Today I met a bunch of new (to me) students and talked with them for most of an hour about temperature and heat flow and conservation of energy and graphs and equations. Afterwards three of them independently came up to me to tell me that my teaching style is "outstanding." I'd call that a successful first day of class ( Read more... )

This evening I went to the awards ceremony that concludes a summer orientation program that my department offers for incoming first-year students. I was primarily there to give out balsa wood gliders as trophies to the teams that had scored the most points in a Physics of Paper Airplanes workshop a few weeks ago... but after doing so, I realized ( Read more... )

Summer session: ten weeks' worth of physics material packed into only five. Every support workshop is a rush; every day I find that students are studying material about a week ahead of what I would expect. So often in the past few weeks I've been reminded of Feynman's footnote ( Read more... )

(cross-posted from Storytelling PhysicsThis evening I spent nearly 2.5 hours running the final review session for the differential equations students (their final is tomorrow morning). There were 46 students there! They ran out of chairs, so they sat on the floor; they ran out of floor, so they stood in the hallway. I gave them general tips on test ( Read more... )

Santa's not *from* the North Pole, but he does use the North Pole as a starting point for his annual journey. From his secret base in Lapland, he flies to the Pole, where the circuitry in his sled interacts with the unique polar magnetic field to create a quantum multiplicity. Infinitely many virtual Santas then fly south along infinitely many ( Read more... )

"So the plurals would be Centigrades, Celsiides, and Fahrenheiten."

"What's the plural of Rankine? Rankeen?"

"No, Rankine is already plural. The singular is Rancow."

(We've been running the air conditioner upstairs, but not downstairs ( Read more... )

Notes for a reference sheet I'll be making for my physics students later this summer:

-20°C: inside a freezer
0°C: water freezes/ice melts
4°C: inside a refrigerator
10°C: winter in Davis
20°C: comfortable and a bit cool
25°C: comfortable and a bit warm
30°C: time to hit the pool
37°C: inside your mouth
40°C: summer in Davis ( Read more... )

Note to self: get some of this beaded chain from a hardware store.

I got quite a workout this morning helping my brother put a roof on his new yurt. Hoist hula hoop-sized wooden center ring to top of scaffold, lift forty 15-foot long wooden support beams into place between wall and ring, dismantle and remove scaffold, realize that all beams are upside-down, rotate all beams in place, aaaaaand break for lunch. Good ( Read more... )