Sargent Welch: where are you?

UPDATE 5/11/09: See comments for the detailed explanation from Sargent Welch. The short version: Technical difficulties--please stand by. (Whew!)
UPDATE: Lee T sends word that the site is back up. Gave me a palpitation for a moment there.

Can't tell / Don't know if this is a temporary outage or something worse.

But current attempts to connect to the Sargent Welch website are redirecting to a Network Solutions "domain-holder" page. (By the way, are such pages among the most annoying things you see on teh interwebs?)

Anyone know what's up at Sargent Welch?

Caturday gravity

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

AP Physics at Rio... We hardly knew ye

Or perhaps we knew ye all too well. Either way, with a scant 18 sign-ups in AP Physics for the 2009-10 academic year, the school has decided not to run the course. Registered seniors are being encouraged by their counselors to take an equivalent course at American River College, per administrative instructions.

Rio will entertain sign-ups for the 2010-11 school year. If the demand meets the school's student-to-teacher ratio staffing ratio needs, the course will be resurrected. From what I can tell, there would then be no attempt to register students for the 2011-12 academic year; the idea being that we should go with an every other year approach.

UPDATE: It appears Rio's AP Physics has been granted a reprieve. For now. Enrollment is 21-ish by my count.

Physics Bowl 2009 results

I'm a little late on this, but I've been busy! Check the page listed below for the solutions and competition results (as they come in) of

Physics Bowl 2009

If you don't know what Physics Bowl is, click here.

Spot the physics

My buddy and fellow skeptical photographer, Scott Hurst, sent this along.



I see physics. And I see pain. But mostly... WOW! It's 5:38 of your life you can't get back. Trust me; you'll be OK with that by the end of the clip. Don't forget to breathe!

If the video embed above doesn't work for you, click here. I hope to see more from master Danny MacAskill.

UPDATE: No, I couldn't leave "well-enough" alone. You know how I am. Here's a worksheet you can use as a classroom lesson to accompany the video clip. Can you write a better one? Of course! If you teach physics, you'll be keen to generate some estimation-based calculations. So have at it. Think of my lesson as a mere introduction to the video.

See me on The Dark Side of the Moon

Alec Hodgins and I go back to 1988, when he joined the faculty at Rio Americano. I was a 1.5-year veteran at Rio at the time. We've had the good fortune to be able to help each other on various projects and to bend elbows from time to time.

He recently took the initiative to get a mural painted on the large, blank wall outside his classroom. The process was non-trivial, but he navigated the administratium of it. There is a large, blank wall outside my classroom, too. He put only a wee flame to my fanny and I jumped. Right on to his mural-approval bandwagon.

Click the image to see the one-week photo album showing the construction of the mural. On Monday morning, the wall was blank. By Friday afternoon, the image was complete.

Alec is handy with tools and he overflows with drive for projects like this. I contributed a modicum of cleverness in the engineering and willingness to breathe spray-paint vapors. A number of Rio physics and French students provided invaluable assistance, making it possible to complete the project within the school week.

The end result speaks for itself.

Burning gum

My friend and fellow physics teacher, Dan Burns of Los Gatos High School, mentioned using a large Fresnel lens to burn gum off the pavement outside his room.

A few years ago, my school purchased new overhead projectors for the classrooms. I shuddered at the thought of all the old OHPs going to the landfill. I intercepted as many as I could and salvaged the optics from them.

The harvest was bountiful. It included the Fresnel lenses that formed the stages of the OHPs.

Hence the community service project outside my classroom last week.

Two lessons to take away? One: always be on your toes for potential harvests of otherwise unwanted or unused school equipment. (I similarly collected dozens of headphones when the school purchased classroom PCs.) Two: it's nice to have bright folks like Dan Burns to get clever ideas from.

Psychics can squeeze blood from turnips

...or at least from the throngs of bleevers who just fell from the turnip truck. Matt at The Skeptical Teacher shines a withering light on this psychic puff-piece masquerading as a human-interest time filler at CBS "News."



Bottom line: you can make a lot of money making up things to tell people. Check out Matt's note to see how hard it is to become a psychic.

And remember, there are no real psychics. If there were such things, where were they on 9-10?

AP Physics B Redesign, part 1

Trouble looms on the horizon.

I attended a session at the 2008 AAPT Summer Meeting in Edmonton regarding the upcoming redesign of the College Board's AP Physics B program. The proposed changes will make Physics B a two-course program. Too many schools teach the current Physics B as a first-year course, despite the College Board's admonition that Physics B is intended to be a second-year course. For this and other reasons, the plan is to split the course into two courses: AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2.

As someone who moved his school away from AP Physics B as a first-year course, I applaud such an initiative.

The redesign is still in progress, and the College Board has not yet announced the course outlines for AP Physics 1 or AP Physics 2. Implementation of the redesign will not occur before 2013. But one proposal has been unveiled for teacher review and comment.

The proposed AP Physics 1 course would include
Linear motion in 1- and 2-dimensions
Gravitational, electrostatic, and contact forces
Gravitational fields
Newton's laws
Energy conservation
Fluid statics
Mechanical energy
Energy transfers as work and heat
Linear momentum conservation
Charge conservation and simple circuits
Mechanical waves
Thermodynamics

A few topics of interest in the AP Physics 2 course include
Electric and magnetic fields and forces
Electromagnetic induction
Interference and diffraction
Reflection and refraction

As proposed, AP Physics 1 will not be practicable in California. Too many of California's 9-12 Physics content standards are left out. AP Physics 1 is intended as first course. A first course in California physics must include a robust treatment of electricity and magnetism and waves (including wave optics).

I hope changes are made to the course outline before implementation. California's implementation of NCLB has all but banned Physics First from public instruction in California. I hope the College Board's implementation of the AP redesign doesn't likewise banish AP Physics from The Golden State.

Big Bang Theory and The Doppler Effect

I like to include video clips in my lessons where appropriate. They add nicely to a well-balanced (and well-mixed) lesson.

Examples of scientific principles used in popular culture are always nice for critiquing. You show Roadrunner clips so students can reflect on where the physics is good, where it is bad, and "what should have happened?"

At some point, students might get jaded and assume every pop-culture clip you show will contain some misrepresentation of physics.

Then you show them this gem from The Big Bang Theory:

Sheldon's Doppler Effect Halloween Costume (I would have embedded, but embedding was disabled.)

The Big Bang Theory actually vets its scripts with a UC physicist. A physics-content misstep on TBBT is a rare event. And they drop in physics references like most sitcoms drop in toilet-humor references.

While discussing the Doppler Effect in class, I show the clip and ask students if Sheldon gives a correct definition. Some will knee-jerk a swift "no!" Wait time is important here. Others will eventually chime in with a "yes." I repeat the definition portion of the segment a few times without adding prejudice one way or the other. The tide sweeps through the room, and the "yeas" outweigh the "nays" soon enough.

I then assure them that they can watch TBBT with confidence that the physics will be correctly represented. Unfortunately this may simply ensure that TBBT will never be seen by any of my students. Sigh.

UPDATE: Did I mention I have a birthday coming up? I'm partial to 2XL.