Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The caves at Meramec were created in dissolved carbonate rocks; that’s how most caves with interesting cave formation form. The recent storms in Guatemala, along with leaky sewage pipes, have helped speed the dissolution process producing some devastating sinkholes.
[googleMap name=”Guatemala City” description=”Guatemala City” width=”450″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false”]Guatemala City[/googleMap]
On the last day of our trip we drove an hour west of St. Louis to Meramec Caverns. If you’re ever on I44 heading out of St. Louis you can’t miss it. From 30 km away you start seeing billboards, sometimes in pairs, almost every 100 meters.
Largely this is because it is a privately owned cave. Privately owned also means that they can do things to “enhance” the cave that you would not see at a National Park like Mammoth Cave. The light shows in certain caves were particularly interesting. Our tour guide was pretty good, entertaining and scientifically accurate for a general audience.
The presence of different colors in the rock formations (red, white and black) due to different metals in the carbonate precipitates could tie in very well with our discussion earlier this year of ionic bonding.
There are also historical tie-ins. The cave was the site of a skirmish during the civil war, because the bat guano was being used to produce gunpowder. Jesse James participated in that engagement and later used the cave as a hideout.
Finally, they have a reconstructed hut, which although it has nothing to do with the cave, has a bootlegger’s still does link with our discussion of steam distillation.
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers. Richtel, 2010
Matt Richtel has an intriguing article in the New York Times on how multitasking on computers is affecting the way people think. I don’t have a whole lot of time to get into it is a well resourced article citing work from researchers such as Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir and Melina Uncapher at Stanford, Steven Yantis at Johns Hopkins, Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, Gary Small at UCLA and Adam Gazzaley at UCSF.
Other choice quotes:
[Multi-taskers] had trouble filtering out … the irrelevant information.
multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.
that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory
Finally, the article ends with a thought about how technology use affects our ability to relate to others.
Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.
“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”
That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”
This work of course ties in with Nicholas Carr’s thesis that asks the question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid“. Carr’s book, “The Shallows” takes up the argument that we should spend less time online. While I tend to agree with Carr that we would benefit from more time offline, I really think his explanation that the invention of the press, and cheap books, lead to more deeper concentration (and that’s what we’re loosing now) needs a lot more evidence to back it up.
The Federal Reserve’s data website produces graphs using the same economic data that the Federal Reserve uses to make decisions about the nation’s economy. The above graph, showing long term unemployment in the U.S., combines the unemployment numbers based on how long people have been unemployed from four data series (<5 weeks, 5-14 weeks, >= 15 weeks, >27 weeks). You see howthe site makes the combinations you want, and produces the graph.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank has started a video competition for college students to present economic information. The first competition was to explain opportunity costs.
As oil continues to leak from the damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico and the surface slick is affecting more and more of the coastline, scientists now using research vessels to track the underwater plumes spreading at depth throughout the gulf.
Satellite imagery from NASA only shows what’s at the surface. To find the underwater plumes, researchers on boats lower instruments on cables that measure the chemistry of the water. Certain chemicals, like colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) are produced when there is a lot of oil in the water.
Dr. Samantha Joye, from the University of Georgia, is the lead scientist on one such vessel. She started the Gulf Oil Blog where she describes her ongoing work in the gulf and answers readers questions. It is an excellent resource. A great demonstration of science in action, working on a practical problem but using techniques and methods developed over time for answering more abstract questions.
I had not particularly wanted to go up into the St. Louis Arch myself, but the students really wanted to and we had a little time to spare after the Science Museum. So I grabbed tickets for the last tram to the top, and I’m glad I did. Looking down on the city and river from above you could, in an almost tactile way, reconcile the geographic elements with the history that we’d talked so much about at Anheuser-Busch.
Standing in line, waiting for the tram to the top, we were treated to a short documentary on the Eads Bridge, the first across the Mississippi in St. Louis. The video stressed the importance of the bridge in allowing the city to become the gateway for westward expansion.
The tram arrived and small rectangular doors opened up to reveal tiny escape pods fit for a spaceship. Five of us squeezed in, fortunately we were all friendly. The distinct possibility of claustrophobia tinged the air. Three minutes 47 seconds later we reached the top. Forty-five degree rain was pouring down outside. The wind was so strong you could, if you held still and waited for it, feel a slight sway in the Arch itself.
Looking east we saw the mighty Mississippi. Not quite so mighty as it is in Memphis, which is downstream of the confluence with the Ohio River, but enormous nonetheless. On the river, huge barges carried freight cars with unknown cargo south toward New Orleans. Just below, an helicopter sat on an helipad barge waiting for an emergency call. Directly across the water, on the east bank, enormous silos with their own docks waited to load barges with grain collected from across the mid-west.
It was still pouring when we left the Arch, and the rain continued on even during dinner. But leaving the restaurant, heading back to the hotel, the setting sun to the west, refracted through raindrops over the river, created one of nature’s own ephemeral monuments. A poignant reminder that forty-five, or even one hundred and forty-five years are but a moment in the deep span of geologic time.
The above video, on how to build a self-watering container (this type is also known as a Global Buckets), seems extremely useful for the urban gardener, especially in Memphis where even gardening in the ground is difficult because of the poor, loessic soil. I’ve found container gardening (in cat litter buckets) to be much more effective, even though evaporation is a major issue with our hot summers. So I very much like the idea of self-watering containers.
These containers may also be an excellent complement to our greenhouse, because we can avoid having to water every day. If we got the right containers, or decorated them nicely enough, we might be able to sell these with our vegetables at the end-of-year plant sale.
The related videos on YouTube have a variety of other self-watering container variants. This version, with water jugs and a single large tub, also seems like it might be effective. There are also nice instructional video on how siphons work, as an easier way of watering a series of buckets. The Global Buckets project is a fascinating effort to help reduce malnutrition with simple materials.