Check it out:
http://www.marinlibrary.org/using-the-library/museum-passes
As a side note, the library is also great for it's more traditional purpose of picking up free books.
San Marin Science |
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There's a spectacular opportunity available through the Marin County Free Library. You can book tickets to local museums and attractions for absolutely FREE. Cool places that are available include: The California Academy of Sciences, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Lawrence Hall of Science, and the Exploratorium (hopefully coming back this fall). You may think that science museums are just for kids, but it's way more fun to go back when you actually know some science and can appreciate more than just, "the wheel is fun to spin."
Check it out: http://www.marinlibrary.org/using-the-library/museum-passes As a side note, the library is also great for it's more traditional purpose of picking up free books.
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We've been studying astronomy, galaxies, and stars for the past couple of weeks. Conveniently, here are the best astronomy pictures of the year courtesy of WIRED SCIENCE. They're pretty spectacular. Click the link to see all of them Whirlpool galaxy: a classic spiral galaxy which is currently absorbing the yellow galaxy at the top of the picture. Most of the dots in the background are also distant galaxies. Nebula remnants of a supernova: This was a supernova (huge star explosion) 40,000 years ago. It's still expanding, but is currently classified as a nebula (cloud of dust and gas). All of those tiny dots in the background are distant galaxies. The Witch's Broom: This is another part of a nebula from a supernova. Check out all of those galaxies in the background!!!
Lesson: Spa This new discovery at Stanford is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while (pun unintended). It's so simple, and yet so effective and brilliant. I never knew that we lost so much heat from our hands. I always figured it was mostly from the head. It's well worth the read, although the results are so outstanding that it almost feels faked:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html Thank you so much to all of the families who have already donated to the Science Department this year! We really appreciate your support and look forward to doing lots of hands-on science labs using the supplies we'll be able to purchase. If you haven't had a chance to donate yet, or you haven't received the science department donation letter, you can find it here. I also gave every student a hard copy on the first day of school so it's probably somewhere in your backpack.
I love waking up on the first day of school. I feel nervous (in a good way) and excited at the prospect of a fresh start and a new group of students. This year, the first day started with receiving an email from one of my AVID graduates from last year checking in after his first day of college. He's at Dominican University which I think is a great fit and has made the starting 11 for their soccer team. It was nice to start the day with a reminder of the great outcomes you can have at the end of high school, and then see 120 freshmen on their first day of high school. The first week is always hectic and busy and a bit of a shock to the system with schedule changes and getting everyone situated, but I'm really optimistic about the school year. This year, it seems that my optimism hasn't been misplaced. I'm thrilled with my classes this year. I've got four Earth Sciences and my sophomore AVID class and I really like all of my students. I'm excited to be able to really focus on AVID and Earth Science and perfect my lessons in both classes.
After reading a bit about character traits and perseverance/grit, I'm going to be updating my classroom rules for next year and condensing them down to two:
1. Work as hard as you possibly can. 2. Be respectful. I think everything I'm looking for out of my students falls into one of those two categories. If you've been following the news lately, you might have noticed that there's this really exciting new scientific discovery that lots of people are talking about. You also might have noticed that the non-scientist newscasters are having a tough time explaining exactly what was discovered, and the scientists who discovered it are having a tough time explaining what they discovered to people who haven't devoted their adult lives to working on finding sub-atomic particles in a 27 kilometer long tunnel-laboratory 100 meters below the surface of the Earth (that lab is called the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which stands for the European Center for Nuclear Research in French).
Here's my best shot at explaining what they found. First, let's go back to middle school science and remember that everything is made of atoms like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, neon, gold, etc. All of these atoms are made up of particles and the three particles you probably learned about are protons, neutrons, and electrons, of which electrons are the smallest. It turns out that there are even smaller particles (called subatomic particles) in atoms. These subatomic particles make up protons and neutrons and do some other things in the atoms as well. Examples of subatomic particles are quarks, muons, and bosons. The Higgs boson is one of these subatomic particles that was named after the scientist who theorized about it (Peter Higgs). Basically, what Peter Higgs noticed is that light (which comes in units called photons) moves through space really, really, really fast (around 700 million miles per hour) and particles like electrons can also move through space really, really fast, but not quite as fast as photons can. Higgs figured that there must be something slowing down these electrons and other particles that isn't slowing down light. He came up with this idea that space (which we previously thought was empty) is filled with a "field" of these subatomic particles called bosons that create some type of friction-like force that slows down particles that have mass. The greater the mass of the particle is, the more these bosons slow down the particle. That would explain why a photon, which has effectively no mass, can travel so much faster than particles that have mass. He called the field the Higgs field and the particles that create the field Higgs bosons (because scientists love naming stuff after themselves, see: the Hardy-Weinberg principle, the Pythagorean theorem, Halley's comet...although making things even more complex, often things get named after the person who wasn't the first to discover them). So what was actually discovered a few days ago? Well, in the Large Hadron Collider, scientists speed atoms up to a terrific rate and crash them into each other. When they do this, the atoms burst into all of their component pieces of subatomic particles. A few days ago, scientists collided some atoms and recorded evidence of a new type of never-before-seen subatomic particle that they think could be the Higgs boson, which until now was just theoretical. And that's what has everyone so excited. We're still not 100% sure that what was discovered was a Higgs boson, but it was definitely some type of new subatomic particle, and that's pretty exciting. For a visual explanation, this video does a pretty good job. Next year's schedule (for teachers) is out! I'll be teaching 4 Earth Science classes 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 7th periods and one AVID 2 class 5th period. Mrs. Vogl will have two Earth Sciences. Biology will be taught be Mrs. Martini and Mrs. Carlomagno, chemistry by Dr. L-B and Mr. Blok, physics, AP physics, and marine bio by Mrs. Nicolaisen, biotech by Dr. L-B, AP bio by Mrs. Carlomagno, and AP chem by Mrs. Vogl. Should be a great year!
And now a bit of work on the arm shelf... One with Mommy... And if you're going to take after Daddy, you'll have to work on staying much more still for self portraits...
Yesterday, there was a solar eclipse. This was a partial solar eclipse so the moon was partially (~85%) blocking the sun since the Sun, moon, and Earth were all in a straight line in that order. Since the moon orbits the Earth every 28 days, you'd think this happens a lot, but because of the tilted orbit of the moon, it only occurs twice per year as the moon is at the middle point of its orbit. Also, because the Earth is constantly spinning, it's unlikely that the part of the Earth that you're standing on will be facing the sun at the right angle to see the eclipse so the next solar eclipse in the Bay Area is in 2017. Anyway, I was thinking that I could walk outside, stare at the sun, and see the cool "ring of fire" that was supposed to be visible. I'd read the warnings about staring directly at the sun, but I figured that those warnings applied to people who aren't me because I have unreasonable confidence in myself. As it turns out, the sun is really bright and staring at it just looks like a really bright blob. Fortunately, the light was filtering through a tree onto my neighbor's house so I got to see some cool effects from that as well as the peculiar dusky light from the 85% less bright sun. Here's what the light filtering through the tree normally looks like at 6:30pm: And here's what the filtered light looked like yesterday during the eclipse: Check out those super-cool crescent shapes in the shadows!
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AuthorThese blog postings may or may not be related to science and/or education. Most of them will not be. Very little of it will relate to what we talk about in class. Archives
August 2013
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