Bill's Blog - Comments and Discoveries from the Science Guy
10-18-2009 - Science Guy Becomes an Undertaker for Two Days
Science Guy plays an undertaker in Cemetery Walk – this October was my first attempt at acting, at least as far as I can remember. I played an undertaker, William Fiedler that operated a business that built caskets known as the Winona Casket Company. Memorizing the lines in four paragraphs did not come easy for me; I tried a couple of techniques such as writing out the lines and recording myself with a tape recorder. Then I searched YouTube to see what videos I might find regarding memorizing lines for a monologue.
I found a couple of videos that I thought were good; “Practicing Audition Monologues : Memorizing Monologues” and “How to Memorize Lines”
One of the techniques that I questioned, memorizing before you go to bed, I found at least a couple of people that had tried this and believed it helped.
My two performance days went pretty well but I found myself pretty nervous to start with and it became a little easier as I went through the skit several times each day. Now that I no longer have a need to remember the lines, I find they are still stuck in my mind.
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11-16-2009 - Superconductivity
My friend and relative Wayne Diercks had recently mentioned to me about the application of superconductivity for power transmission and I had pretty much forgotten about researching this further until watching a program on Nat Geo channel last night. In the program that I only saw a small part of, the benefits for space saving of the infrastructure were emphasized compared to conventional power transmission, the picture below shows the first commercial installation:
From the website: http://www.amsc.com/products/htswire/LIPAHTSCableProjectBrief.html you will find this image and complete article:
I found a few videos that I linked to ScienceGuy: http://www.scienceguy.org/Videos/TabId/57/VideoId/399/Superconductive-Distribution-Cables.aspx
This Howstuffworks article explains it fairly simply and I took some excerpts from the article: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question610.htm
“Superconductivity is a phenomenon observed in several metals and ceramic materials. When these materials are cooled to temperatures ranging from near absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Kelvin, -273 degrees Celsius) to liquid nitrogen temperatures (-321 F, 77 K, -196 C), they have no electrical resistance.”
“Because these materials have no electrical resistance, they can carry large amounts of electrical current for long periods of time without losing energy as heat. This property has implications for electrical power transmission, if transmission lines can be made of superconducting ceramics, and for electrical-storage devices. “
There are also possible implications for maglev trains and superconductivity because of a property known as the “Meissner effect”.
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11-18-2009 - Edutopia
I just found a new website dedicated to improving education that has the famous filmmaker George Lucas attached to it. http://www.edutopia.org
There are some really well done videos on the website, blogs, and lots of resources. There is also an Edutopia magazine available. I found a statement that George Lucas had made in an interview particularly interesting:
"finding your passion, what you want to do in your life is the single most difficult thing you can do. If you can find it, and if you find it early, it is a fantastic advantage over everything because no matter what happens you will be happy in your life." George Lucas
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02-17-2010 - Mythbusters
I revisited an article in Popular Mechanics about the popular Discovery Channel show, “Mythbusters”. On occasion I do watch the show and was thinking maybe this show will get people more interested in science. After reading the PM article, it appears that is the case, the show has a huge following with nearly 2 million viewers per episode. The show has been running on cable television for six years but I have only had cable television for a little over a year now, so just started watching this year.
Many people point to the positive aspect that the show gets people, particularly kids interested in science, some people counter and say it is mainly about explosions and over glorifies what scientists really do. The main characters of the show; Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage point out that the show was not created with science education in mind, their background are in special-effects.
Some teachers use video from Mythbusters episodes in their science lessons. When the President was speaking at the recent launch of Educate To Innovate program, Adam and Jamie were invited along with prominent scientists.
A quote I really liked from the PM article was:
“We’ve shown that it’s a lot easier to get hands-on experience than people think,” Jamie says. “You can memorize how to do something, but unless you internalize the information, it’s just a pile of data sitting on a table. Hands-on experience is what allows you to make it part of your brain; it brings that data to life.”
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