New Tenant

A new tenant has moved into Pixel's tank, a Russian Tortoise. We've set the tank up on the other side of the couch to mirror the fish tank. The cats have showed only mild interest so far.


Apparently, they can live for between 50 to 100 years.

-Tim

Teachers

The fall semester officially started today, and the Physics 140 sections that I'm TAing will meet for the first time next week. As my back to school assignment this year, I decided to write a post dedicated to my favorite teachers and what I learned from each of them about teaching.

Mrs. Gallagher--all subjects, 3rd Grade--is still my favorite teacher of all time, she was by far the most dedicated and enthusiastic teach I have ever had. Mostly what I took from her, was that you should know your students as well as you can. Know their strengths and weaknesses, know what they know, know how they learn best. And remember them long after they're no longer your students, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Mrs. Gallagher would recognize me even now.

Mr. Mayfield--AP calc-based Physics, Senior year of high school--taught me that it's possible to identify with your students without trying too hard. Basically, it's helps to be like them, but never try to be one of them. You can display the interests/concerns/experiences you have in common with them, but don't dwell on them. We all thought it was cool that he once didn't get our papers graded on time because he spent all night playing Quake, but he would never have tried to involve himself with our games.

Prof. Selen--Modern Physics Lab, Senior year undergrad, and supervisor in the Physics Van, all undergrad--is always genuinely excited about the subject. After all, if you're not, they won't be. And you should always be able to answer (or find the answer to) any question, no matter how wide of the original topic. And sometimes you just need to explain things in lots of different ways until you find the one that clicks with your students.

Prof. Eckstein--E and M I & II, Thermal Physics, sophomore/Junior year undergrad, and graduate research advisor--is also very good about being overtly excited about the subject he's teaching. But what I've gotten most from him so far is that when a student is wrong/doesn't understand a concept, use what they know to lead them to the answer, rather than simply correcting them. Ask them leading questions and they'll figure it out for themselves and remember it much better. Not that he's ever used that technique on me.

-Tim

Now they tell me...

Jobs that pay badly.

Scroll down to the last one.

-Tim

Ideality Factor of One

A research scientist at GE has apparently created a perfect diode using a carbon nanotube. Really though, I just like the phrase, "Ideality Factor of One". Sounds like a bad Star Trek episode, doesn't it?

-Tim

Movies

By this point, we're already on our second block of 100 movies for $100 at Rentertainment and we finally decided that we needed a way to keep track of the movies we've rented, lest we rent them again by mistake. But a simple list of our conquests seemed too impersonal, so we've decided to post short reviews, starting this week. We may add some retroactive reviews, but not tonight. :-)

You can find them here, if you're so inclined.

-Tim and Tamara

Radio Controlled

All the driving I've been doing lately has gotten me thinking about my car's stereo. It's a decent enough stereo, but I know it could be so much cooler. Right now, the radio doesn't even have a cd player. Usually, I just listen to the radio on short trips, because the ipod is just too big a pain to deal with if I'm only going to be in the car a few minutes at a time--although it is much easier than the portable cd player I used to use. On long trips, the ipod works great, but the sound is noticebly flat. It would be very nice to have a direct line in or a cd player.

I've often thought about just buying a cd deck, but a new one from the manufacture would cost $600, and there aren't any aftermarket decks that would allow me to use my car's built in steering wheel radio controls, which I'm not willing to give up. Every once in a while, I'll check ebay and the junk yards for a cd deck taken from another car. But I've yet to find any good deals, and I'm not totally sure who I could get to install it. I replaced the original radio (with a tape deck model) on my old 1986 Bonneville myself, but I haven't the slightest idea how to take apart my current 2000 Grand Prix's dashboard. I think someplace like Best Buy might do it, but who knows what they would charge.

However, what I've decided is that what I really want is a hard drive premounted in the stereo that I can load all my mp3s onto and that can be voice controlled. Wouldn't that be awesome? To just be able to say, "Car, play songs at random." or, "Car, play the album 'Out of Exile' by 'Audioslave'," or "Car, play the song 'Free Fallin' by 'Tom Petty',"and have the stereo do it?

I think the technology to do this must be there, the only hard part would be indexing the song/artist/album/genre names. In fact, my iBook is pretty close to being able to do it already, the voice control built into the system is pretty good. Unforunately, the built-in controls don't extend to itunes and ones I can find on the net are fairly limited.

In the end, it's probably best that I don't spend enough time driving to actually attempt this.

-Tim

Spay day? No way.

Tamara and I left the house at about 4am on Saturday so that Tamara could go to another 'spay day' up in Chicago. Suffice to say, it wasn't a pleasant drive. In fact, from Gilman to well past Kankakee, it rained so hard that we literally couldn't see out the windows. We actually found the place without incident once we'd finally reached the city (Tamara has been there several times now, but we were coming from opposite the usual direction), I dropped her off and turned back south towards my parent's house, they were pretty surprise when I pulled up.

