April was two months ago

Waaay back in April, I attended a local physics teachers’ meeting that I helped organize.  It was definitely one of the best such meetings we’ve had in years, though I must say we do a good job on meetings.  I don’t recall a bad speaker that we’ve had or bad food.

Our Friday evening we hosted a local top physics student and his physics teacher, part of our new outreach initiative.  We enjoyed a catered meal with adorable tiny and multitudinous desserts…oof.  Thank goodness for the exercise class I started taking at school!  Then we walked to the building next door and listened to University of Pennsylvania professor Ken Lande, who amazed us and grabbed us with his energy talk.  He’s nearly as good as Al Bartlett – certainly he is as alarming.  I started thinking about what I can do to help save the world.  (Follow the Al Bartlett link and watch his talk – I highly recommend it)

Saturday we had a talk by my NCSU professor, Bruce Sherwood.  He’s the one who taught me to use vpython and completely changed my view of introductory physics.  I’ve been promoting vpython with the local physics teachers and Bruce’s talk was very well received.

There were some short talks by members of the group and a business meeting at which I was elected “Corresponding Secretery” which means I took over the mailing responsibilities and I now write a bi-weekly newsletter.  But after lunch, we had an awesome experience:

Ollie brought members of the Eastern Electric Vehicle Club (EEVC) and their cars to explain electric cars, answer our questions, and show off their work!  I was impressed by the plug-in vehicles made by modding existing vehicles.  There was a guy with a  Ford 150 pickup truck that he converted to a plug-in gas-electric hybrid, a woman with a student-modified van, a guy with a Geo Metro convertible (link gives specs) turned into a purely-plug-in electric vehicle, and more!  Here’s the workings of the Metro:

under the hood

in the trunk

The acceleration on these electric cars is very exciting – lots of delta v in a short delta t!  It comes from having a powerful electric motor and a low mass that needs to get moved.  The Metro got towed to the meeting behind a sexy sportscar, that’s how light it is.

Here is Ollie in a car converted to electric by high school students:

Ollie let us drive this car around the parking lot, and that was pretty cool too!  Those extra guages on the dashboard show the voltage across the batteries and the current drawn by the engine.  Multiply the two values together, and you will get the power in watts.  746 watts is 1 horsepower.  Mostly, you wouldn’t multiply while driving though…but you have to keep track of the voltage or you could find yourself stranded without enough “juice.”

I had a great time!  I am itching to find some crappy used car in decent shape, rip out the insides, and make an electric car for runs to the grocery store or whatever.  Yet another thing to put in the “future projects” file…

Population growth

Thanks to a great birdfeeder my parents gave us and my father in law helped us put up, we’ve been feeding the birds in our neighborhood for nearly five years.  When we first started feeding the birds,  I can’t remember seeing more than one adult male cardinal at a time.  We’ve had juvenile males hanging around, however.

This fall, I have seen FOUR adult male cardinals at once! Here’s one of them:

Not a normal day

When I got up yesterday, it seemed like a normal day.  When I walked out the door, it still seemed pretty normal.  As I drove to school, it was clear that normalcy was no longer the state of the day.

As I drove to school, first, a few flakes of snow started falling.  The snowflakes got fluffier, quickly, and I enjoyed the Millenium-Falcon-transistions-to-hyperspace effect of the snowflakes in my headlights.  I don’t get to see that very often, and here it is still November!

Then, the snow started sticking to the ROAD.  whoa.

Traffic slowed a bit, and as I got closer to school the snow completely coated the road.  The main thoroughfare near school was merely wet, which was not surprising since there is a lot of traffic on it, but then I turned onto the road the school is on which is usually terrible in snowy weather.  The local salt crews leave it until late and it is moderately hilly.  Though it was snow-covered, it was fine.  Even when I pulled into the parking lot, I could see the lines well enough to pick a parking space and get in just fine.

I got into my classroom, pulled out some plasma demonstrations, found a big chart of the nuclides, and enjoyed watching the snow out the window, something I have ALWAYS enjoyed.  I happened to glance out the window at the parking lot at 7:20 AM, when teachers are required to be in school.  The faculty lot was still half empty, and my car looked like it had 2-3 inches of snow on it!

