Education – Page 5 – Fooyah

April 15 2013April 17 2013

Bridge Construction

When I was in America I did some running. On my last day in the USA I ran past some bridges. While running up to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge I noticed a curious linkage design in the side of the bridge.

In the UK the majority of bridges are built on rollers so that when they expand in the summer, warmer months they don’t crack and break apart. These rollers can be observed from under the bridge and the expansion joints can be seen on top of the bridge.

This particular bridge in Washington DC is hanging from the cantilever end parts of the bridge to allow expansion in the structure. A close up below:

A close up with my annotations:

This is quite a clever solution to bridge expansion. I also think it is quite clear that I would make an excellent dinner guest, not boring at all! One of the things I love about civil engineering is that it is Meccano but just bigger. Big bolts, big nuts and big cables!

March 5 2013March 6 2013

It’s Just Right

Once a fortnight is just about the correct frequency.

Private Eye is a fortnightly news magazine to which I subscribe. It’s possibly the only newspaper willing to spread the truth and print what is going on. It’s quite frightening really just how corrupt and dodgy most organisations and societies are. Maybe corrupt is the norm and I’m just hoping for an idealised society that can never exist? The other magazine I subscribe to is Scientific American.

In the same week that I receive Private Eye the Merseyside Skeptics Society release their podcast called Skeptics With A K. It’s a show about an hour long which features three normal (ish) guys chatting about skeptical items that interest them. There’s a bit of swearing and a reasonable amount of poking fun at people but it is very interesting and I learn a lot.

Both these subscriptions arrive in the same week and have for a few years, even allowing for the Christmas break they have. Each new year I wonder if the synchronicity will be altered but I haven’t found so this far. Perhaps it’s deliberate?

March 4 2013

Official Declaration

As an encouragement to one of my classes today I decided I would declare them as a genius on this website if they produced a scattergraph that looks better than mine. The criteria I used were:

Axis scales consistent
Axes correctly labelled and correct variable
Small crosses for each datum
Good, well-positioned line of best fit
Good interpolation value from graph

The following pupils succeeded and are therefore declared geniuses:

Ed
Louis
Leo
George W
Cameron
Stewart
James

Note: genius should only be taken to mean able to draw a graph.

December 10 2012

Meme

One of the standard explanations and examples I use when teaching the mechanics module of A Level is to consider driving a car around town. Most pupils have experienced, or are aware, of people thier age who drive circuits around the local town trying to get noticed. I used to just talk about this practice but a few months back a friend was talking about his teenage experience of this form of behaviour and he used the term:

Barry Laps

This term didn’t really need any explaination as I already knew what it meant. I’ve never really partaken in the the Barry Lap experience. I think the closest I got was riding around Bishop’s Stortford on my Honda NTV 650 with Daryl on his Silverwing just after we had set up radio communication between us. We went around town a few times chatting to each other on the way. Being able to easily communicate between different bikes was far more of a novalty than trying to get attention from onlookers. This was in 1999 and quite before either of us owned mobile phones.

Anyway, I hope that with my continued use that the term Barry Lap might one day make it into the OED!

May 24 2012

Vader’s Saber

My form group have left their compulsory education, although most are coming back, and as I will no longer be their form tutor they very kindly bought me a gift.

It is a .45 scale replica of the lightsaber prop used in the film of Star Wars Episode 4. It’s an excellent choice of weapon, being the one that disptached Obi Wan Kenobi about three quarters of the way through the film.

Thanks very much 11Ph.

May 23 2012May 23 2012

Ammonite

I got two rather cool gifts from my further mathematics class when I saw them for the last time today. The first thing is an iPhone case that looks a lot like a very early calculator.

There is a slight mistake though because you can’t write “hello” on a calculator without putting a decimal point after the zero so it should look like “hell.o”. Just me being a pedant and geek there.

The next gift is a gorgeous looking fossil.

The details of this fossil are:

Upper Lias, Lower Jurassic Ammonite from Whitby:-

Dactylioceras (Orthodactylites) tenuicostatum

The Grey Shales, Tenuicostatum Subzone, Tenuicostatum Zone, Upper Lias, Lower Jurassic, Kettleness, Nr. Whitby, North Yorkshire, England

180 million years old

Really impressed with this. Going to keep it safe.

The class were: Alex, Peter, Lewis, Stephen, Michael, James, Thomas, Thomas and Joshua.

January 16 2012

Excellent Adverts

It really doesn’t get much better than this Australian advert from the Shonky awards:

Or, you might want to have a look at this excellent Adobe advert: