Link dump from "Back to Work" podcast (episode 605)

I've listened to the "Back to Work" podcast since it started. If you have never listened to this podcast, it's a bit hard to explain. Initially, it was about productivity at work. Over time it has become less about that and more about all sorts of issues related to existing in the varied environments that we all exist in. The topics cover a wide range: work, home, online, offline, hobbies, Apple, markdown, and productivity.  This particular episode had a great set of shared links that I wanted to remember. My favorites from the episode were:

• List of common misconceptions - Wikipedia — This is quite a long list from many different fields. The whole page is like the top of a thousand rabbit holes into which I could disappear.

• The Cabinet of Wikipedian Curiosities – Sam Enright — Mostly a bunch of really strange bits of history documented on Wikipedia.
• Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow — Really great essay by Cory Doctorow, which explains a lot of how/why online services that start great end up becoming terrible.
• The Thoughts of a Spiderweb | Quanta Magazine — I am saving this article mostly to come back and follow up on the links it contains related to how spiders use/detect vibrations.

Browser clutter - February 2013 edition

This is where I dump some links that I've had in my browser tabs for awhile.  I don't want to forget them, but I don't have a better place to put them.

Music inspired by astronomy - from the Astronomy Education Review.  I wish the pieces in the article had better links.

Inertia games - We have some REALLY OLD computers at school that we keep mostly to do this for algebra based physics courses.  If I could find a port of this to some new platform it might free up some space and time in the labs. (Alternative link)

Love2D - an open framework for making games.  Maybe could write an Inertia Games clone in this.

Over the winter break I was able to go to the national AAPT meeting and give a talk on the history of modal analysis.  I titled the talk something like "From Chladni to the present, a history of modal analysis".  In preparing for the talk, I was surprised to learn about a bunch of pseudoscience that has taken from the work done by legitimate scientists and applied to all sorts of nonsense.  At the risk of increasing traffic to their sites, I will point out some of the more laughable crap that I came across:

Harmonic Resonance Theory - weird.

Cymatics history - history of, uh, cymatics (whatever that is) "research".

"How the leopard gets its spots" - In 1988 Scientific American published this article, which may or may not be good science. All I know is that the inference that the modal analysis of a metal plate cut in the rough shape of a animal skin is related to how the patterns of spots appear in the animal's fur is just bizarre to me.  (Google search)

--END PSEUDOSCIENCE LINKS--

Making cloud chambers - I've tried this a number of times, and they never quite work for me.  :(

More links later!

Acoustics link dump - July 2011 version

My browser tabs are again full of links that I haven't fully digested.  I need a place to file them, so I'm putting them here so I can hope to remember them for future reference.

Equation behind noise canceling headphones - probably over-simplified, but neat to see on Wired nonetheless.

Tibetan singing bowls - this was all over physics/science/tech blogs this week.  It's interesting, but not so much for the acoustics and/or the videos.  The fluid dynamics presented in the paper is the really interesting stuff here.

Earliest known recording discovered - very cool story, more links from the metafilter post on the topic.

Demo of Air Temperature on Wind Instrument Tuning - Here's something you can use in a classroom demo.  Simple and elegant.

Random links

My browser tabs are over-cluttered with stuff I've been thinking about for awhile.  I need to clear them out so I can focus on other ideas.  Here's what I've been meaning to write about, in no particular order:


Back in October (!) I came across this commentary on the documentary "Waiting for Superman". The meat of the article is in this quote:

Where did you think great teachers come from? That they spring fully formed from the head of Zeus? Just about everybody who’s an accomplished teacher used to be an ineffective teacher, and as the maker of a documentary about first year teachers, I’m totally confused that you don’t seem to understand this. If you want to talk about great teachers, but don’t have anything to say about the conditions under which teachers become great, you are at a different stadium than where the game is happening.
(Hint, by the way: in order to become great, teachers need to make and then learn from their mistakes. What kind of environment fosters making and learning from your mistakes? Fear that you will lose your job over your kids’ test scores? Or maybe transparent, non-defensive collegiality? Okay, good job on that one, now the followup: what kind of education policies are going to create the environment that fosters growth?)

I couldn't agree with that more.  Not because I think I'm a great teacher, but because I think I'm still making and learning from my mistakes. He also linked to another criticism of the film where the main complaint was the confusion on what it means to create an environment where learning happens in a classroom.

Here's a snarky comic strip on what to do to encourage students to read their textbooks. I agree with the premise (that reading the textbook is important) but I'm not sure I completely agree with the message.

Are we teaching students to think like scientists? (Preprint)

Bill Nye talks to Popular Mechanics about teaching evolution in schools, but I was struck by this:

So we want to excite a new generation of kids—every generation—about the passion, beauty and joy—the PB&J—of science.

Passion, beauty and joy are often forgotten in teaching science.  I suppose I'm guilty of it many times, too. Plus, cool acronym!

Here's a guide to what seminar speakers are really saying that was recently posted over at Science. I'm really thrilled that the colloquium speakers we get in our department are usually really good and interesting to listen to.

A well-known astronomy textbook author (and his wife? Not sure.) had a jokey letter to the editor published in the New York Times. Thankfully, it was really brief.

There's an article in last month's American Journal of Physics that explores what was discussed in over 300 conversations students had while doing clicker questions in an intro astronomy class.  I haven't (yet) read that article, but Stephanie Chasteen at The Active Class had a great summary of the article.  Makes me think about what I could be doing better with the clickers.

And the last link for today comes from the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics who wrote an article with the provocative title: "Endless Algebra - the Deadly Pathway from High School Mathematics to College Mathematics".

End of term clean-up.

Today I'm in my office to clean up and get ready for the summer term course I'll be teaching in July. I've got a stack of papers to go through, clear off my desk and dump in the shred bin. But, I've also got a collection of science news stories which have been cluttering up my browser. In the spirit of clean-up, here's a small link dump:

• PhD student in Canada is studying the psychology of earworms. (What's an earworm?)
• Another Canadian psychologist has examined how Rembrandt draws viewers into his paintings.
• An engineering student in England has adapted a bike to pump water in Guatemala.
• NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the Phoenix lander and may have imaged the damage to the lander, explaining why it never woke up after the Martian winter. 
• Infrared image of nebula from the WISE telescope looks like a pair of hearts situated next to each other in space.
• Want to go to Neptune and come back in 5 years?  It will only cost you $4 trillion. (More links at bottom of that page.)
• Possibly the most adorably unfortunate misspelling of hadron ever.  Let's hope this kid never loses his interest in science. 
• Something hit Jupiter last year, and amateur astronomers saw it first.
• In May, The Big Picture featured a round-up of really great images of Saturn and its moons.

I think that is all the links I've been saving up. You can always see my shared google reader links, even if you aren't following me.

Back to clearing the desk.

Link dump

I've got a bunch of links that I've been collecting in my browser that have nowhere else to go, so I'm going to plop them here. In no particular order:

• What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting

  This is a brilliant NY Times article that explains very clearly why text messaging in the US is completely overpriced. To me, it is no wonder that cell phone users in this country were/are slow to adopt texting at rates that far exceed any rational pricing structure. (Bonus part of this article was the explanation of control channels.)
  

• Why I drive a 13-year-old car

  Read this article, then read the second comment after the post. The comment explains why although the spirit of the article is great, the math the author uses is slightly off.
  

• The case for Candyland

  
  

• The case against Candyland