Upside Down

We've been studying lenses and talking a bit about the eye in Physics, and I was telling my students the story of George Stratton. He did an experiment where he wore a pair of inversion goggles (they make everything appear upside down) for several days. After a time, his eyes/brain adjusted to the abnormality, and he could function (somewhat) normally. And THEN, when he finally removed the goggles, it took some time for his naked eyes to go back to seeing normally. Here's one of my students wearing the goggles...it's quite an unusual experience. You can make your own with a simple triangular prism...

Making the World Small

This year I finally made it through G.K. Chesterton's "Heretics", which is an amazing book. You can actually read the whole thing free online at pagebypagebooks.com. But one passage in particular struck me, in a chapter entitled "On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small." Here's one of my favorite paragraphs:

It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas.

It's nice to live in Europe, and it's nice to go on side trips now and then (my parents flew me to London to meet them 3 weeks ago...it was great!). There are so many things to discover. But the last few months especially, I've been enjoying feeling really at home in Vienna. There's so much to explore and enjoy right here. Here's to settling down, making friends, and getting to know one place well, and to appreciate it for what it is.

Laziness is the Mother of Invention

The last few weeks, in freshmen science, we've been studying work, power, and the conservation of energy. Instead of a test, they have a project and a paper for this unit. Their goal was to build a Rube Goldberg device (named after a cartoonist famous for creating unnecessarily complicated machines to complete a simple task). Since I've assigned this project for 3 years now, I figured I should build one of my own. I often find myself having to walk ALL the way across the classroom to turn off the front light switch during class...so I came up with a "simpler" way. It might be a little hard to understand what's going on, so first I filmed an explanation of the steps, backwards--and then the machine in action. Also, for a link to one of the best such devices ever made, click here.

Building Bridges

For the last 2 weeks of first semester, my colleagues and I provided a series of brief science electives--students got their choice. The one I taught was on Design and Engineering, and culminated in a bridge-building project. Their goal was to make the most attractive bridge possible that would hold a maximum weight over a 30 cm gap, using as little pasta and glue (their only materials) as possible.

The results: here's the winning student bridge, which held around 12 kg (that's about 24 lb, for those who don't speak metric). I hate to boast, but I will, by pointing out that the bridge I made held 31 kg (62 lb). OK, no fair, I do have an engineering degree. For all the pictures of bridges (and their architects) click here.

The Sound of Music

There's a lot of wonderful music in Vienna...and I got to play in two concerts in December. The first was a community band just outside the city...every year they have a concert on the opening day of the local Christmas market (you can just see me in the back). Then on the 13th, our school jazz band (mostly students with a few teachers) got to play in this beautiful baroque cathedral in downtown Vienna. I think the parish priest was a little nervous when we brought in the drumset. It's not the kind of place you typically hear a lot of jazz music, to say the least.