Montessori Muddle – Page 141 – Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View

POV-Ray: 3d rendering

Giles Tran’s amazing rendering of glasses on the counter inspired me to check through my own POV-Ray generated library. Nothing nearly as good, but some of it is still might be useful.

Axial_tilt — Demonstrating the axial tilt of the Earth, this image shows the Earth at the northern hemisphere's summer solstice.

120px-ElipticN_000_2xAplaneClose — Rotating Earth at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice.

You build 3d models in POV-Ray and then export 2d images from whichever point of view you want, so once you have the model set up you can easily change the perspective or even move objects to create animations.

POV-Ray does not have any useful sort of user interface; you’re usually creating your models with computer code. It can therefore be challenging to use, and, as with any 3d programming language, a bit of geometry, trigonometry and algebra are needed.

However, the final results can be impressive. I’m continually amazed each year by the quality of the work added to their Hall of Fame.

For much easier, quicker and not so sophisticated 3d results, I use VPython, which is also a great way to learn programming that outputs 3d images.

Genetic testing: What it can do, and where we are.

“On average we found that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.”
–Stephen Kingsmore, physician, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Greenfieldboyce (2010), New Genetic Test Screens Would-Be Parents.

NPR’s All Things Considered had two related articles on last night that deal with the specific topics we’re covering this week: genetic disease and recessive alleles.

The first one is about the latest in genetic screening technology, for determining if potential parents have recessive alleles that could combine to produce children with genetic diseases. Recent research has made this much easier.

The second touches on the ethical consequences of genetic screening. It could lead to an increase in abortion rates and leads us along the slippery slope of eugenics.

Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress — What if we engineered for intelligence?

This second story would make an interesting basis for a Socratic dialogue. As would, I think, the movie Gattica, which deals with the consequences of genetic screening and genetic customizations. I see it’s PG-13 so we may be able to screen it. Similarly, I may recommend Brian Stableford’s War Games to my eight graders who might like a military science fiction book that deals with genetic optimization. Alternatively, Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain might offer another interesting perspective on this issue.

Shake the dust revisited

Today in working on extending our thinking about texts we revisited Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust“. We started by reading and thinking about the text, then had a group discussion. I played the video at the end.

After we watched Mojgani, I asked the students to write down if, and how, his presentation changed what they thought about the issue they were most interested. Mojgani’s presentation is forceful, and it emphasizes different issues than you can gleam from a dry reading of the poem. Doing it this way, I think, allowed students to see that there are multiple ways of interpreting the same texts.

Still life

800px-Glasses_800_edit — Image by Gilles Tran.

What makes art? Frank Wilson points out that:

art … never simply transcribes what is “out there,” but selects certain details and arranges them into a harmony that transfigures them.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.

We might see arrangements like the stuff sitting on the counter every day, but the image/photography/painting becomes art when the collection is view from a specific perspective that transforms them and highlights details.

Aside from its obvious beauty, what really intrigues me about this picture is where it was taken: In the living room of the Menchers’ apartment, just a few feet from where I was standing. I would never have guessed.

When Eric told me that, I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.

Such is the alchemy of art.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.

Note: The image at the top of this post is computer generated Gilles Tran, using the free, open-source, 3D rendering program POV-Ray. I’ve played around with POV-Ray and it can be a bit tricky, but you can do interesting things.

Forms of speech: Antithesis

EV from Somewhat in the Air has a great post on antithesis.

An antithesis … can be built by contrasting any of the different parts of a statement. But there is always a balance in the actual physical construction.
— EV (2011) in Antithesis – 15 minutes of writing

For example:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” –Barry Goldwater (1964)

It makes for a nice little (15 minutes perhaps?) self-contained exercise.

DNA –> proteins

Learn.Genetics have some very nice animations and exercises that deal with DNA, genes and protein synthesis. At the moment, I’m finding the following particularly useful:

Instruction on how to extract DNA from anything, (I’m going to use this as a lab and perhaps to make pea soup too) and specifically, from people (inside of your cheek).
What makes a firefly glow animation. It’s a bit dense, but complements the transcribe and translate a gene exercise nicely.
The Observable Traits Slideshow identifies some of the same traits we look for in our exercises: dimples, handedness, etc. (they have a quick reference pdf.
There are a bunch of great traits activities, including family tree building, and traits bingo.

Haiku Finder: Haikus are everywhere

Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.

You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.

I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:

One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.

— from On Rabbit Digestion