omenti

how electrical energy moves..

a quick minipost

Most people don't understand how electric energy flows until they take and Electricity and Magnetism class in college. I've found teaching it without math to be challenging unless your good at drawing or some other type of visualization..    Derek Muller does an excellent job without having to resort to the math! 

 

Maxwell's equations are often the first place a physics student has the wind knocked out of them by sheer beauty. 

getting to clean enough

It's becoming clear that the SARS-CoV-2 virus will be around for a long time.  We're probably much closer to the beginning than the end.   Hotspots will shift and new variants arise so it makes sense to be ready to mitigate risks as much as possible.  Vaccinating the world should be a high priority along with next generation vaccines, better treatments, testing, high quality masks when the risk is high, etc. etc.  

 

Improving local air quality is low hanging fruit.  To first order that means high quality masks in hotspots along with fresh air.   Room air filtration and circulation can be a powerful tool.  As living animals we exhale carbon dioxide.  In pristine location, say a mountain top in Hawaii, you can measure the baseline concentration. Air is about 420 ppm (parts per million) carbon dioxide - a bit over 0.04%.  Enclosed spaces with people have higher concentrations.  You're breathing some of the air from other people.  If people are the only source, you can calculate the percent of the total air in the room that's exhaled:

        CO₂ concentration (ppm)        % of total air that is exhaled 

                    420                                                  0%

                    600                                                0.5%  

                    800                                                1.0%

                    1000                                              1.5%

                    2400                                               5.0%

 

With these numbers it was believed the risk is low for up to an hour if everyone was wearing a simple cloth mask and one person was infected with the alpha variant with carbon dioxide concentrations as high as 800 ppm.  The delta variant changes the threshold.   Now the one hour number is about 600 ppm with everyone wearing a surgical mask.¹  Of course the probability of an infected person being in the room is low if you're in an area where the infection rate is low.  

 

It would be good to know the concentrations where ever you go:   offices, classrooms, stores, theaters, taxis, airplanes etc.²  Consumer grade carbon dioxide meters can be purchased for $100 to $300.  If you're really interested I can make a recommendation, but I've only used a few.  We'll probably see a rapid improvement as these are going to be essential tools.  Japan is requiring them in many public places and school rooms.³  It's important to have an NDIR sensor (basically it's doing spectroscopy with an infrared laser to measure concentration  - there are many other techniques, but this is the cheapest with enough accuracy and repeatability).  These are accurate to about 50 ppm, so ignore the more exact looking reading and just round up to the next multiple of 50  - if it reads 537 just call it 550.    It takes about two minutes to get a stable reading and you'll want one that stores measurements.  The model I like talks to an iPhone app which gives you a nice chart of the day.   For businesses and schools it's a good way to check if the rooms are getting good airflow.   I saw one schoolroom that exceeded 3000 ppm when students were present. It turned out an air return duct was blocked - a thirty minute fix gave the students clean air again.

 

High carbon dioxide concentrations make people drowsy and sap cognitive abilities.  It hasn't been carefully studied, but readings over 1000 ppm can make you drowsy and perhaps a bit feeble minded.  One Army study suggests 800 ppm should be a warning level.  Half-jokingly I told a superintendent that he could justify the cost of measurement though improved test scores.  It turned out that's what sold him.  Maybe it's a way to upgrade the collective intellectual capacity of an office.  Another benefit is a possible reduction in airborne diseases like the flu.  

 

You can't always open windows and doors to get a solid draft, but HVAC systems can often have their fan settings increased and room vents adjusted. High quality filters can capture viruses along with other particulate like some from a fire.  MERV-13 is a sweet spot for price,  the ability to snare virus sized particles and not requiring more powerful fans.  And you can buy or build portable air cleaners.