Homeroom wound up being held over for 25 minutes beyond our normal dismissal time, first period was really short, and I managed to do only one of my plasma demos with that class.  All morning, students kept trickling into the building.  I had started a lab experiment with my third period class and one more student came in with a pass, saying he had been on his bus for two and a half hours!  One of the guidance counselors had been involved in a fender-bender with a student and a school bus, lots of kids reported passing multiple accidents and cars in ditches, and one of my colleagues took two hours to get to school.

I love snow.  It is very very unusual to have snow like this here in November.  Apparently this narrow band of heavy snow only across the county I live in and the county I teach in caught a lot of people by surprise, in addition to starting too late for a delayed opening to be called.  Even the accuweather website called for merely a cloudy morning, while also posting a late-breaking weather advisory for my school’s zip code a little after 7 AM.

By the time it was time to leave school, the roads were merely wet and the snow had melted off my car, but the district still canceled all extra-curricular activities after school as a belated precaution.

Odd day!

Giving

Every year, we get asked what we want for Christmas.  I don’t mean this in the general sense, I mean my mom calls or e-mails and asks if my husband and I have our lists yet and to please send them as soon as we can.

This is difficult.  We both maintain wish lists on Amazon.com, and keep them fairly up-to-date.  But to come up with things we need is a challenge, and things we want, well, we don’t want much and when we do want something we usually buy it for ourselves.

So this year, we decided to make a list of charities.  A list, so there would be some choice, or maybe our parents could give a little to each one.  Here they are:

• Heifer Project International – Donations buy farm animals which go to needy people who can then sell the eggs or milk and breed the animal(s) to expand production.
• Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres – Doctors help people who are victims of natural disasters, wars, or poverty.
• The Nature Conservancy – Donations are used to conserve nature, either by directly buying up land or by partnering with others to buy or protect land.
• Camfed USA – This group is educating girls in rural Africa and empowering them to become leaders for change in their communities.

I hope you will agree that at least one of these charities is worth supporting.  I have given to each, and I would love it if you would also.  Please do not give me any gifts this year.

If you are curious about how these organizations (and many others) spend their money, you can check out Charity Navigator.  This website gives a breakdown for charities on how much they spend on accomplishing their mission, fundraising, and administrative expenses.  You can see how much the CEO is paid and how big a chunk of the overall pie that is.  I recommend checking this site before donating to any organization that is asking you for money.

Worms

Last summer we bought a worm bin and have been adding kitchen scraps to it on and off. We keep the bin in our basement, and it has produced a tray of dark, earthy-smelling, nutrient-rich soil. I think it is amazing that we could plop a couple thousand redworms into some coconut fibers, add the bits we cut off beans and broccoli and other scraps, and wind up with this glorious material!

Below is a picture of the former vegetable waste, with some eggshells mixed in. We should probably crush our eggshells more before adding them, but I don’t mind seeing them in there.  I wish you could smell through the computer screen—this stuff smells like great potting soil!

Our bin is round and less than two feet in diameter. Still, it wouldn’t really fit in the kitchen, and it isn’t very pretty. True to the blurbs in catalogs, it doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t breed flies. We got it in part because going down to the basement is easier than going out to the compost pile in the back yard, especially in winter or in pouring rain. Also, there are poison ivy plants near our backyard bin (they weren’t there when I first constructed the bin, or I wouldn’t have put it where it is) and I do not want any poison ivy on me, thank you very much.

I highly recommend having a worm bin if you don’t have room for a compost pile. We take out our garbage only once a week most weeks, though our neighborhood has two collection days every week. We’re looking forward to adding the castings to our potted plants (I have to do a bunch of repotting this summer) and we’ll continue watering our plants sometimes with the liquid “tea” that collects at the bottom of our bin (there is a handy tap for getting that liquid out). When we get a whole tray full of castings, we can mix it into the soil in the rose bed. Also, I can sell you some bait if you want to go fishing!