time to say "hey"

Time to delurk, maybe let me know you should be in my blogroll.

You could also post a topic request. Any physics topics of interest out there?

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