 

The hot ticket for rolling your own is a very simple design known as the Corsi-Rosenthal cube.  Here's the public domain diagram we used to build 84 of them for about $5,000  (the cost shown in the drawing doesn't involve much shopping around).  We used the cardboard from the shipping boxes the fans came in.  The shroud is very important.  Square corners disturb the airflow and can drop the unit's efficiency by about a third. A normal sized classroom for 30 to 40 students probably needs two units.  Keep them away from walls, doors,  and openable windows.  The filters will probably last the school year if you turn them off when people aren't in the room.  Most of the classrooms are showing readings under 600 ppm with these and the school's HVAC system fans all on high.  The boxes make a big difference.  Commercial air cleaners with good filters probably make more sense in offices and schools if they want to go long term, but 600 cfpm MERV-13 filters are about $500 and in short supply these days.   Like carbon dioxide meters I suspect we'll see some movement on air filter and fan design. 

 

Some learnings:

Duct tape is frustrating!

Schools have mountains of duct tape.

Eighth graders are the perfect people to enlist if you want to build a lot of them.  Eighth grade girls if you want them to be semi-presentable.

_________

¹ These are rule of thumb numbers based on empirical evidence.  But it's complex with many confounding factors. 

² A closed car can be spectacularly high. I sat in my car for fifteen minutes with one other person and recorded 3800 ppm!  You can drop this by opening the windows.  Opening them diagonally makes a lot of sense for creating airflow.  Airliners have good general circulation, but a given row can be bad.  A flight is probably much safer than a half hour Uber ride if the driver has the windows up.

³ People are already taking measurements in gyms, restaurants, etc and putting them online with locations and business names. It's ad hoc and not very standardized, but there are over 100 locations in NYC the last time I checked.  It makes much more sense for a business to do their air handling homework and post numbers in their establishment as well as their website.  Hopefully at some point a respectable aggregator will step in.

 

                                      

breadth and depth

His parents were Danish, hers Swedish.  By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities.  Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year.   He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week.  He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it.      We'd sit in his yard and listen.   Some were short, some took a half hour.  They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places.  They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections.  Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.

 

My sister is a visual storyteller.  It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder.  She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize.  I suspect my Dad was a big influence.  He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions.  He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple.  Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad. 

 

A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range).  He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:

Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:

“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”

Raducanu added this:

“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”

 

Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing.   Epstein goes into depth in both of his books.  Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs.  These people have built the tools they need to think creatively.  They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.

 

 I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again.  I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12.  I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life.  Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices.  The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular).   One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.

 

I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects.  Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work.   They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth.   There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia.  Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.

 

Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects.  Many of you have your own diverse lists.  My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports.  Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you!   It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later.  You find yourself becoming more creative with age.  Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres.  Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or...  the list goes on and on...   

 

Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.

 

 

low distortion rearview mirrors

 

History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

      -  Mark Twain

Except it wasn't him.  

His clever and prolific writing made people assume he said it even though he never did.  It turns out it first appears around 1970 in a poem by a Canadian artist named Robert Colombo.  When asked if he knew where it was from Colombo couldn't recall other than he might have seen it in a literary section of the New York Times a few years earlier.  In fact it appears with and without attribution several times around the time of Colombo's poem in the early 70s.   That said, a hundred years from now people will still think Twain said it.

 

The process of science is much messier than the simple order kids learn in school.   There are too many dependancies to list.  A few philosophers of science  - notably Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - have tried to describe how scientific revolutions and change happens.  The how, where and why of scientific change.  Kuhn and Popper are somewhat at odds.  Kuhn's ideas were popularized and are still taught as how scientific revolutions happen.  It turns out that both of the frameworks are deeply flawed and have fallen from favor with serious students of the history and philosophy of science.  I came to it late, but I'm more a fan of an earlier step - trying to understand some of the history of science. 

 

Unfortunately the history of science is often neglected in scientific training.  Students are told a few selective stories from the great revolutionaries without much context.  Experiments, theories and techniques are described with little background.  The struggle and small steps forward and backward are  missing.  The world seems much too messy when you start doing real science on your own.  (this is probably true in many fields!)

 

One gets bits and pieces of local history from the last generation or two in their subfield.  This can be very powerful. I learned a lot about the development of the atomic bomb as some of the people I studied with were parts of the Manhattan Project.  You need to learn the importance of failure as well as hunches and the need to distrust your own work.  

