Category: Uncategorized

What is Style?

Style or taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.
I mean, it’s a process of collection, almost. Like you’re grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You’re drawn to something without knowing why.

Kyle Chayka during an interview on the Ezra Klein Show

I did not expect to find this interview as fascinating as I did. It starts with the idea that taste/style is a personal feeling–intrinsic not extrinsic–that resonates with you, then explores how the internet has made for more niches of styles but shared those niches globally so we are, perhaps, loosing some of those fascinating hyper-local niches. Both increased diversity globally, but still some genericization as the algorithmically generated recommendations, of search engines and the like, help direct us towards the niches we like yet blinker us to discovery of others.

[A] feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier or more to your liking, you’re never going to sit with the thing that’s in front of you. You’re never going to be forced to have the patience, or the fortitude maybe, or the kind of willpower to fight through something and figure out if you truly like it or not.


Whereas, I think fighting that generic quality and figuring out at least one thing that brings you joy and you’re passionate about and that makes that change happen in your brain makes you have this encounter that you never expected. That’s the only thing that’s worth doing in life, kind of. Or at least in the field of culture, why would you want to have the generic experience? Why would you want the lowest common denominator result of recommendation?

Kyle Chayka during an interview on the Ezra Klein Show

AI Antibiotic Drug Discovery

A recently published article, about using AI to help discover a new class of chemical antibiotics, is likely one of the first of a wave of applications of artificial intelligence techniques to solving scientific problems.

The Hard Fork podcast has an excellent interview with one of the researchers involved in the study. They do a great job describing the problem (the search for antibiotics to deal with drug resistant bacteria) and overviewing how the AI was combined with physical experiments to do the research.

Making Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs)

It turns out that it’s pretty easy (and relatively cheap) to design and order printed circuit boards (PCBs).

PCB wired up to a light box.

I’ve used Fritzing to design them. It’s simple to use with their PCB view window. They have a lot of parts available (such as the 3pin connectors), though I did have to get the fritzing part for the Raspberry Pi Pico off the Raspberry Pi website. Fritzing is very commonly used for circuit diagrams on the web, so it’s fairly easy to find parts you’re looking for. The current version (>1.0) requires a small donation, but the older version (0.9+) is free, and I’ve used both successfully.

The board above is used to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico to pairs of LEDs and touch sensors. In this case only one pair is in use to make a light box that can be turned on and off by touching the sides.

Light box in action.

There are a number of companies that will take the exported Gerber files and make you a PCB. In fact, there’s even an option within Fritzing to place an order. I’ve used PCBWay (this is my PCBWay referrer link that gets me a discount if you use it), which, as of this writing, costs about $5 for a batch of 5 PCBs (that’s the minimum order), plus about $10 for 15 day shipping to the US. The only change I made to their standard settings is to use the Lead-free solder.

Image of PCB.
One of my first PCBs. It makes it easier to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico to a series of touch sensor and LED pairs. I messed this one up by not using the official raspberrypi.com part and not realizing that the one I chose did not have the holes drilled all the way through the board.

I’d like to have my physics and/or computer science students design and make their own starting next year.

Area of a Triangle

The area of a triangle is one half of the length of the base times the height:

A = \frac{1}{2} \cdot b \cdot h

Six triangles with the same area.

For my Geometry class, I made this set of six triangles to show that as long as the base and height are the same, all these triangles will have the same area.

Each student measured a triangle and found its area, which is a useful exercise in itself to get them to transfer the ideas and equations out of the book, and then the all compared their results. Their calculated areas were all within 5% of the actual value, which was not unexpected given that some small measurement error was inevitable.

Since you can use any side as the base, not everyone measured the equivalent side and height, so I had to demonstrate that similarity as I summed up the exercise.

For the next time I use this set, I’ve marked the one side that is 10 cm on each triangle for students to use as the base.

Missouri COVID-19

For a Statistics project, I took raw COVID data from John Hopkins University on May 20, 2020. With the data, I found the general statistics and then compared how cases are going up in Missouri every month.

