Monthly Archives: January 2012

Interlude

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Four Mile Run, from about a month ago, on a nice warm day while I was geocaching. I had climbed down to the water and upstream a ways in a vain search and stopped to admire the scenery.

I also spied this. I’m guessing metamorphic, which might be a gneiss guess, but I don’t know schist from shinola.

When I decided to leave I forgot Spengler’s advice and I crossed the stream. Turns out wet rocks are really slippery because of the slime on them (curse you, low coefficient of friction! Mu-uuuuuuuu!). I fell in (only up to mid-shin, and it was a mild day, so no big deal) but also banged my elbow, which took a week or so to un-stiffen.

Losing the Lecture

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Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

[L]ecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

Given that it’s been the form of instruction for such a long time, it must have some effectiveness. I have nothing against improving teaching techniques, but it seems to me this piece is doing a bit of attacking a straw man. It may just be that they have not properly defined the teaching style they are criticizing.

There’s the example of students not understanding that gravitational acceleration is independent of mass of the object, but the students “get it” after seeing the professor drop two balls. To me, that implies that the professor wasn’t doing that demonstration in the lecture. Similarly,

“Students have to be active in developing their knowledge,” he says. “They can’t passively assimilate it.”

implies to me that the professor isn’t doing anything to engage the students. Which, to me, is simply a sign of bad instruction. So if they are against the Buelleresque “In… what… waaayy… does the author’s use of the prison…” where the students are drooling on their desks, I’m there. But is anyone surprised that engaging the students gives better results than one-way verbal-only communication? Because that seems kind of obvious.

The Ventures Physics. Or Biology.

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Walking or running efficiently, your locomotor muscles might not agree

So we’re good walkers, or at least economic ones. But the question is, what MAKES for this efficiency? How exactly are we burning fewer calories at a specific walking pace? Ideally, this means that our muscles, like our bodies overall, are at their most efficient at a moderate walking pace. The calories burned over time are the result of the total metabolic rate of all the muscles that produce locomotion. So since your metabolism is minimized at a moderate walking pace, creating the most efficiency, it would make theoretical sense that your individual MUSCLES are also minimizing their metabolism at that moderate walking pace, and the cumulative effect is one of energy efficiency.