 

The history of science, like the history of art or music,  is a story of the development of ideas that can be appreciated by non-specialists.   There are some wonderful books out there.  The trigger for this post was one of them:  Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen.  I know the technical area well, but have big holes in my understanding of how all of this came about.  If you can follow articles in the New York Times science section, you'll learn a lot of what the physics is saying without the math and how it changed the world.  He gives a very simple, but accurate, description of entropy and has the best description of photosynthesis I've seen that doesn't get into biochemistry.  The historical motivations make it come alive.  I'm stealing some of his clear descriptions.

 

Most of this is probably true in many other fields.  About twenty years ago a friend invited me to dinner with Maurice Wilkes - his grand advisor.  Even though Maurice was in his late eighties the discussion went on late into the night and continued on two more occasions. I'm not a computer scientist or engineer, but Maurice is a physicist who happened to invent a good deal of the fundamentals of computing that's still in use.  Hearing him talk about the early history and the connections to our shared background made it all come alive.  The problems computers had to solve as well as the nuts and bolts of designing one - provided a wonderfully rich learning experience.  There was this hint of how the great mind of this humble person worked. A good history book can provide that kind of experience.

 

 

mother's day

She enjoyed having to wait.  People around her would become characters in stories she'd make up.  Story making was a hobby of hers.  Often she'd invite you to join in.  As you gained experience, she'd take greater leaps.  Simple things on the street would develop complex plot twists and even find themselves in other eras or places.  

 

She was a bit on the quirky creative side and some of that may have rubbed off on me and my sister.  Here are a few lessons I learned:

° It's good to have some boredom in your life. It encourages you to try something new.

° It's fine to not be great at something if you enjoy it.

° You need several very different interests because they'll have conversations with each other if you just listen.

° Don't worry about names and dates in school. "How" and "why" are better.

° chocolate is good, pie is good, ice cream is good.

° Your friends may turn out to be at least as important as your family.  Find the good ones.

 

We were never pushed to do homework school. My parents were busy enough that our upbringing was more semi-supervised free range.  There were a lot of books and trips to the library.  The reward for a good report card we'd get an ice cream cone from Dairy Queen.  Perfect marks scored a banana split or a milk shake.  And even if she didn't understand our interests, Mom would support us how best she could. 

 

When I was about fifteen I read Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland - probably the book that had the biggest impact on me until I went to college.  As I  described the world Abbott created, Mom ran with it and developed a richer story and asked some "how" questions.  Those questions started me down a path  that taught me a little engineering - subjects she was unfamiliar with.  I began to see the value of story telling - particularly those visual stories.

 

Besides stories she enjoyed drawing and painting.  She wasn't very artistic, but spent a lot of her free time at it.  I wondered why as my sister's art was much better.   Then I went off to collage and found myself drawn to sketching.  I'm terrible, but it's a form of play that can take me to a state of flow.  I realized she was probably doing the same thing.  My sister became an accomplished artist - some her pieces have been described as snapshots of quirky short stories.   She obviously picked up a lot from Mom too.

 

We celebrate those important ones through memories and  recognition of how they helped create who we are.  Even now I find myself watching people and imaging stories when I'm waiting.  She would have laughed at how unimaginative smartphones are.

 

Happy Mother's Day Mom.

 

the power of the liberal arts

a minipost

Tomer Hanuka of the School of Visual Arts in New York asked his third year illustration students to create a post-pandemic New Yorker cover.   Some of the pieces were so moving that he posted them on Twitter where they quickly went viral.   So viral that an article appeared in The Washington Post.

 

The power of art never ceases to amaze me.  I'm clearly not an artist, but think visually.  The few beginner art classes I had in school as a teenage played a big role in how I think abstractly.   I don't understand why art, and for that matter liberal arts in general, are on the cutting block these days.  Somehow they're not seen as relevant for the job market.  I think they're necessary if the student is preparing for life long learning.  Of course I'm biased as I was a liberal arts major (physics and math are liberal arts).

 

I've spent some time trying to link art and physical science programs in a couple of colleges. No details as it's been political and was interrupted by the pandemic, but I'm still enthusiastic.  The fact that one of the physics professors is in a rock band helps..

 

the education question

Last week I sent a note to regular readers:

 

Perhaps it’s a sense that things are possible post-pandemic, but I’ve been asked for comments on the future of education three times since the beginning of the year. While I have some unscientific and undoubtedly biased thoughts I’m happy to share it occurs to me this group is exceptionally diverse.