Unfortunately, I was only there about ten minutes before Tamara called to say that there was no one at the vet clinic and would I please come pick her up. Sigh. We ended up going back to my parent's house to take a nap before going out to lunch with them and then heading back home.

Apparently, they had rescheduled for next weekend and didn't bother to let Tamara know.

-Tim

Fruit Basket

Tamara's dad and sisters came down on Sunday to help us clean up the backyard a little. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone weed a garden with a chainsaw and Roundup.

We were actually very productive. Triming back all of the trees and cleaning out a massive amount of weeds. Turns out that in addition to the large Black Walnut in our front yard we also have a plum, a peach, a golden apple, and a cherry! And the peach at least had produced quite a bit of fruit.

We also finally knocked down that big wooden structure that was in the back yard and cleaned all the garbage out from under it. Now it's just in little piles everywhere around the yard, since we'll need to add it to our weekly garbarge in small increments. We did finally get rid of the old water heater though! They took it today. Finally, on Monday, we rented a wood chipper to turn all of the branches and weeds we had collected into mulch.

The yard looks much better now, but since we haven't gotten all of the garbage out yet we haven't taken any new pics. I'll post something of a before and after as soon as I can.

-Tim

There's more than corn in...

Stupid Indiana. I've never managed to drive anywhere in that state without some ridiculous traffic delay.

Last Saturday when I went to pick up Tamara at the Indianapolis Airport traffic on I-74 came to a dead stop for about a half hour while police officers forced everyone off of the highway in Brownsburg. To rub salt in the wound, the exit they forced me off at wasn't even in my road atlas. I finally made it to the airport almost an hour late, Tamara had been getting pretty worried.

I suppose, maybe, cell phones could have been useful there.

-Tim

Isn't it Ironic

Sunday's local radio contest for a free, 10-person lunch from The Panera Bread Co was won by the people working at the Atkins Diet Center. No wonder they went bankrupt.

-Tim

Begun, this retail war has.

Walmart has opened up a brand new store on Prospect Avenue, just across the street from Meijer. Not one of the local bulk stores, mind you, it's one of the big Corellian stores. In fact, it made the Kessel run in...no, wait, never mind.

Anyway, Meijer's counter attack was to put down some nice wood flooring, add a pet section, enlarge the pharmacy and grocery sections, and completely rearrange everything in the entire store so that no one can find anything. Good planning.

Your pitiful band of shoppers is no match for this fully operational Walmart SuperCenter!

-Tim

Air Conditioning!

What an adventure, who knew getting an air conditioner would be so complicated?

There are two main parts to a central air conditioner. Outside the house is the compressor, usually a large beige box, and inside the house is the coil, literally just a coil of copper tubing attached to the furnace. How AC works is so ridiculously simple that it's borderline unbelievable. Basically, you have a working fluid (like Freon) that is expanded by forcing it through a small constriction and then into the coil. As the liquid is forcibly expanded, it cools down dramatically. The furnace then blows air over the cold coil, cooling the air, which is then pushed out of vents throughout the house.

After the working fluid reaches the end of the coil, it has absorbed a significant amount of heat from the air inside the house. It is then returned to the compressor outside, which, oddly enough, compresses it back into a liquid. The heat garnered from the house and produced during the compression step are left outside.

Obviously, in practice it's a bit more complicated. Specifically, the compressor is a fairly involved piece of equipment. But still, the fact that the whole system boils down to (uh, no pun intended) air being forced over a cold pipe amazes me.

Now, air conditioners come in different sizes and different levels of efficiency. The sizes are measured in half ton (6,000 BTUs) increments starting at 1.5 tons. The unit 'ton' apparently comes from the fact that it takes 12,000 BTUs (British Thermal Units) to melt one ton of ice. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. The efficiency is measured in the Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio (SEER). The federal government currently requires all units sold in the US to be at least 10 SEER, but starting in January 2006, all new units must be at least 13 SEER. Some companies claim to have units that weigh in at as much as 18 SEER.

Now, we have a very small house. Even so, every single estimate we got, save one, recommended a 2 ton unit for house. And ever single estimate we got, save one, simply used the rule of thumb that says 1 ton for every 500 sq ft. The last company (20th Century) actually ran the necessary heat load calculations for our specific house and found that 1.5 tons was easily enough for us. And that unnecessary half ton saved us a lot of money. And apparently, these companies are not aware that every single piece of AC advice on the net screams that you should NEVER hire any company that doesn't bother to do heat load calculations.

The unusual thing--I thought--was that it was really hard to get any of them to sell me a unit more efficient unit then a 10 SEER. We finally got a 1.5 ton, 12 SEER unit made by Armstrong. It would have cost us another $500 to move up to a 14 SEER (the next highest they make). Guess they're just trying to liquidate their old stock.

-Tim

Hiding from the world

Yes, the table is that messy.

-Tim