Energy usage dashboards for teaching physics?

 I just learned about three pretty cool dashboard webpages for showing students energy production / consumption which might be useful for discussing how electrical energy usage is related to climate change. 

The first one covers a large part of the globe: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

The next two are specific to the United Kingdom: https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#5.97/54.23/-3.617 and https://grid.iamkate.com/

I'd love to know about other options and if anything like the last two exist for North America or the U.S. Let me know if you've seen anything like these that I should be aware of!

Really interesting OpenBook titled "Engaging with Everyday Sounds"

I have had a tab open in my browser for several months to a book called Engaging with Everyday Sounds.  I'm sure that I discovered this book through one of the podcasts that I subscribe to related to acoustics, but I have since forgotten which podcast it was. 

This book is interesting not only due to the content but also because it is an OpenBook and therefore free to read online. Perhaps what is most unique about this book is that embedded within are sound recordings related to the chapter material.

This is neat work, and I would like to read it more closely rather than just the light skimming that I do every time I return to the tab.

Social Justice in Acoustics and Soundscape Research

I recently listened to a great episode of one of my favorite podcasts - 99% Invisible - that I just can't get out of my head. The episode was called Home on the Range - if you have yet to hear it, you should go listen to it now.

The episode is a profile of a suburb of Cincinnati, a majority-Black town neighbored by a gun range used by the Cincinnati police department. For a variety of structural and historically racist reasons, the town had to build housing incredibly close to the gun range.  The focus of the episode is mainly on the reasons why that came to be, how the situation has gotten worse over time, and, finally, a possible resolution to the issue. 

What struck me about this was that it seems clear to me that this is a type of social justice issue that the community of people who work in the field of acoustics and especially those in the field of soundscapes should have been aware of years (or decades!) ago.  Some people in the acoustics research community may have heard of this town and the noise situation, but for me, it was a totally new story.

I don't mean to compare this to the story of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK - but I definitely feel echoes of that history in my reaction to the podcast episode.  When I think of soundscapes as related to social justice, I can think of examples of airplane flight paths over low-income neighborhoods and I can think of examples of urban soundscape research with possible links to increased health risks, but I feel that I don't have a handle on the state of soundscape work and where there are opportunities to use acoustics to make people's lives better.

If anyone out there does this sort of work, let me know!

Something I'm reading intersected with stuff I"m listening to

Around the end of the year, I listened to this episode of 99% Invisible which featured a story about how emergency vehicle sirens use higher sound levels than they historically did. The podcast mentioned the story was a part of the book "Golden" about the theme of silence in the world today. That sounded interesting, so I purchased the ebook to read.

I've been reading the book and enjoying it. The book is less about the acoustics of silence and more about the psychological aspects of searching for silence (or peace) in a loud and chaotic world. Still, it has been a worthwhile read so far.

I was a bit surprised to find an episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz also titled "Golden," which was also based on the book.  It, too, was a really great episode - I recommend checking it out.

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.

Why does Rice play Texas?? A podcast episode about Kennedy's moon speech.

This episode of the podcast "It Was Said" has been in my playlist for months now.  I've listened to pretty much the whole episode, and I think it's great. I'm biased, though, as a complete fan of Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech. I just wanted to be sure I could find this episode for sharing with students in physics or astronomy class.

I'll admit up front that I'm over three months past when most people do a year-end review. But it's spring break for me, and I almost feel like I have time to think about things like this for a few seconds. 

I like to read books. I'm certainly not the fastest reader out there, nor do I end up reading a huge amount of books each year, but usually, I'm able to finish at least 25 books a year. Last year, I only read 17 books.

As the end of the year approached, I looked back at the books I had picked and noticed that the lengths of books I was reading were trending upward. In 2020, the books I read had an average length of 314 pages. In 2021 it was 337 pages. Last year it was 342 pages. 

The longest book I read was "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen. Not only was that book long, it was also a slow read for me. I can't exactly explain it - the book never seemed to drag, but yet it was the type of book that took more deliberate reading.

Another long book was "I Alone Can Fix It" by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. This was about the last year of the Trump presidency. I try not to read too many contemporary political books, but in 2021 I had read a book about the first three years of the Trump administration, so I figured the Leonnig and Rucker book would be a good way to finish the story of what happened in the White House.  In retrospect, I'm a bit ambivalent about my decision to read both of those books. I think they were fine choices for what they were, but I'm not sure how much they will stick with me long term.

The last specific example of a long book I read was "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson. Out of the 17 books I finished in 2022, this was the book with the highest average rating on Goodreads. I enjoyed this book, although there were some chapters in the middle which I felt dragged a bit. Wilkerson wrote about an event that happened to her at an unnamed business in Chicago towards the start of the book. I am positive that I had either heard her tell that story on a podcast or in a radio interview well before her book was published, but I couldn't find where I had heard it before. I definitely recommend this book even though it was a bit long and had a few slow parts to it. There is a reason it was so highly rated by many people.

I think another reason I ended up finishing fewer books than I wanted was that I am mostly reading books that I check out from the library as ebooks. Often times, I don't finish a book before it is due and then there is a hold on the book while others read it. I end up with a number of books-in-progress that I'm always planning to come back to after finishing the library books. 

So far this year, I've only finished three books. I'm probably already behind in my goal for finishing 25 books this year. That's okay, though. I still like reading whatever I can.