tingilinde

the air force and potato canons

Actually an education project at the Air Force Academy.  I'm guessing most physics majors built something like this as teens:-)   the pdf link

Studying the Internal Ballistics of a Combustion Driven Potato Cannon using High-speed Video

E.D.S. Courtney, M.W. Courtney

(Submitted on 4 May 2013)

A potato cannon was designed to accommodate several different experimental propellants and have a transparent barrel so the movement of the projectile could be recorded on high-speed video (at 2000 frames per second). Both combustion chamber and barrel were made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Five experimental propellants were tested: propane (C3H8), acetylene (C2H2), ethanol (C2H6O), methanol (CH4O), and butane (C4H10). The amount of each experimental propellant was calculated to approximate a stoichometric mixture and considering the Upper Flammability Limit (UFL) and the Lower Flammability Limit (LFL), which in turn were affected by the volume of the combustion chamber. Cylindrical projectiles were cut from raw potatoes so that there was an airtight fit, and each weighed 50 (+/- 0.5) grams. For each trial, position as a function of time was determined via frame by frame analysis. Five trials were taken for each experimental propellant and the results analyzed to compute velocity and acceleration as functions of time. Additional quantities including force on the potato and the pressure applied to the potato were also computed. For each experimental propellant, average velocity vs. barrel position curves were plotted. The most effective experimental propellant was defined as the one which accelerated the potato to the highest muzzle velocity. The experimental propellant acetylene performed the best on average (138.1 m/s), followed by methanol (48.2 m/s), butane (34.6 m/s), ethanol (33.3 m/s), and propane (27.9 m/s), respectively.

 

huge shoes to fill

Eugenie Scott announced she is retiring from her director role at the National Center for Science Education.  It will be difficult to find someone as dedicated and talented.  They've often been about the only firewall between real science and creationism in the schools.  Extremely important work.

Their big focus has traditionallly been evolution, but they've had to expand to climate change.  Creationists are often climate change deniers.  

One of her talks a few years ago..

learn about ants

A new citizen science program on ants - The School of Ants.  One of several citizen science programs to come from North Carolina State Universit, this one has a free handbook for the iPad.  

snip

...

The School of Ants project is a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools. Teachers, students, parents, kids, junior-scientists, senior citizens and enthusiasts of all stripes are involved in collecting ants in schoolyards and backyards using a standardized protocol so that we can make detailed maps of the wildlife that lives just outside our doorsteps. The maps that we create with these data are telling us quite a lot about native and introduced ants in cities, not just here in North Carolina, but across the United States.

 ...

 

Carl Zimmer gave the book a nice review.

anti education efforts in louisiana

It is remarkable Louisana is so backward.  Imagine being a business trying to attact an educated workforce.  Imagine putting your children through that non-education in science.

(hat tip to Jim)

 

 

 

 

 

a student project to see use tomorrow

NASA's Greenland robot project GROVER came out of a series of Summer Engineering boot camps.  The notion is a small robot to roll around Greenlands ice cap with radar that is used to study the ice.  Potentially less expensive and safer than currently used aircraft and snowmobiles.

 

the great storyingtelling and science "debate"

From the Origins conference ...  entertainment mostly, but certainly entertainment

the motive of some education reformers

Education represents a fair amount of change - some reformers aren't entirely alturistic (via Salon)  This is also true in the emerging MOOC space (something I'm between neutral and negaive on).

vets are great...

but it looks like there is a serious oversupply problem in the US.  (via the NY Times)

A tough field to enter these days...

damaging the well and the need for communication

Tom Levenson on the impact of the sequester on science in the Scientific American Blog.

snip

...

In that larger frame, Kastner argues, we are now confronting a problem that’s been mounting for decades.  The meat-axe poised over the biological sciences struck his own field of physics back in the seventies:  “That was when you heard about theoretical physicists driving cabs.”  The response?  “Groups got smaller and post-docs got treated better.” (Sic! Even now, physics post docs at national labs get significantly higher pay than new Ph.D post docs in biology, Kastner says.)  Something similar is likely in prospect now:  “Maybe what we need is simply to have fewer graduate students.” The issue, brought into focus by the battle over the sequester is that for any of the gambles individual centers may have chanced, ultimately the decision about how much science the U.S. chooses to pursue is a civic one. Right now, Kastner says, “we have over-produced scientists given the investment we are willing to make as a society.”

In sum: “the reality is that I think the sequester will have a rolling effect on science research” Kastner says, “but it’s hard to tell as there are no controls.”  Thinking parochially for a moment, MIT and similarly well-off, internationally recognized universities will hold up. Not perfectly, not without pain, but still, they’ll persist. And certainly, science as a human enterprise isn’t going to go away.   But that’s not the same thing as saying that America’s scientific pre-eminence is invulnerable. “There are places around the world which will fill the gap,” Kastner tells me as our conversation winds down. They’re just not necessarily here in the U.S.

...

 Science communication would be useful - the country is largely scientifically illiterate, yet it is a fundamental driver of our long term economy.  Currently communication and education leaves much to be desired.  Scientific illustrator Emily Coren writes in a Nature blog and offers list of some resources.

 

 

 

the calming effect of animals

An NPR piece on a study that looked at using guinea pigs to help autistic children interact in classroom settings.

Animals can be very calming for many people - when I worked at Bell Labs a group of us were working with some people in another part of AT&T along with a german shepherd.  It seems one of the programmers was blind (!) and his guide dog always came to the meetings.  She was extremely well behaved and would visit everyone as the meeting progressed.  One of the best additions to a meeting I've seen.