Britt's Blog

This is one of the most excellent things I have encountered this week. We have been given a boatload of books this week, chock full of physics and the proper teaching thereof. One is Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite by Edward Redish.

The author describes a particularly sadistic word problem given to middle school students:

A shepherd has 125 sheep and 5 dogs. How old is the shepherd?

The correct answer, of course, is that the shepherd’s age cannot be determined from the information given.

However, many students struggle with the problem, and come up with an answer. Can you guess what it is?

They say that the shepherd is 25 years old.

Why? Well, imagine you’re a 6th grader. You do not have that many mathematical tools to bring to bear: you know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide—beyond this, your skills are fuzzy and uncertain. Now, it would not make any sense for the teacher to give you a question that you couldn’t answer with the tools you have learned about, so let’s try each tool:

125+5=130. Obviously wrong. Too old.
125-5=120. Ditto.
125×5=625. ‘Way too old.
125/5=25. Whew! Finally, an answer that makes sense! Obviously, that’s the answer the teacher is looking for.

You might think this is the kind of mistake only a young child would make, but I can give you plenty of examples of college students picking a formula that seems to have the right kind of letters (i.e. variable names) and merrily plugging and chugging away with nary a backwards glance.

In fact, I am actually quite impressed that the young students apply a “sanity check” to the answer to their problem—I wish college students did this more often!

Of course, the savvy physics student would apply another sanity check: dimensional analysis. 125 sheep / 5 dogs = 25 sheep/dogs, not years.

The University of Oregon Department of Physics is extremely primitive in that they don’t have wireless access in all areas of the building, so instead of surfing on my own laptop, as is only right and proper, I have to use one of their stooopid lab machines.

But now I don’t have my RSS feeds or my Stumble button.

And I am at a loss as how I am supposed to surf the ‘net.

I mean, geez, how did I do it before? Type in URLs by hand? Ew.

When creating tables in LaTeX, I will always place the \label{} after the \caption{}.
When creating tables in LaTeX, I will always place the \label{} after the \caption{}.
When creating tables in LaTeX, I will always place the \label{} after the \caption{}.
When creating tables in LaTeX, I will always place the \label{} after the \caption{}.
When creating tables in LaTeX, I will always place the \label{} after the \caption{}.

Stoopid table numbering…

You gotta love seeing celebrity using her brains for a nerdy cause! Danica McKellar, the actress who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years has co-authored an paper (Percolation And Gibbs States Multiplicity For Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models On Z²—Eek! Statistical physics!) on a proof of what is now known as the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem and written a book to encourage girls at the very delicate middle-school age, when many girls decide that they don’t like—or aren’t good at—math.

Awesome.

Danica McKellar Is Counting on Girls to Love Numbers

Jason and I are experimenting this summer with community-supported agriculture. (Let us just say that Jason read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and life in our household hasn’t been quite the same since.)

We got together with one of my colleauges and sharing a subscription to Wright Way Farm, a local organic outfit. Each Saturday we journey down the stairs and around the corner to the Beloit Farmer’s Market to buy some grass-fed beef (see The Omnivore’s Dilemma comma Jason’s reading of) and pick up a bushel basket filled to the brim with organic produce, the majority of which is salad greens.

So we’ve been eating a lot of salads.

A lot of salads.

This has lead me to discovering the joy of making my own salad dressing. I always thought that whisking up some vinaigrette was terribly sophisticated. Shaking it in a bottle is just not the same. (And, in my experience, not nearly as effective.)

I won’t bother giving a recipe, because, firstly, there are a kajillion recipes for vinaigrettes, and secondly, that kind of misses the point. I start with the smallest splurt of Dijon mustard that I can manage, though for some reason the mustard bottle always has a mind of its own and ejects much more than I want. This is whisked together with a health splash of balsamic vinegar and a goodly squirt of honey (because all I have around is cheap, acidic balsamic—though I used some of the last of an expensive bottle in a dressing and it was sublime) plus a pinch of kosher salt and as many twists of finely-ground pepper as I have the patience for. The delicate flavor of an expensive olive oil is overwhelmed by the balsamic vinegar, anyway, so I just use the sautéing-and-baking kind. The magic happens when you briskly whisk in a thin stream of the oil. You must beat vigilantly to create an emulsion, and you will be rewarded when the dressing becomes pale and silky. I find that the more oil I can coax into emulsion, the better. (The mustard helps.) A beautifully balanced dressing clings, spreads and coats each leaf (be it romaine or arrowleaf, or arugula, or mizuna or whatever crazy thing is in the basket this week).

Despite my amazing alchemical accomplishments, Jason refuses to eat vinaigrette every day. He wants his Hidden Valley Ranch. (Jeez.) I whipped up a very satisfactory French dressing in the blender today—though it was based on ketchup, something I have trouble associating with the word “French.” Making dressing is cheaper than getting it in bottles, and probably better for you—fewer additives and what not (ketchup-based blends aside).

Lettuce leads to more adventurous eating and cooking! Hurray!

literature-map
Enter your favorite author and receive a gently wafting cloud of authors who are also enjoyed by people who like the original author. Click on any author to center them and see more related authors, and thus wander literature space.

Personally, my problem isn’t finding new things to read, it’s finding time to chip away at the obscenely long list of things I want to read (not to mention wading through the crap I really ought to read for work.) but this is still an interesting visualization, and it’s kind of fun to play 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon and see if you can get from Arthur C. Clarke to Salman Rushdie.

These two novels demonstrate the classic early 70′s science fiction formula: laughably contrived gimick + naked people => Hugo Best Novel.

In the foreword to The Gods Themselves, Asimov explains how the novel originated in a conversation he had with Robert Silverberg about a mistake the latter made about a basic principle of nuclear physics, to whit, giving the atomic weight of an impossible isotope of Plutonium.

Sounds like a real page-turner already, doesn’t it?

For a book with such a mind-numbingly arcane premise and disproportional nuclear physics content, there’s a heck of a lot of hand-waving about the actual nuts and bolts of the process the plot revolves around. But, long story short, the author writes people acting in an irrational and stupid way, then mocks them and looks down on them for being irrational and stupid.

Then there’s a bit with extraterrestrials, which is actually extremely interesting and made the book less than a complete disaster.

Then we’re on the Moon, with people—indeed, naked people. Except that you’re told that Lunarites don’t wear clothes, and you’re picturing them naked, but then dropped into every scene is some casual reference to somebody’s trousers or shirt collar, and occasional grousing about having to wear clothes because of the “Earthies.” I mean, c’mon, it’s a novel. Just say they’re naked (no need to belabor the point) and let the reader get his/her jollies picturing everyone naked. Whats’ the point of this incessant fig-leafing?

The Moon-dwelling protagonists are mostly unappealing, unsympathetic jerks, and they save the world, and then there is implied sex. The End.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first novel of the Riverworld Saga by Philip Jose Farmer, has many, many more naked people, but lacks anything in the way of interesting ideas. There is much telling and little showing, and if there seems to be an interesting thought coming up, don’t worry, it will probably be derailed in short order by a brawl, or an attack by dudes with spears, or a war-party coming alongside in a canoe flinging incendiary devices. The prose and dialog is workmanlike and uninteresting, a fault made even more egregious by the fact that the main character us supposed to be the poet Richard Francis Burton.

The author and editor kindly warns us at the end of To Your Scattered Bodies Go that the main character of the second Riverworld novel is none other than Mark Twain. No doubt the wit and wisdom of the extraordinary wordwright Samuel Clemens is entirely absent from the volume, and I am grateful for the thoughtful warning which permits the traumatized reader to give wide berth to the inevitable travesty.