StateConfirmedDeathsPopulationCasesPerCapita
Alabama1305252247797362.73069475
Alaska401107102310.564605037
Arizona1490674763920172.33197127
Arkansas500310729159181.715754695
California859973497372539562.30839914
Colorado22797129950291964.532931308
Connecticut390173529357409710.91660355
Delaware81943108979349.125392289
District of Columbia755140770574910.69927127
Florida474712096188013102.524877256
Georgia39801169796876534.108425436
Hawaii6431713603010.4726895003
Idaho25067715675821.598640454
Illinois1004184525128306327.826426633
Indiana29274186464838024.514943547
Iowa1562039330463555.127439186
Kansas850720228531182.981650251
Kentucky816737643393671.88207174
Louisiana35316260845333727.790227672
Maine18197313283611.369356673
Maryland42323212357735527.330496027
Massachusetts889706066654762913.5881248
Michigan53009506098836405.363307445
Minnesota1767078653039253.331495072
Mississippi1196757029672974.032963333
Missouri1152864059889271.92488571
Montana478169894150.4831137591
Nebraska1112213818263416.089771844
Nevada738837727005512.735738003
New Hampshire386819013164702.938160383
New Jersey15077610749879189417.14943333
New Mexico631728320591793.067727478
New York354370286361937810218.28713669
North Carolina2026272695354832.124905471
North Dakota2095496725913.114820151
Ohio294361781115365042.551552879
Oklahoma553229937513511.474668726
Oregon380114438310740.992149982
Pennsylvania681264770127023795.36324731
Rhode Island13356538105256712.68897847
South Carolina917540746253641.983627667
South Dakota4177468141805.130315164
Tennessee1841230563461052.90130718
Texas516731426251455612.054955147
Utah77109027638852.789551664
Vermont944546257411.50861139
Virginia32908107580010244.112973539
Washington18971103767245402.821159514
West Virginia15676918529940.8456584317
Wisconsin1341348156869862.35854282
Wyoming787115636261.396315997

The Table above is the raw data I extracted but I added the population of each state and then calculated the cases per capita by dividing the confirmed cases by the population. This allows you to compare each state equally.

After getting the raw data I did the statistical analysis on the confirmed cases and cases per capita.

Confirmed Cases

Min.401
Q15268
Median13052
Q334112
Max354370
Mean30364
Inter-Q28844
Standard Div5513.53
Missouri11528
Missouri Z-3.416323118

The data above is the analysis from the confirmed cases. The analysis is for all 50 states.

Confirmed Cases per Capita

Min.0.4727
Q11.9543
Median2.9013
Q35.2468
Max18.2871
Mean4.4639
Inter-Q3.2925
Standard Div4.101132
Missouri1.92488571
Missouri Z-0.6191008458

The data above is the analysis from the confirmed cases per capita. The analysis is for all 50 states.

Missouri Predictions

After I did the analysis for all 50 states I focused on the rise of cases in Missouri from April to September. Then I predicted the number of cases in the future if the rise in cases stays the same. More than likely the cases will be higher or lower than the predicted number. If the state implements safety precautions the curve could flatten out. If the state does nothing and people keep taking it less and less seriously than more then likely the curve will get stepper.

Above are the data and graphs I used to predicate the cases at the beginning of October and End. The two highlighted boxes are the predictions.

I predict there will be 130,278 cases in Missouri on the first of October. On the 21st I predict there will be 166,268 cases.

Atom Size and Element Properties?

Are the elements of larger atoms harder to melt than those of smaller atoms?

We can investigate this type of question if we assume that bigger atoms have more protons (larger atomic number), and compare the atomic number to the properties of the elements.

Data: Properties of the First 20 Elements

Question 1.

Your job is to use the data linked above to draw a graph to show the relationship between Atomic Number of the element and the property you are assigned.

Question 2.

What is the relationship between the number of valence electrons of the elements in the data table and the property you were assigned.

Bonus Question

Bonus 1: The atomic number can be used as a proxy for the size of the element because it gives the number of protons, but it’s not a perfect proxy. What is the relationship between the atomic number and the atomic mass of the elements?