Pardon the curse-word, but I just had to share this wonderful little piece from the Onion.

And since I would otherwise get taken to task for “taking myself too seriously” I won’t even make any sort of meta-comments on student motivation or other things that we education-types worry about. What’s the point?  It’s just funny.  Warning — the language in this clip isn’t work-friendly.

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don’t Give A Shit?

Thanks to Don Baird of the Blog of Phyz for this little treasure…

And from the website hosting the picture:

This is a redundant clock. And this is a redundant description.

Hee hee.

“Spook” is another one of science writer Mary Roach’s forays into the science of some weird topic (and not even her most recent, I’m just behind in my reading). Wonderfully researched, and with Ms. Roach’s typical biting humor and marvelous turns of phrase, it’s such a joy to read.  I still liked Stiff better (where she talks about what happens to your physical body after you die, from forensics to crash testing), but Spook was fantastic, giving a detailed look at the attempts to confirm (or deny) such weirdnesses as reincarnation, ectoplasm, infrasound, and ghosts).  Here’s a bit of prose from the very end of the book, where she’s a lot more generous regarding the things that people believe than she is through most of the book:

I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science.  Certainly most things can — including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising — but not all.  I believe in the possibility of something more  — rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums).  It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago.

Myself, I’m probably in Mary’s camp.  Most of the weird things people believe are bunk, and can be explained through psychology or trickery.  But there are some things we haven’t been able to explain yet.  There’s a lot we don’t know.  It’s important to be skeptical, but not completely closed.  On the other hand, as Lawrence Krauss says, “It’s important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”  Too many people fall into that camp.

The Exploratorium museum houses many wonderful science and perception exhibits, one of which is the anti-gravity mirror — a simple perception exhibit consisting of a big mirror with a platform hidden on the back side.  The explainers (the high school kids employed by the Exploratorium to do a lot of the demos and help visitors in the museum) just posted a really great video of a lot of the fun tricks you can do at the anti-gravity mirror.  Very fun!

I blogged a while back about mapping out the hot spots in your microwave with fax paper, or marshmallows or chocolate chips.  (Your food is not heated at the “nodes”, or cool spots, which is why we have those rotating plates).

Here is a decidedly un-yummy (but undeniably creative) take on that activity (as sent to my old teacher mentor):

I had a student read somewhere that you could use a cockroach to map out the hot spots. His home experiment (to my delight and of course horror) was to ink up the feet of several cockroaches and let them run around inside the microwave and produce a graph of x-y foot prints which mapped out the cold regions. It was working quite well he wrote in his experimental report – that was until his mother ascertained what he was doing. Gave him 8/10 for his report BUT took one mark off for not seeking an animal ethics and equipment approval from his mum.

We see the darndest questions on teacher listservs. It seems that, at one school, there was a mystery to be solved. The boys’ urinals were often surrounded by a puddle of “liquid.” Were the urinals weeping water? Or were the boys purposely urinating on the floor (as the janitor believed)? And, most importantly, how can we use our good friend SCIENCE to solve this mystery, the teacher asked?

Is there a powder I can sprinkle on the floor that will turn a particular color?
A UV light to shine on the puddles that will fluoresce?

It turns out that, yes, there is such a device!  Specifically created to detect pet urine stains, the Rug Doctor is here to help (and so are a plethora of other products).  It’s a blacklight, and it turns out that certain molecules in urine (just like in semen and blood) will fluoresce.  They use this at crime scenes too.  “Fluorescent” means that a material absorbs light of one color, and then re-emits it in another color.  Blacklight is ultraviolet, which is highly energetic light that is “too blue” for us to see.  The fluorescent molecules absorb that light, which loses some energy in the process, and re-emit it in as light that’s lower energy (that we can see).

I used to study some fluorescent polymers that fluoresced in room light.  They were beautiful.  The liquid in the little vial seemed to glow (well, it did glow), this kind of chartreuse.  The picture here isn’t from my research, but similar material.

Here are some common materials that glow under blacklight.

Anyway.  Back to the problem at hand.  We weren’t quite sure how these blacklight devices would work for detecting urine in tile grout (which probably holds all kinds of things). And how would one know if you were detecting backsplatter, or intentional misbehavior?

One teacher helpfully added:

A couple solutions I’ve seen to encourage boys to aim properly- in a bathroom at a truck stop in Alaska, there were the normal plastic filter things over the drain, but they had a little propellor thing labeled “Restroom Roulette” If you directed the stream at it, it would spin around until you stopped and point at various things like “You’re a Winner!” or “Sorry, try again” etc.  Most kids would get a kick out of that.  I’ve also seen urinals where the realistic image of a fly or a spider is etched/painted onto the urinal at the “sweet spot” where you get the least splashes.  Males apparently can’t resist trying to nail the bug to try to wash it down the drain.

