Big Dog Robot

This robot is totally crazy smart. What do you think DARPA will use it for?

Cool Science Stuff!

SEA SHRINKS FOAM Cups and their messages back from the Arctic Ocean: left, from recent Russian dives; right, from an earlier dive, with a landlubber.

Far Below the Surface of the World’s Oceans, a Tough Place for Foam Cups

The New York Times

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: March 25, 2008

Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.

The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing.

Afterward, the tiny cups became instant mementoes of the polar dive, offering striking proof of the descent into an unfamiliar zone and silent testimony to the crushing power of plain old water.

“The real North Pole,” read one cup’s shrunken writing. “Explore the abyss,” another urged.

Deep explorers have made thousands of such keepsakes over the decades, and more recently, schools have joined the fun as a way to drive home some of the peculiarities of a planet where very deep water covers some 65 percent of the surface.

For example, in 2001, a third-grade class at Harding Elementary School in Corvallis, Ore., decorated 28 foam cups with bright fish, happy faces and American flags. The scientist father of one of the students then sent the cups into the depths of the Indian Ocean, shrinking them into small trophies for a lesson on the crushing weight of deep water.

A comparison to air pressure helps. At sea level, atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. The deeper the dive, the greater the water pressure. At the resting place of the Titanic, more than two miles down, the pressure is 2.8 tons per square inch. That constantly bears down and tries to obliterate any void.

The pressure on any object in the deep sea, as at sea level, is uniform. It presses from above, below and the sides. That is because the molecules making up fluids (which in physics include both gases and liquids) are free to move about and transmit force in all directions.

Sea creatures are made primarily of water, which is virtually incompressible. So they escape destruction in the abyss.

But the high pressure causes most cavities and hollows, like human lungs, to collapse. So, too, with foam cups. They are almost all void since the foam is 95 percent air, according to the American Chemistry Council. As pressures build during descent, the air slowly compresses and the cups shrink.

Explorers of the deep escape slow torture by descending in small craft known as submersibles. A super-strong personnel sphere protects a pilot and two observers, who peer out through tiny portholes made with extraordinarily thick windows. The air pressure inside is the same as at sea level.

In its early days, Alvin, a pioneering American submersible, often carried outside its crew sphere compressible items like cork bricks and foam balls, cups and wig holders (to make shrunken heads), according to “Water Baby,” a profile of the craft.

“It’s an old trick,” the author, Victoria A. Kaharl, wrote, adding that the pressure of the deep makes “perfect miniatures.”

But the experimentally minded on such expeditions were also tempted to see what might withstand the pressure, and in at least one instance sent down a raw egg.

Filled with incompressible fluid, Ms. Kaharl wrote, the egg returned to the surface “perfectly intact and edible, but salty.”

The Earth and Moon in the same photo!

As seen from Mars. Link from this website.

I heart Google.

Google for Educators.

You must check it out. Now!

Virtual Surgery

Have your students try their hand at medical procedures virtually on Edheads.org!

Donor's Choose

If you haven't heard of this site already, you must visit it. Now!

This site allows teachers to write 'mini-grants' to fund small classroom projects and allows regular folks like you and me to quickly and easily donate to those projects, knowing our funds are going directly to help improve classroom instruction. How cool is that?









Right now, there is a $100,000 blogger challenge being run by Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation. So far, over $75,000 has been donated to teachers and their students across the United States.

Seriously, cool it get any more awesome??

Socratic Electronics

What is Socratic Electronics?*

We live in a world where the accumulation of knowledge is exponential over time, and where the ability to continuously learn and make sound judgments is essential to survival. Formal education ought to play an important role in preparing individuals to succeed in this environment, but many traditional modes of education actually discourage development of independent thinking skills necessary for success.

The most important thing any educator can impart to a student, in any context, is the ability to teach themselves. When teachers dispense knowledge to students in the traditional lecture format -- where students passively watch and listen -- they deny students deep interaction with the subject matter. Furthermore, instructor-centered pedagogy assumes and reinforces the debilitating notion that education can only happen in the presence of a superior: You (the student) need me (the teacher) in order to learn.

Placing students at the center of the instructional process breaks this dependency. A time-tested way of centering instruction around students is to teach by asking questions. This is generally called the ``Socratic method,'' made famous by the Greek philosopher Socrates. Another way to center instruction around students is to have them share their new-found knowledge with others. As any teacher knows, ``when you teach, you learn twice.'' I have found that a synthesis of these two instructional techniques -- stimulating student thought by asking lots of questions, and consolidating new-found knowledge through presentation -- not only fosters learning at a deeper level than I have ever experienced in a lecture-based course, but also builds confidence and self-teaching ability within students.

The purpose of this website is to provide both rationale and resources for research/discussion-based instruction to instructors everywhere. Central to the Socratic Electronics project is a large collection of questions and answers, intended as student assignments. By requiring students to research answers to these questions, then present their findings in class, students learn how to locate information, problem-solve, collaborate, and clearly articulate their thoughts while learning the basic subject matter. While the resources provided on this site are specifically designed for teaching electronics, the method itself is applicable to a wide variety of disciplines. I welcome constructive criticism, as well as participation in the development of this learning resource.

An important feature of these questions and answers is that they are configurable. They are organized in such a format as to be assembled into custom worksheets suitable for use in a variety of electronics classroom settings. Thus, you are not bound to using the compiled worksheets as they appear on this website. Rather, you may easily select which problems you wish to have on your own worksheet(s), and create them automatically by editing and executing a simple computer ``script'' file.

For those interested in the genesis and application of this teaching philosophy, here is a "manifesto'' I've written on the subject of learning to learn. It briefly chronicles my experiences with this learning method during the first year of its application in my class.

* Excerpted directly from the Socratic Electronics Website.