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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Why We Teach

If you don't read Inside Higher Ed, you missed a great article this week.

In a followup to his article about the murder of one of his students last spring,
Wick Sloane, an adjunct who teaches English at Bunker Hill CC in Boston writes about an experience in one of his classes this fall.

I have nothing to add to that article or the comments that appear there except the following: A semester does not go by without encountering a student whose life is or was changed by learning in one of my classes. One of those makes up for a dozen bad lab reports, or the slackers that drop a class after taking first exam without even bothering to find out what grade they earned.

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iPhone Homework

So I am working with a group of students the other day, and I notice a familiar web display on a student's PDA ... which I then realize is an iPhone.

Yep, she had been using its browser to enter the answers to the on-line homework system I use. She said she used the fact that she could do this to help convince her mom that the iPhone was a good investment!

The on-line homework system is not a proprietary one, so it was designed to be tolerant of lots of systems, including a PDA. I saw it demonstrated on a Palm about 3 years ago, so this did not surprise me too much. I just can't imagine doing much real work on such a tiny screen without one of those Fresnel lens contraptions seen in Brazil.

Which leads to the digression question: Is anyone else seriously disturbed that someone is using the theme from that dystopia film to sell a product?!?

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Engineering Calculus

I saw a comment over on Learning Curves about having to sub for an "engineering calculus" class, and decided it was worth posting a comment on the genre.

As a math BS and physics PhD with a father who is an engineer plus my own love of old textbooks, I have a unique perspective. I have actually seen a true "engineering calculus" text book, and suspect there is a place for something like it today.

My dad's calculus book looks bizarre to someone raised on Thomas (3rd edition) who has seen nothing but its clones and copycats over the years ... both back when I taught calculus recitations and today when I poach some parts of the subject by looking over the shoulders of my physics students when they are doing math homework before class.

The "engineering calculus" book dates to the post-war period, definitely before Thomas appeared (along with all the other post-Sputnik books?) in the 60s. It appears to have been designed for a quarter system and optimized to fit in with a calculus-based physics class that had its (very easy) first section as a pre-requisite. Also, from my current perspective, it might have accidentally managed to deal with the lack of abstract thinking skills so many kids bring to calculus.

It starts with the calculus as arithmetic, literally about doing a specific kind of calculation. It does not ignore the limit (like the infinitesimal approaches that were tried) but it does minimize it, thereby eliminating the several weeks of abstraction related to functional analysis in the typical text. Its goal for the first 10 weeks is to teach you to solve derivatives, integrals, and differential equations involving polynomials. (The only thing you really need for the first bits of physics, until you get to simple harmonic motion and need more.) I think they also did the log integral so they could do first-order linear diff.eqs which are also needed in physics.

The book then goes from concrete to abstract, revisiting the main topics to put in enough functional analysis to do derivations of derivatives of trig and inverse functions, chain rule, etc, and integrals of those functions. That is enough for simple harmonic motion by the time you get to it in physics (even if taken at the same time as this 2nd 10 weeks class). By the third 10 weeks, you are doing all the methods of integration and on to multi-variable calculus, just as in a conventional book, except the co-requisite requirements might ensure that the calc students knew some physics by this time, so the applications could be taken more seriously (assuming the math prof also knew that physics).

The rationale for this could be a simple as the fact that Newton had no need of functional analysis to do what he needed to do in the Principia. That approach to teaching calculus came much later, and mostly serves to puzzle the freshman taking calc I who wonders when they will ever get to calculus. (Answer: Sometimes it is after the first exam!)

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Big Day for Blasphemy

Browsing the BBC RSS feed today turned up all sorts of news relating to Blasphemy around the globe. And not all of it involved religion per se:


There was the story about the government withdrawing a statement about the significance of Lord Ram's Bridge between India and Sri Lanka in relation to a proposed coastal waterway.

News about a bounty being set for those who published a Cartoon of the Prophet made me glad I once got a chance to see an etching by Dali that is part of a series portraying scenes from Dante's Inferno ... as art rather than part of a religious controversy.

A German Cardinal described a new stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral as entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), a term with clear Nazi connotations in Germany. Oddly, this seems to be an example of act of civil blasphemy by a religious person, which must have caught him by surprise.

Gates says a 40% cut in US troop levels is possible by the end of 2008. When a Democrat calls for a reduction of troop levels by that amount in a year or so, he or she gets accused of a policy of "cut and run".

