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[Phys-L] OT: fun things



Some observations that are almost entirely off-topic, but which you
may find amusing:

1) Many press reports and listserv discussions assert that the public schools
have pretty much gone to hell. However, here is one factoid to suggest that
is not entirely, not uniformly true. I know a 13-year-old kid who is taking
"honors geometry" in high school. In the first four weeks of school, as far
as I can tell they haven't done any geometry. Instead, they've been focussing
on the rules of inference, formal logic, and all that ... which IMHO is exactly
what high-school geometry class should be about. The geometric part of geometry
is secondary; the proofs are primary.

I picked up on this when I heard the kid use the word "contrapositive" in a
sentence.

(This is a run-of-the-mill suburban public high school in a below-average district.)


2) When discussing curved spaces, the canonical example of positive intrinsic
curvature is a sphere, and the canonical example of negative intrinsic curvature
is a saddle, such as depicted here
http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/kd/geomview/saddle.gif
Note that there are two ridges and two valleys, all meeting in the middle.

The question arises, what do you call the corresponding thing with three
ridges and three valleys? I recently learned it is called a _monkey saddle_.
http://orange.math.buffalo.edu/241/monkey_saddle_animation.gif

I like things with colorful names, and this certainly qualifies.


3) I know another kid, 9 or 10 years old, who was on a swim team. At the
end of the season, the organizers gave "gag gifts" to the team members.
The kid in question is a bit of a mad scientist, so you know what they
gave him? A pair of goggles! Chem-lab-style goggles (not swim goggles).
They wrote E=mc^2 on them, and other silliness, which leads me to believe
they didn't fully understand how practical their "gag gift" was. The kid
uses his goggles quite often, for instance when he smashes rocks with a
hammer to see if they have crystals inside, or when he cracks open the outer
envelope of a "halogen" bulb to see what the inner envelope looks like,
etc. etc. etc.

I will remember this for future cases when I need a highly symbolic, low-cost
gift or prize for somebody.


4) Another item in the category of gifts for the kid who has everything:
I know a kid who recently got a "Legos Mindstorms Robot Invention System".
It's a bunch of Legos, plus modular motors, gears, levers, touch sensors,
and a light sensor ... not to mention an on-board computer! You write
programs on a PC and download them via an IR link to the on-board computer,
which is thereafter autonomous.

This is obviously not suitable for every kid, but for the right kid, this
is a treeeeemendous hit. He spent 8 hours experimenting with it the first
day, plus many multi-hour sessions since then.

The instructions talk you through "cookbook recipes" to program several
standard bots, which are fairly impressive. But the best part is that
it's all modular, so the kid can use a standard bot as the starting point
for all sorts of custom hardware and custom software.

When I say "talk you through" I mean it literally: There is a CD with
spoken instructions. It's integrated with the programming panel, so
after it tells you what to do it waits for you to do it. There's
also a fat booklet.

The programming language is a "drag and drop" graphical thingy (sorta
like LabView, but simpler). I was pretty impressed to see a pre-teen kid
writing and debugging some distinctly nontrivial programs.

The box says the product is for ages 12 and up, and I think that is about
right. Again, not every kid is going to want one, but by the same token
not every kid wants to go to football camp.

There are something like 718 pieces in the box. It's all compatible with
conventional Lego stuff, so you get to leverage your investment in your
existing Lego collection.

The quality seems high, in the sense that the stuff works and seems
not easily breakable.

The set sells for around $200.00, which seems like a lot for a toy,
but in my judgement it's not overpriced, considering what you get.
To calibrate my value scale: I would not put this at the top of the
scale, which is occupied by things like a nice bicycle, which IMHO
provides near-infinite bang for the buck, and is arguably almost a
necessity for getting to school. I also rate a piano as near-infinite
bang for the buck, even though it is very expensive and certainly not
a necessity.

Alternatively, if you look at the price as "tuition" for a good
course on how to build stuff and write programs, it looks like a
tremendous bargain.

======================

You might be wondering whether it is bad to have kids working at such
a high level of abstraction, where the "elementary" blocks are motors
and fancy touch-sensors etc. -- several layers of "black box" removed
from the physics of the natural world. I was worried about that, but
I became less worried because of the following story: The set comes
with two touch sensors, but almost immediately the users want more.
A little bit of googling reveals that you can build your own touch
sensors out of paper clips. So the kid gets to see inside the black
box after all.
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