Who was Charles Lindberg?

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Who Is College Material?

In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It’s just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.

After more than 25 years teaching at the City University and State University of New York, I’ve come to the counterintuitive conclusion that the single greatest predictor of whether a student will succeed or fail in college is not what he knows when he graduates from high school but what he wants to know when he graduates from high school. Intellectual curiosity is more determinative than high test scores or good work habits because it precedes them — indeed, it causes them. The desire to know just for the sake of knowing, to pick up random facts and start drawing connections in your mind, is the hallmark of the lifetime learner.

I don’t think it’s counterintuitive at all. It’s a matter of being able to devise a way to measure it. However, having gotten the WTF? facial expression from many people when a subject like this is broached, I get the impression that the intellectual curiosity trait is not particularly widespread. There are scads of people who treat learning as a burden.

Games People Play

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I don’t play, so I don’t know if the first rule about Farmville is Don’t Talk About Farmville!

Cultivated Play: Farmville

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.

Colonel Mustard, In the Lab, With a Lead Ingot

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Roman ingots to shield particle detector

Lead is, in principle, a shield against radiation, but freshly mined lead is itself slightly radioactive because it contains an unstable isotope, lead-210. “We could never use it for our experiment, which is exactly about keeping background radioactivity to a minimum,” says Ettore Fiorini, a physicist at the University of Milan-Bicocca and coordinator of the CUORE experiment. After it is extracted from the ground, however, lead-210 decays into more stable isotopes, with the concentration of the radioactive isotope halving every 22 years. The lead in the Roman ingots has now lost almost all traces of its radioactivity.

Fly Me to LEO

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The Big Picture: Journeys to the International Space Station

April 12th marked the 49th anniversary of human spaceflight, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth in 1961. At this moment, 13 humans are currently in low-Earth orbit, aboard the International Space Station. Several were already aboard the ISS when a Soyuz TMA-18 brought a fresh crew up from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 2nd – they were later joined by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery on the 131st shuttle mission to date (only three remaining launches scheduled). NASA recently signed a new deal with Russia for six more round-trips to the ISS, at a cost of $55.8 million per seat. Collected here are recent photos of the Space Station, its current crew, their launch vehicles, and the views from above. (38 photos total)

Here’s a neat picture from the collection (larger version at the link)

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The water bubble acts as a lens and inverts the image, but the air bubble inside also acts as a lens, inverting the image once again. A lens made of air? Well, sort of. Light refracts at the interface of any two media with different indices, so you can look at it as a lens. If we lived in water, we’d probably think of air bubbles in that way. Alternately, you can think of the bubble as dividing the water bubble into two lenses for the light traveling through it, while the light not going through it passes through only one lens.

A variant on this would be if you were to inject a small sphere of a liquid with a larger index inside the water bubble, if you were on the ISS, or use glass with two different indices here on earth.

Is Anyone Listening?

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Maniacal Rage: Photoshop Crash Reports

I changed the canvas size (added 400 pixels to the height while anchoring the existing canvas to the top in case you’re interested in the little details) and everything disappeared. Luckily, I had just saved. I’ve been pretty lucky about that with Photoshop in the past — I’m an over-saver. I save all the time. Probably got into the habit because of applications with terrible stability patterns- You know, like your application. Photoshop. Also, Microsoft Word. Remember that junk? I’m sure you do. You probably refer to that as the ‘Adobe Photoshop of Word Processing’ and laugh and laugh and count your money.

It’s almost like blogging in a crash report dialog window.