Rio AP Phyz CTF opportunity announced

AP CTF OPPORTUNITY

TUESDAY, AUGUST 5

Windows of Opportunity
1. 9am-12noon
2. 1pm-4pm
(While chores last*)

Credit Toward Final rate: 12 points per hour (1 point per 5 minutes)

Helpers are needed to help prepare Mr. Baird's room and make the Book of Phyz materials ready for the new year of PhyzAction.

*Opportunities will continue until all chores are completed. First come, first served. Supplies will be limited so come early!

CHECK BACK MONDAY 8/4 FOR ANY LAST-MINUTE CHANGES. I don't anticipate any, but better safe...

Las Vegas after dark

When TAM6 closed on Sunday, June 22, I promptly took a nap.

After that, I joined some JREF friends for dinner at The Peppermill. At midnight, I ventured out for a photoshoot. By then the temperature had dipped below the century mark, though the wind and the dry were in full force.

I loaded up my shooting vest, grabbed my travel tripod, and hit The Strip. I shot until about 3am and hardly made a dent in the huge tracts of land occupied by The Strip. But I caught a few keepers. And now have finally posted them on SmugMug.

Las Vegas Lights

Enjoy!

What every air freshener wishes it could be

The posts regarding my roadtrip to the Edmonton AAPT meeting (via Yellowstone, Glacier, Banff, Jasper, Glacier again, and the Grand Tetons) may appear to come at random. That's only because they are.

First up is the air at Glacier National Park. I drove long ways to get there (on the way up and on the way back down). So I arrived after dark both times. When I pulled into the parking lot at the Rising Sun Motor Inn in a hurry to register, I was stopped in my tracks (both times!) upon the first breath of Glacier air. The fragrance is a powerful blend of natural wildflowers. It grabs you and says, "Do you know where you are, buddy? Slow it down, take a breath, and appreciate."

I gladly obeyed. Since I couldn't take in the scenery at the moment (sun being down and all), Iooked up and enjoyed the stunning night sky: an astronomer's paradise! I then slowly made my way to the registration desk five minutes before they closed.

But yeah, the air at Glacier is what every air freshener wishes it could be. Go to Glacier and smell it for yourself!

And while you're there, don't forget to at least drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road and stop for pics where you can. Turn it up a notch with a hike to Hidden Lake if the trail is passable. It was a bit too snow-covered for my liking when I had a moment to hike it last week. The loaded shooting vest makes snow-field crossings awkward.

Stay longer and hit some of the myriad trails throughout the park. But bring your bear bells. They aren't simply a cute novelty at Glacier. The glaciers may have retreated, but the bears have not.

If you really want to crank up your experience, you can be like my rockstar niece, Zoe, who's spending time this summer at Glacier doing the heavy lifting involved in clearing and maintaining the trails, among other things.

In any case, be sure to take a meal at the Park Cafe in St. Mary.

AAPT Edmonton photo album is up!

I got some photos at the High School Share-a-thon and the Demo Show.

The "Tesla Shocks" and "Balloon Execution by Laser" sequences are particularly nice.

Enjoy!

Roadtripping to Edmonton

The journey to the American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting in Edmonton began today. The meeting doesn't begin until next Saturday, but I decided to make a roadtrip of the journey so as to have stops in some of my favorite spaces on the way out and back.

Day 1 is always the trip from Sacramento to Salt Lake City, so there wasn't much to shoot. I did take a circulation break at the Salt Flats rest stop to walk up and down the ramp to the "lookout."

The Roadtrip Album is beginning here. I'm about 1/5 up to speed on using Aperture, Apple's high-end photo software. So bear with me as I try to keep things updated!

UPDATE 1: Added images from Yellowstone Day 1 (of only 2): Gibbon Falls, Virginia Cascades, Fountain Paint Pots, Clepsydra Geyser, and the Terraces of Great Fountain Geyser. Thrown in for good measure: a log, some lupines, two runoff stream snags.

The Amazing Spoon Bending video is up!

When Richard Wiseman came to TAM6, he brought spoons. A lot of spoons. Here's what he did with all those spoons in a room full of skeptics.



