Author Archives: Andrea

(News) Flash

You should really keep paying attention to the speed limit while pondering why the heck someone flashes their brights at you even though your headlights can’t possibly be broken because you just had the car checked at the garage the previous day.

It turns out that you remember the other reason why some drivers flash their brights at you in Germany a few seconds later when a blinding red flash indicates that you have just been photographed by the police: The driver was trying to tell you that there’s a speed trap around the corner.

This is what happens if you’re taking the scenic route through the Rhine valley instead of using the autobahn for your way home from work as usual. At least I was only going a little bit over the speed limit; we shall see if I get a ticket or not.

(Related: Why did you flash your brights at me tonight?, Headlight Vocabulary.)

Simulate your own solar system – and more!

Sometimes MetaFilter has links to sites right up my alley: Physics simulators. Lots of physics simulators.

“PhET – Physics Education Technology offers this astoundingly large library of online physics simulations.

Play orbital billiards. Land on a cheesy moon. Experiment with sound. Or try more advanced quantum physics simulators. Still bored? Try the “cutting edge” catagory. Here’s the complete index. (Warnings: Frames, Flash, Javascript, Java applets, graphics, sound, quantum timesuck.)“

I especially like the orbit simulator because I once had to program one in university. During my third semester (I was still aiming for a master in physics back then) I took a course on theoretical mechanics, and we had to write a program that simulated the paths of the moon relative to the earth and the sun. The masses and velocities of the objects were adjustable.

It took me weeks and weeks to finish because I had never programmed anything serious before, but it still didn’t calculate correct paths the day before the deadline, so I had to ask for some more time. Two frustrating afternoons later, I finally found the sign error in one of the formulas… Sigh.

I just realized that this must have been in February of 1996, so more than a decade has passed since then. I guess they do different programming tasks in theoretical mechanics now that you can just download applications like this from the web. Which is a good thing for me because now I can use these spiffy simulations in my lessons instead of my amateurish ones. I’m sure the students are going to appreciate it.

Welche Schule?

Diese Woche gab es in der Zeit gleich eine ganze Reihe von Artikeln zu der Frage Welche Schule für mein Kind?

  • Die neuen Klassenunterschiede. “Das Gefälle zwischen guten und schlechten Grundschulen in Deutschland nimmt zu. Besonders extrem in Berlin. Doch unter schwierigen Bedingungen wird oft hervorragende Arbeit geleistet.” Von Jörg Lau.
  • Abschied vom Sprengel. “Die Wahlfreiheit der Eltern ist je nach Bundesland unterschiedlich groß. Doch der Trend zur freien Schulwahl ist nicht mehr aufzuhalten.” Von Martin Spiewak.
  • Bleiben oder gehen? “Warum sich zwei Elternpaare für beziehungsweise gegen die Schule in ihrem Bezirk entschieden haben.”
  • Plädoyer für Schulrankings. “Fragen an Wilfried Bos, Direktor des Instituts für Schulentwicklungsforschung in Dortmund.”
  • Bringt Puschen mit! “Seit einem halben Jahr geht die Tochter zur Grundschule. Der Vater Henning Sußebach lernt eine alte Institution neu kennen.”
  • Keine Angst vor der Entscheidung. “10 Tipps, wie man die richtige Schule finden kann.” Von Martin Spiewak.

A small step for man…

Washington Post: The Saga Of the Lost Space – Tapes
NASA Is Stumped in Search For Videos of 1969 Moonwalk.

“As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his “one small step” onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander’s door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. […] Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even mesmerized. What they didn’t know was that the Apollo 11 camera had actually sent back video far crisper and more dramatic — spectacular images that, remarkably, only a handful of people have ever seen. […]

The original, high-quality lunar tapes were soon stored and forgotten. Only in recent years was the agency reminded of what it once had — clean and crisp first-man-on-the-moon video images that could be especially valuable now that NASA is planning a return trip. About 36 years after the tapes went into storage, NASA was suddenly eager to have them. There was just one problem: The tapes were nowhere to be found.”

I think it would be really exciting if they manage to find the tapes after all, though the chances seem to be slim. I’d certainly like to watch the footage.

Link via Garret.

A Fan of the Desert

Hal writes that today would have been Edward Abbey‘s 80th birthday.

I discovered the author by accident when I found his book Desert Solitaire among a bunch of 75% off foreign language books at my favourite bookstore in Bonn. It must have been either shortly before or after André’s and my first trip to the USA because Arches National Park rang a bell, so I bought the book and instantly liked his writing style, as well as his descriptions of what Arches was like before it became a National Park.

I’ve since read The Fool’s Progress and The Monkey Wrench Gang, too. I enjoy his books partly because he describes landscapes and areas we visited during our trips to the US and instantly recreates the feeling of being there in my mind. I can almost smell the sagebrush…

Another book by him deserves being mentioned here: The Hidden Canyon with photos by John Blaustein. The text is Abbey’s journal of a boat tour through Grand Canyon.

In Desert Solitaire I first read about the controversy of building Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell, which to me seemed strangely out of place in the middle of the desert when we visited it in 1999. If you want to see Glen Canyon the way it looked before the dam was built, I recommend the book Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World by Tad Nichols, which is another favourite of mine I wrote about before (10 Jan 2001, 3 Nov 2004). You can see some of Blaustein’s photos here and here.