So the request: Could you write a bit about what you’d like to see in education going forward? The subject is huge and readers represent at least seven countries so just pick a few and stay away from clear needs in some countries - like affordable and equitable education. Those are incredibly important, but perhaps some thoughts on curriculum, teaching, etc.. I’ll collect and post them with my comments in a week - say a cutoff on the 24^th of April. Let me know if you want your name attached or not. And don’t worry about it if you don’t have time.

 

Here are the responses in order of arrival:

 

I could write too much on this but one thing I think should be focused on is an increase and improvement of vocational education including changing the name and giving it an equal or near equal standing with so called academic education. With the rapid changes in technology there are numerous supporting jobs required and they must be trained for. I would also like to change the word Engineering to Applied science and technology which might attract more women and others who have a fear or not so great feeling about "Engineering" .......................you asked for it there are many other things like required mentoring in High school, more use of the case method in all education fields...... good question

Ed Hajim

__________

Thanks for the request, Steve!

I think fixing the existing bureaucracy of schooling is a fool's errand, so I'm more interested in creating a scaffolding that helps anyone learn, at any time, with others not gated by their common age, etc. We've created many kinds of artificial scarcity where abundance exists.

With that in mind, if you have the time, I'd route you to my TEDx talk, then the Vegas talk I did right after, which dovetails into the first one, then my Brain on the Hidden Curriculum of Schooling and Great Design Questions Unschooling Raises.

Happy to talk about any of the above at any moment :)

Jerry Michalski

_________

 

As a grandparent who has primary care of two elementary school aged children, I have observed, obsessed and have a lot to comment on public education in my city, Seattle.

Our system is at once both profoundly broken and resilient.

Broken? A system that refused to use a complexity lens to plan and be able to respond to changing contexts. (And appears to have NOT been planning all along, but I don't know if that is true. They appear to operate with a fixed mindset. A mechanical mindset.When the governor set a deadline to return to school, the resulting design reflected a reaction versus a design ready for complex contexts. (The lowest common denominator?)

Resilient? The teachers and learning specialists who spend every ounce of their beings supporting their students (this is not ALL teachers, but we have been blessed with ones who have been AMAZING and have saved our collective sanity. Thank you Nadia, Michelle, Kendra, Stephanie, and many more...)

Broken is a system where children of color don't want to come back into the classroom for all the racism they endured before and during the pandemic. How is it we are shocked to hear this?

Resilient? The advocates for children with special needs, for communities of color, LBGTQ, and for families sapped by Covid-related financial and emotional losses. The people who have wrapped families as best they could with food, services, support and compassion.

The resilient people are resilient. Well supported families adapted in the pandemic with home based learning, bought the additional services their children needed/wanted, and when and where they had to, made sacrifices around their own work and parenting roles. Barely skipping a beat they continued their quest to get their kids "into a good college." Yup, the system they want is one that provides the path to a good college. They make the system work for their families or they go to private school. It is a sort of bootstrap mindset for white upper-middle and upper class families. "You can make it work if you do the work!" And they donate to the PTA so they are also addressing all the ills of the system. Yeah, right. But have we leveraged white privilege to redeem the school district? I don't think so. And lump me in there as often I crumble at the depth of need and the brokenness of the system.

Broken is a system so weirdly funded that when pressed to bring back students into the classroom, the caveat is "and sorry, transportation only for those federally mandated." (Note: this example is one of cascading impact. Bus drivers laid off, weird funding approaches and what might be perceived different motivations to remove choice options from the system by denying transportation.) A system that responds to loud, privileged parents who want their kids out of the house now. How is that an option for working families and single parents, particularly those with children in multiple schools? (Broken, in that the district has poor understanding and management of their own budget and yet resist audits and insights, preferring to spend money on PR to make things look good.)

Resilient? Parents who try and set up, moderate and endure Facebook support groups (that are often hijacked) that try and serve as a critical connection points (neighborhood car pools, walking busses?) even if the data shared is often wrong. (What happened to data???)