Greenspan attacks Pres. Bush on the US economy, while the Dollar hits new low against the Euro. We will have to wait for the Sunday talk shows or his Monday appearance on the Today show (and lots of others, I expect) pushing his book to see if the connection between these two stories is missed. After all, the blasphemy of a Darling of the Conservatives attacking a "conservative" President is not unrelated to the blasphemy of a "conservative" President backing massive deficit spending by a "conservative" Republican Congress. Will this lead to an insistence by the current Congress that Pres. Bush find some taxes to pay for the extra money he needs to pay for Iraq?

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Alternate Careers

Profgrrrrl pointed to the Career Cruising site and listed a username and password to enter it. Given her rather interesting results, I thought I would give it a try.

The first set of questions did not even put professor in the top 40, but did include quite a few things that I have done in the past (highlighted in bold face or italic depending on how seriously it was done), although not necessarily as an employee with that title. Some were done in the ancient past, when the term had a somewhat different meaning.


1. Multimedia Developer
2. Astronomer
3. Optometrist
4. Website Designer
5. Desktop Publisher
6. Criminologist
7. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
8. Computer Programmer
9. Oceanographer
10. Animator
11. Driving Instructor
12. Video Game Developer
13. Computer Engineer
14. Physicist
15. Meteorologist
16. Mathematician
17. Environmental Engineer
18. Actuary
19. Biomedical Engineer
20. Civil Litigator

Seeing astronomer in there is interesting. I've done some amateur observing and worked with a planetarium, but don't own a telescope. Ditto for meteorology, with an emphasis on storm watching and tracking. But my first degree is in mathematics (which I have also taught) and I could slam code with the best of them back when I felt like doing it.

My second pass, after including education level and answering another set of questions, did not include programming for some reason, but pushed Professor into the top 10. Maybe the program sensed that I no longer like slamming code.

1. Computer Trainer
2. Optometrist
3. Criminologist
4. Business Systems Analyst
5. Multimedia Developer
6. Astronomer
7. Professor
8. Announcer
9. Mathematician
10. Meteorologist
11. Physicist
12. Computer Support Person
13. Historian
14. Computer Engineer
15. Judge
16. Database Developer
17. Artist
18. Anthropologist
19. Writer
20. Environmental Engineer

But Optometrist? Someone seriously missed the boat on that one.

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Rush to Failure

One remarkable statement in the testimony of Gen. Petraeus missed getting media attention even though it would make the perfect title for a book about the entire Iraq policy of President Bush.

He said we should not be "rushing to failure" as we face the "imperative of transitioning responsibilities to Iraqi institutions and Iraqi forces as quickly as possible" (emphasis added).

Although common in news reports, it is pretty hard to find much commentary that even mentions this phrase. Michelle Malkin heard it and blogged the sound bite "rush to failure", but did not analyze it as a warning from the General to the Bush administration to alter its long running, and failed, "surge and run" policy in Iraq. I'm kind of surprised that Democrats did not pick up on the razor's edge between destroying the Army and failing in Iraq that Petraeus clearly was walking down as he reported to Congress.

He also runs the risk of telling participants in the Iraqi Civil War that they only need to lie low between now and next November to achieve their goals. Lighten up a little bit and watch our troops leave, then attack. In particular, I would not be surprised to see a huge rise in violence during the last few months of the Bush administration, after Bush has cut troops along the lines mentioned in this week's testimony. Petraeus told the "enemy" (I put this in quotes because Petraeus made it abundantly clear that he did not view our opponents in Iraq as a threat to the US) it would be all theirs if they play along, just as he told them that we cannot keep this up even if they don't play along.

I have not seen much mention of his seeing a quick drawdown of the surge as an imperative, even though his prepared testimony was quite clear on the point. Indeed, he saw it as a strategic necessity for "long-term US force viability". He clearly knows that the Army is seriously threatened by the policies being followed in Iraq; he has probably been told by the JCS that we cannot sustain a force in excess of 150,000 for more than a year without Bush leaving the Army in a state similar to it was after Nixon was done with it. That may be why he stated that "Force levels will continue beyond the pre-surge levels of brigade combat teams that we will reach by mid-July 2008" (underlining emphasis in the original). It also may be the case that even this will not be enough to prevent long-term damage to the US Army.

Now I just hope that he does not cut and run before the mission is complete. We have not had a General see this war through in the way that Eisenhower did in WW II, or Westmoreland for most of Vietnam. And we certainly have not seen one get called back out of retirement for a second tour of duty in Iraq in a "stop loss" order like the troops have experienced.

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