“Visualized whirled pees?” responded one.

Other suggestions included:

You could change the school water supply to include small amounts of the super absorbent stuff (sodium acrylate?).

The simple remedy is to issue each boy a pair of vice grips set to clamp to a small circumference. This will restrict flow, encourage returning to class and giving new meaning toclamping down on a problem. (Raleigh McLemore)

I had hoped to avoid stepping into this subject out of fear it may be too deep for me.

Some things are too serious to joke about.

One of our more prolific contributors (Al Sefl) shared:

A classic book has been written about the trajectory of droplets caused by a liquid stream impinging on the urinal receptacle surfaces.  I believe The Bathroom by Alexander Kira was the first and most comprehensive study of both male and female urinals with backsplatter patterns.  It pointed out that most of the bathroom appliances were poorly designed and kept that way out of some misdirected sense of traditional design.  …  He came to the conclusion that the clear majority of receptacles were not scientifically designed to minimize splash droplets.  Other conclusions included were that the height of male urinals were often above the stream source so the end of the stream, as it peter’s out so to speak, often drops below the lower edge of the urinal.  The book was a text used in a course for one of my master’s degrees, Industrial Design.  It was very obvious that a complete redesign of the western lavatory in general was needed.

Al Self

Who thinks urinals should have a sign posted over them stating:

MIND THE GAP

In these tough economic times, waste not, want not, right?

So, an enterprising Explainer at the Exploratorium thought well, there must be some good use for all these cow eyes we dissect on the museum floor every day.

So, yup, you guessed it.  Kudos to those crazy kids for the following recipe:

Tacos de Ojo (Eye-ball Tacos)

Makes 1 heaping taco

2 Cow Eyes (muscle and fat trimmed off)

1 tablespoon Olive Oil

2 teaspoon Salt

2 teaspoon Pepper

1 Lime

1 Corn Tortilla

Tapatio Hot Sauce

Read more over  (including the taste test) at the post on their blog.

Though you might not want to do this in your classroom… might get a few parents a tad upset.

Image from London Matt on Flickr.

Gosh, I’m posting a pi day post just FOUR DAYS before pi day.  Heavens.  Well, any teachers reading this aren’t going to be preparing until the night before, right?  Besides, pi day is, sadly, on a Saturday this year, so you can always cheat and do it on Monday if you need to!

So, yes, pi day is 3/14 at 1:59 pm (and I just found out that square root day was 3/3/09 and I missed it!).  This is a wonderful chance for geekery in your classroom.  And it was invented by a fellow Explorite (the Exploratorium’s cheerfully eccentric Larry Shaw).  It also happens to be Einstein’s birthday.

The Exploratorium website has a nice page devoted to Pi Day, lots of history and limericks and some pi poetry (pi-ku).

The Year of Science has a nice resource website with a bunch of activities related to pi day, such as information about Einstein, Pi songs, and trivia.

The Exploratorium will be having a celebration (which I’ll miss, waah) in Second Life.  Visit this SURL to teleport to that location in Second Life.

Here’s a nice little story from the Exploratorium about how Larry started Pi Day:

The original Pi guy is Larry Shaw, a physicist with streaming white hair, a white beard and a transcendent glow. It was 1987, and a cacophony of cultural references and relationships of the time intersected in San Francisco at the Exploratorium, to this day an internationally acclaimed museum of science, art and human perception. Shaw was thinking a lot about the concept of rotation into another dimension — the sorts of things he was actually paid to do. To recapture the time and the place, imagine Shaw mulling over the metaphor of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, specifically the infinite improbability drive of the Heart of Gold Space Ship that is a major factor in the book. Turns out that the concept of rotation into another dimension is exactly what Pi describes. Pi represents the relationship between one dimension to another in the sense of the linear dimension and the plane; or the relation of the linear dimension and the sphere. Pi is key to these relationships. So for Shaw, Pi was in the air and definitely on his mind. He and his colleagues were talking about a Pi Shrine or a Pi Day, something to make the concept of rotation noteworthy. And so it all came together. For the first Pi Day, they installed a Pi Shrine (a small brass plate engraved with pi to a hundred digits) at the exact center of a circular Exploratorium classroom, a spot that also corresponds to the center-line of the museum’s building. And they walked around the shrine because as Shaw notes, “People go around things to show respect to them in many cultures and religions.” And they ate pie.

As usual, Randall Munroe says it all

http://xkcd.com/552/

And while we’re on the subject of causality, a reader just reminded me of this wonderful graph from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster showing how the lack of pirates are responsible for global warming  (If the FSM doesn’t ring a bell, you need to work on your geek merit badge.  Check out the link.  It’s about intelligent design taken to its (il)logical extreme).

vengaza.org

…for anyone who hasn’t seen this one yet…