Broken is a state leadership that says schools MUST OPEN for the mental health of students, and yet the state nor the district provides funding for additional physical or mental health services (or has to cut them due to budget shortfalls), offers no support to families struggling with the mental health needs of their children beyond a link to a help line (not the school district's), and diminishes students who must stay or choose to stay remote by hyping those who are returning to the classrooms.

Our systems are designed based on outdated, broken financing models, labor/management relationships that have deteriorated over time into spaces of zero trust and constant battles, and the instantiation of our profound, national racism.

There is no better time to reinvent, not just tinker. To do that, however, we have to re-prioritize socially and financially the role of public education for all. We can't have schools funded on real-estate taxes which continue to thread red lines through our communities. And those of us with means CANNOT WALK AWAY.

Nancy White

__________

 

I think the focus on making students a product for companies is wrong.  The skills someone might need in 10 or 15 years may be very different.  I'd like to see school focus learning how to learn rather than memorizing facts that may not be facts.  At least some of it needs to be fun and play is overlooked.  Play's where you find your passion.  For people not going to college I like apprentice systems like the German and Danish systems.   

In Alberta we had streaming. Kids were assigned to groups by what they thought was ability.    They must have thought it would be easier to put me in the slowest group because I'm deaf.   We were the kids who were constantly reminded we'd never amount to anything.   On top of that  kids and even some of the staff bullied me because I look unusual.  My parents didn't know enough to advocate for me.  Some children fall through the floor.  I'd like to see that fixed.  

Oh - I want people like Steve to teach math and science:-)

Jheri

 

__________

 

I've written quite a bit on what I think is important assuming the issues Nancy points out can be addressed, so I'll spare you.  Get in touch if you'd ever like to talk about it. But one thing..

 

The first time I was in my grad school mentor's office I noticed something on the top left of his blackboard

Knowledge is acquired and never bestowed

It was always there. 

 

questions inadequately probed

Kip sent this lovely piece 

 

 

It's pretty funny, but then you remember some misconceptions you had became you didn't ask the right questions.   When I was a kid we had to sing the Christmas carol Angels We Have heard on High.   Apart from the line  Gloria in excelsis Deo,  it made sense.  Our teacher didn't explain it was Latin, so my mind patched together a meaningless phrase that I could sing out out - something like in eggshells sustain -e-oh.   A few years later we had to sing it in a choir -  this time with a score.  I didn't know Latin, but at least there was enough information to track it down. 

 

Keeping with the family tradition one of my nieces proudly sang the line:  The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind. The ants they’re a blowing in the wind.  (I wish I could remember her full take on the song - she was about four)

 

The mind is awfully good at coming up with an explanation when you don't have enough information, I've had several other dramatic misunderstandings - often much more serious than the lyrics in a song.  Over the years you learn you need to ask questions when there's cognitive dissonance.  Not that this works for all misinterpretations and misinformation, but it helps for some.  

 

Feel free to add some of yours in the comments.

 

 

chindōgu

a minipost

Several people have written asking for educational projects to occupy their kids during the pandemic.  I've answered with a number of ideas, but it hit me chindōgu could be the perfect ticket for many.  It's the absurd Japanese art of useless inventions aimed at solving everyday problems with roots in Rube Goldberg machines and the art of the kludge - a clever but inelegant solution to a problem.   A number of good examples are shown here.  I've recommended this approach to a number of middle and high school teachers.  At least one has had a lot of fun with it making a "how to program things" module more fun.  It's also become a recreational art form at an animation studio you've heard about.

 

Thinking that way can be unexpected powerful.  It cuts through barriers combining critical thinking and play with the goal of humor.  Failure is fine and can be a powerful learning experience. Simone Giertz has been credited with getting more teenage girls interested in engineering than other person or program.  She's famous for useless robots - "shitty robots" as she calls them.   Here's her TED talk (one of the few useful TED talks I've seen).  

 Here's her YouTube channel.  Earlier pieces may be more accessible to beginners as she's become more sophisticated in her craziness.  And she has done much of this with brain cancer.  A remarkable inspiration. 

 

So start off small with supplies around the house and just have fun.  There aren't any downsides and you can spend as much or as little as you want.  You're only limited by your imagination and sense of humor.  And if you are building them, you can draw or write about them.   

 

 

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile.