Quote for the Day: On Power

The measure of a man is what he does with power. — attributed to Plato

It’s quite fascinating how character traits are highlighted when students gain the rights and responsibilities of the student run business supervisor. Certainly, some students become a bit over-enthusiastic about exercising their rights; though that’s never been much of a problem for the main supervisor because I try to make sure that anyone who gets to be the main supervisor has spent some time supervising a division. Also, Montessori students get a lot of practice working in their small groups, so leadership positions are usually not too much of a shock to them. Those that do try to throw their weight around excessively, provide the class with the opportunity to discuss worker rights, and a deepening of their understanding of the needs for checks and balances.

What I find most interesting, however, are the students who see only the responsibility of leadership and get bogged down and stressed out trying to manage all the details. For them the practice of leadership does a lot to help build character.

It Takes a Long Time to Go Away: Collecting Garbage on Deer Island

sc-deer-garbage-1909 — Collecting anthropogenic debris on the beach.

Plastic bottles take 100 years to break down; styrofoam cups – fifty years; aluminum cans – 200 years; glass bottles, which are made of silica, just like the beach’s white sand – who knows. So we took a little time out of our adventure trip to collect anthropogenic debris as we walked along the beach on Deer Island.

sc-deer-garbage-1899 — Leather (shoe) - 50 years.

sc-deer-garbage-1901 — Plastic bags - 10 to 20 years.

sc-deer-garbage_1463b — Styrofoam cup - 50 years.

sc-deer-garbage-1465b — Plastic bottles - 100 years.

sc-deer-garbage-1906 — Tin cans - 50 years. Aluminum cans - 200 years.

We picked up stuff on our way out, so we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labours on our walk back to the landing point.

sc-deer-misc_1475 — The beautiful beach cleared of garbage.

Note

The degradation times for marine garbage can be found on the SOEST website, but That Danny has an interesting compilation of data that tries to reconcile the different degradation times you can find on the web.

Setting up a Computer with Free Software

[Updated: 7/22/17] The open-source and free-software movements have matured to the point where a teacher or student can reliably outfit a new computer with software that is free and compatible with their proprietary cousins.

The first place to look for free software for whatever purpose you need should probably be ~~SourceForge~~. It feels odd having to say this, but it’s legal, free software. Mind you, it has a lot of programs that are still in development, many are not terribly polished, and not everything will be available for your operating system. Add in a few other pieces, like Firefox and OpenOffice, and you have all the basics you need for a basic loadout. I typically find these to be most useful.

LibreOffice or OpenOffice: Free, but not as powerful alternatives to MicroSoft Office. They can open and save MS Office files, but also has some of the irritating auto-formatting issues as Office. So for text editing I usually prefer Smultron (on Mac) or Atom (on Windows). Also, Gnumeric is an excellent alternative to Excel.
Atom (Windows and Linux): An extremely versatile text editor that a lot of my students like for coding.
Smultron (Mac): for writing text and only text, forget the formatting (and also useful for writing computer programs).
Firefox: For web browsing.
GIMP: instead of PhotoShop for editing images.
Inkscape: For drawing diagrams (like this one).
VUE: For mindmaps (like this) and flow charts.
Audacity: works well for sound editing (I’ve only used it a little for trimming sound files when I was trying to create sound effects). Unlike SOX (see below) Audacity has a user interface.
OpenSCAD: For creating 3d models using basic shapes (spheres, boxes etc.) for 3d printing.
VPython: I usually introduce my students to programming with VPython, which is a Pythno library for creating 3d visualizations. The VPython downloads pages include instructions for installing Python.

There are other odds and ends that you’ll find on my computer, like vlc for playing DVD’s, Combine PDF for rearranging pages in pdf documents, and TexShop for really nice typsetting, but there are a lot of good, free alternatives out there. Not a whole lot of games however.

Command Line Programs

If you’re comfortable using the Linux command line there are a number of programs, most of which have been ported to the major operating systems (and you can use the Cygwin program to use a lot of Linux commands if you’re on Windows), that can also be very useful:

SoX: For generating sound tones and notes (e.g.),
ImageMagick: the convert command is particularly useful for working with images (their example page is excellent). The GIMP is based on this program.
gifsicle: for help making animated gifs (particularly for optimizing them).

It All Depends on Your Point of View-2

Here’s a neat little video, which holds the Milky Way (galactic-centric) steady as the Earth rotates relative to it.

For comparison, here’s the original video by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado, showing the geocentric view of the sky moving:

It is always revelatory to see things from unexpected perspectives. Brian Swimme was amazed by the immensity of it when he first truly recognized that he was standing on a planet that was rotating through space orbiting the Sun.

The inner planets. (from my Solar System Model).

I’ve always been struck by the opposite point of view. To think that if you hold still enough, and think about it a bit, from one point of view you could be the central reference point for the entire universe, with everything else moving relative to you: the Earth still beneath your feet; the Sun (almost) orbiting around you; and the planets arcing through their epicycles.

planets-geocentric-all-2 — Orbits of the inner planets viewed from the Earth (a geocentric perspective). Paths plotted using Gerd Breitenbach's neat little applet.

How to Think Like a Mathematician

The epistemological approach to education suggests that the best way to learn a subject is to learn how to think like the experts in the field: how to think like a scientist; how to think like an historian; how to think like an engineer; etc.

How to think like a mathematician is Kevin Houston‘s attempt to explain how one mathematician at least approaches problems. To whet your appetite, he has a free pamphlet, 10 Ways To Think Like a Mathematician, which starts off with:

Question everything, and
Write in sentences

Logic is, apparently, quite important.

If you want to understand mathematics and to think clearly, then the discipline of writing in sentences forces you to think very carefully about your arguments.

— Kevin Houston: 10 Ways To Think Like a Mathematician

It’s an interesting introduction to how mathematicians see the world, and its a useful reminder that many of the ways of thought that apply to any field can be useful in other places, or even in life in general.

Tau not Pi

This one’s for the nerds. It’s hard to argue against the elegance of using tau instead of pi. Natalie Wolchover explains, while Kevin Houston makes the argument in video:

History of English in 10 Minutes Video

This is the first of an excellent series covering the history of English from The Open University. They make for a great spark-the-imagination lesson for etymology.

There’s lots more interesting videos at The Open University’s YouTube channel.

(via The Dish)