"Ricicles"

The early name of Rice Krispies. From about 1960.

(At the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry)

If the road is too muddy...

...then just make a new one and go around!  :-)

Vacation time

Hopefully I'll avoid the Griswolds on this European Vacation.  Many pics to come over the next 3 weeks I hope!

Relationships, relationships, relationships

In my introductory weather and climate course, scores on Exam 2 typically slide considerably.  Sometimes, the average drops 10-15% from Exam 1.  I have no hard evidence, but my suspicion is that scores go down because the primary topic is humidity and atmospheric moisture, a topic many students find quite difficult to grasp.  However, although some students do worse on the second exam, there are always several who do much better.  How??  They figure out that my classes are not about rote memorization -- that I'm serious why I say that I care about critical thinking skills, and that I care about problem-solving ability.  And they make a conscious effort to change their study habits.  To continue just "studying the vocab" is a quick route to a failing grade.

I asked one such student -- who went from a C+ on Exam 1 to a perfect score on Exam 2 -- what she did differently.  Her response:

To the people who say "I'm just not good at science," I say stop it!  This student is a political science major and goes on to present a universal truth: analytical ability is a key to success in college regardless of your discipline, not just in the "sciences."

---

P.S.:  That's all for this post, but I figured it might be helpful to show an example exam question.  In large courses (>50), exams are strictly multiple choice and there are typically N = length_of_class/2 questions on an exam.

See also "What 'the tests count for too much' really means"

For my G109 students: air pressure experiment

I had a water bottle open on my flight today, and closed it while we were at cruising altitude (so the pressure inside the plane was about 850 millibars).

Once we were almost on the ground in Atlanta, I pulled it back out.  With the air inside the bottle sealed at 850 millibars, but the cabin now back to around 1000 millibars, I opened the bottle and...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yqivni0ces4so63/20140406_125554.mp4

Spring tornado drills

Here's the timeline of how I received the evening's Test Tornado Warning from various sources, including the National Weather Service, through my cable television provider, and other channels related to the largest employer in my hometown.


7:36 p.m. All three of my NOAA weather radios went off.

7:37 The TV is on pretty loud...  "Did you just hear sirens?"  "I'm not sure."  (Yes, they were going off.)

7:38 Tweet from @IUEMC.

7:39 EAS activiation on all cable TV channels.

7:40 Email from "IU Notify" system arrives.  It was time-stamped at 7:37, but took 3 minutes to get through the getrave.com servers to my inbox.  (I verified this by looking at the email headers.  I'll be happy to provide a screen capture of them.)

7:42 Tweet from @IUBloomington.

7:49 The average "lead time" for a tornado warning is 13 minutes -- meaning a tornado could have just hit your home.  How much lead time would each system have given you?  Backtrack from here.

The sling psychrometer

Want to learn a few German words? Just check out the psychrometer from our cabinet at work... a.k.a. das Schleuderpsychrometer.

(If it's der or die instead of das, let me know.)