Serendipita

Optical Illusions

I’ve seen many optical illusions that make lines of the same length look long and short and so on, but I haven’t seen any colour illusions before.Grey and grey can be the same, yet look differently. More illusions here, but the Flash plugin is required for them. These are just amazing!

Links via Eleph.antville. Also seen at MetaFilter.

Around the World

New York Times: 36 hours in Santa Fe (free registration required). Of the mentioned places and sights, André and I visited the Plaza, the Museum of International Folk Art, Harry’s Roadhouse (great food, as Hal can also attest), Canyon Road (briefly), Pasqual’s, and the Bear Wallow/Borrego Trail. But we stayed in Santa Fe for almost a week instead of just a day and a half and of course visited more sights, for example the Georgia O’Keefe Museum. Besides, it’s a good place to get married…

Link via Garret, of course.

Around Europe

Bad Münstereifel, the town where my school is, is twinned with Ashford, Kent in Great Britain, and our school has a partnership with two schools in Ashford. This year’s exchange between the schools will be accompagnied by three English teachers and yours truly. Even though I don’t teach English I have been asked if I wanted to come along, and of course I said yes. We will spend a week in Ashford and are leaving from Bad Münstereifel on the day after tomorrow. I’ll be back home late on Sunday next week.

Our schedule is packed with day trips: We are going to visit Bodiam Castle, Tate Modern Art Gallery, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Science Museum, Dover Castle, the London Eye, the Tower of London, Canterbury Cathedral, and some other places I couldn’t find links for.

After we return from England, there will be one more week of school (which is going to be very busy for me), and then we have two weeks of autumn break.

Physics

New York Times (free registration required): Here They Are, Science’s 10 Most Beautiful Experiments. And on PhysicsWeb: The most beautiful experiment.

Links via MetaFilter.

My favourite experiment would be Newton’s decomposition of sunlight with a prism because I love optics and the beautiful rainbow colours. Foucault’s Pendulum is pretty amazing as well. But the most amazing experiment I did myself was building a laser during a lab course at the university. Of course I didn’t build it from scratch; the ingredients – mirrors, He-Ne-filled tube etc. – were already there, but it’s still amazing that you can get a laser started by adjusting those tiny mirrors micromillimeter by micromillimeter. It takes a lot of patience and you can de-adjust the thing by sneezing, but I was all the more impressed I got it running in the first place.

Speaking of physics… I’ve been teaching physics to 30 sixth-graders for almost a month now, and I had no idea how much fun it would be. During the first six months of my traineeship I taught 8th to 11th graders and found it easiest to understand and help solve the problems of the older students. Sixth grade is the first time students have physics lessons in German schools, so they don’t have any previous knowledge from earlier courses. I thought that it would be difficult to choose topics and experiments that would be interesting for them but not too complex and still easy enough to explain.

However, almost all of the students seem to be very interested in the topic I chose first – light – and eager to learn. They’re curious, open-minded and not afraid of explaining their views and opinions to their classmates even if they are not sure whether they’re right. They also sometimes surprise me by what they already know about phyics. The speed of light, anyone? And the time it takes light to reach the earth from the sun? (Yes, one of the six-graders knew the answers.)

And they ask interesting questions, sometimes even about things I never questioned or even thought about. The other day, we were talking about light that is not visible to the human eye, namely infrared and ultraviolet light. I explained that some animals see differently than we do. Bees can see in the ultraviolet range (but are blind to red), and I said that some flowers that are plain white to us are very colourful to bees. One girl then asked: “And what colour does the flower really have, white or ultraviolet?”

Teaching is fun, and it’s always good if the teacher learns something new as well.

Community

And by the way, Garret posted another gorgeous sunset photo yesterday.

Printer

I’m still looking for suggestions on what printer to buy…

New Printer

I need to buy a color inkjet printer. Since André has a pretty good black-and-white laser printer and I’m not going to need the color printer all that often, I’m looking for one that is cheap but still prints okay. It should be less than US$ 100, if possible. And of course I have to be able to connect it to my Macintosh’s USB port. Any suggestions? (via comments or email)Thanks!

Does anyone happen to know the Canon S 200 or HP Deskjet 3420?

Neuer Drucker

Ich brauche für die Schule einen Farbdrucker. Da André einen recht guten Schwarzweiß-Laserdrucker hat und ich den Drucker nicht so häufig brauchen werde, suche ich nach einem Farbtintenstrahldrucker, der billig ist und trotzdem einigermaßen vernünftig druckt. Wenn möglich, sollte er unter € 100 kosten, und natürlich muß ich ihn via USB an meinen Mac anschließen können. Vorschläge sind herzlich willkommen! (via Kommentar oder Email) Danke!

Kennt jemand zufällig den Canon S 200 oder den HP Deskjet 4320?