Comments on: Electronics, Teaching, and a Quiz

By: Taipei 101 | Cosmic Variance

Taipei 101 | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 22:01:34 +0000

[...] On Tuesday, in my Physics 151 class, I got to the point where I talk about falling objects, and also about terminal speed/velocity. There’s an example in the textbook and in my notes where (in order to understand drag) there is a discussion of shooting a styrofoam ball straight down off the Empire State building, and then studying the resulting settling down to the terminal speed due to drag balancing the weight, etc, etc…. [...]

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:39:11 +0000

Perhaps physics should be taught this way in highschool.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:14:00 +0000

Actually, when they don’t understand and you get answers all over the place, that can be fun too! Because then you get them (following Mazur’s “Peer Instruction” stuff) to try to convince their neighbour with a reasoned argument. Then they click again…… it almost always clears things up… or at least narrows things down to help you sort out what the conceptual logjam was….

-cvj

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:10:24 +0000

Yeah, good luck with that part where everybody clicks if they don’t understand….

By: indrax

indrax — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 01:24:43 +0000

Note all figures are from my head, these are just my estimates, and could be wildly wrong.

1. I am not a morning person
2. ok Human DNA is 8 feet long, and has around 600 MB of information, which would be 300 million base pairs. A base pair is what? 4 or 5 atoms ‘tall’, tops. I’ll say 1.2 billion atoms in 8 feet. 150 million per foot. 5 million per cm. 500 million per meter, so.. 2 nanometers?

3. 8 car hours.

4. 8 light minutes, or 93 million miles. (I could tell you that asleep)
light goes 11.8 inches per nanosecond, so that would be about 48 billion feet.

or to alpha centauri: 4 light years, which is about a parsec (right?)

5. Ok, light can go around the earth 7 times in a second, and there are 24 main time zones. so that’s 148 time zones per second. The US covers 4 time zones, so that’s 1/37th of a light second so .027 light seconds
Assume 5 feet per person, that’s 5 light nanoseconds. We need to cover 27,000,000. 200K people would cover 1 mill. so.. 5.4 million people.

I suggest offering pizza and free music downloads.

By: Plato

Plato — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 22:05:37 +0000

Of course I would like such expansion on the digital world walkabouts too, and how, such applications become "instrumental" in our assessments.

By: Chris W.

Chris W. — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 17:38:24 +0000

Mostly off-topic, but maybe these could be addressed in a future CV post: Digital Universe -- an interview with Wikipedia's co-founder Larry Sanger on his new project, plus a new article on Wikipedia's prospects and recent travails, Can Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?.

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 07:03:21 +0000

I once had a student calculate on an exam that the radius of the earth was 29 meters. I later quizzed the student if that made sense to them, and he/she had never thought of looking over their answers and ensuring they made sense!

By: Mike Molloy

Mike Molloy — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 05:38:25 +0000

Good joke, spyder, but everyone knows that God’s first name is Harold. (”Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.”)

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 01:24:02 +0000

“About the size of a ping-pong ball in comparison to a football field.”

… Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!

(Why, yes… I am a product of American public television! ^_^)

p.s. I could only answer the second one, but I think I did pretty well: ~6 hours * ~50 mph = ~300 miles. The actual distance from Detroit to New York is 650 miles — Âclose enough for astrophysics!