Curious as to what it's all about? Check out
http://spoonscience.com/

TAM: it's good to be back!

The 18-month wait has ended and TAM6 has convened. This year's TAM is at The Flamingo Las Vegas. Registration and reception allowed for reconnecting with "skeptical friends" Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer), Swoopy and Derek (Skepticality), Glenn (Hindmost), Karen Stollznow, Susan, The Petersons (Desktop Icon & Carol), and Angela (Articulett). And to connect with Luciana, Mattus Maximus, Normal Dude, Lee, and a few others whose names I will soon internalize.


With Articulett's help, I got a groupie shot with Neil deGrasse Tyson. And yes, he is that tall. We look up to him in more ways than one.

More pics in "preview" form can be found here.

The leader of band has died

I found out today that my master teacher, Walt Scheider (on right), passed away last month. My thoughts are with his family.

Walt was an inspiration to me at a very formative time--the beginning of my career. He will always be among the brightest stars in the constellation by which I steer my ship of instruction.

It was my favorite teacher in the Michigan Physics Department, Lecturer Jean Krisch, who recommended that I work with Walt for classroom observations and student teaching. Her own daughter had been through his class. But Walt had never had a student teacher before. And when I approached him on the matter, it didn't seem he was terribly keen to take one on. All U of M physics teachers-in-training had always worked with the teacher at Ann Arbor's other public high school. Not with Scheider up at Huron. But I was tenacious and he eventually relented.

I remember being in awe of him most of the time I observed him. I was reading The Feynman Lectures in Physics at the time and thought someone should come out and document The Scheider Lessons in High School Physics for the benefit of teachers who did not share my good fortune of observing the master directly in class.

And I cannot describe how intimidated I felt when it was my turn to teach his students. Walt was very protective of his physics students. There were only so many minutes in the school year and each one of them was important to him. Time lost to a journeyman bumbler like me was to be kept to a minimum.

I felt bad about my performance knowing how much better he was. I was pretty sure his evaluation of me would include phrases like, "Ya know, there are a lot of career options available to people who know as much physics as you do." But instead he was quite generous and felt I held some measure of promise.

We kept in touch after I graduated and moved to California. The photo of Paul Hewitt, me, and Walt Scheider above was the result of a chance reunion in Rochester, New York, at the AAPT Meeting in summer, 2003. By then he was retired from teaching but well into his career as a book author. I recall Hewitt being impressed with Scheider's success in this regard,

I'm grateful for the relationship I had with Walt Scheider and will miss him. I hope that part of him lives on through me.

Here's a remembrance published in The Ann Arbor News.

Cell phone crockery

Did you know you can cook popcorn (and eggs) with you cell phone? No? Oh, that's because you can't.

But the myth is good enough to inspire this badly-acted YouTube virus.



Great fun. But fake. (The orange juice is a nice touch, though. The Japanese version features tea and the French one features beer. Apparently this trick requires imbibing something.)

Snopes.

Wired Underwire. Warning: this link gets all "factual," and leans heavily on "science." Talk about a killjoy!

Brainiacs:


What's especially disheartening is to read the YouTube comments of the apologists for these hoaxes. Sigh.

Do teachers get smarter in the summer?

I ponder because our mostly Rio teacher Sac Brew trivia team, currently named "Wipe the Klingons Off Uranus. Please!", often does better during the summer. And I nailed today's NPR Sunday Puzzle Listener Challenge fairly quickly. I usually don't even try. I enjoy playing along with the on-air puzzle, but the listener challenges go right through me.

I know that when school is on, it consumes my focus to the exclusion of nearly anything else. And if you know me, that explains a lot of things (sadly). So when Alice Cooper's "School's Out" rips through campus on the last day of school, it's as if a burden has been lifted and I can finally slow down my curriculum-development activities to a civilized pace.

Anyway, here's the challenge. Submit your answer via the link above.

A calculator displays a five-digit number. The first four digits are 8735. These digits form a logical sequence. What is the fifth number in the series?

UPDATE: Car Talk's Puzzler for the week of June 9 didn't fare any better against my "First Sunday of Summer" mental agility.

And if you didn't click that Alice Cooper link, you're seriously missing out.