Thank you for the thermometer award.
I was a bit surprised and confused at the warnings printed on the box, the content directed at the subjects of volatility, combustibility, and the potential conflagration ability if the obviously thin glass were broken. As a nerd geek in high school, in an unexpected contemporary situation, and having been a former frequent target of many in the room from back in high school, I read everything on that box, first, before opening... I figured you guys remembered, from high school, the various low yield explosions, and noxious gas clouds, the occasional wild electrical display phenomenon; could maybe might be wanting to get even ...
Being a nerd geek can have its compensations; Harry Johnson (turn of the last century classical chemistry teacher) really appreciated having a student around that could cause bigger explosions than he planted in the classroom to keep the students from falling asleep (sometime during the hour, you never knew when, you never knew where, there was going to be a big bang). I think that it might have been Bob Vorwalski that found one before class when Harry was out of the room, enhanced it with the materials available right next to it, and planted it under my chair. Near the end of class the four feet departed radically from that chair in which I was sitting obliviously, and I disappeared, straight down, below the level of the lab bench. Harry turned around, couldn’t see me. The administration wanted me to pay for that chair. The faculty feared Harry Johnson, and, I surmise, the administration also. Job security? Anyway, the reputation was good for a socially withdrawn nerd geek, but also unfortunate fodder for having been a frequent target of Doug Johnson’s writing in the “Skyrocket” school newspaper... The remaining teachers, of course, were afraid of me, which had a certain utility... Anyway, the option went briefly through my mind that the contemporary plot here could be, maybe, to finally get even using the mechanism of this unknown award contraption...
I picked up, from its foam cradle, the hypodermic shaped thermometer, and held it; unfortunately like a nurse would (with my right thumb on what could very well be a trigger), and unfortunately with the pointy end toward Barry Jensen... I think the option went briefly though his mind, that the unfortunate consequence of the award was to place into my hands the raw materials for a forming contemporary plot involving a conflagration, maybe to finally get even...
Barry had been trying unsuccessfully to teach me chemistry since Klipstein (science at John Muir Junior High). Klipstein spent a science class trying to teach me something, while I spent that class admiring the form of Cheryl Envick (which she has maintained elegantly). Made it hard to sit, then and now... She had an attraction to me then, which, if I had acted upon, could have led to an unintended shortening of natural life span... Barry had already amassed a chemistry lab (not chemistry set, though it started with several, and he had obtained all of the different chemicals possible). Klipstein took Barry under his wing, teaching him for a presentation at some science fair, involving wet chemical reagents. Private tutoring of budding genius, before lethality emerged. Barry was doing college level quantitative analysis in lower level junior high. Barry, of course, needed large amounts of distilled water, with which to create the various wet chemical reagents. I was recruited to set up and operate the still to make the required large quantities of extremely pure distilled water. Hey, that whole thing about Klipstein’s back room, could be fixed with a little paint, and replacing everything that was made out of plastic; wasn’t a big expense, wasn’t a really big deal...
I never really saw fear in the face of Berry Jenson before that award at our gathering last night... Anyway, he grabbed the thermometer, set it down on the table, and explained to me what it was, and how it worked. Once he started talking, the various obvious attributes of the device became apparent even to me, and my fear level subsided...
I was sitting with Doug Johnson, and Bob Vorwalski, and Barry Jensen, which were, it was never found out, the writers and publishers of “The Subversive”; the underground, unauthorized, alternative to the faculty micromanaged and content reviewed school newspaper (Skyrocket). “The Subversive” had a wide circulation, even among the faculty. There had been an administration investigation to try to find out where “The Subversive” was coming from; apparently unsupported by the faculty, who should have guessed. I was the operator of the press (free labor wannabe). Anyway, these guys would never let me write for “The Subversive”, because, they told me over and over, I had no sense of humor, no literary talent, and was generally disinteresting. Such is the life of a nerd geek. Anyway, the award last night created a certain level of discomfort in this peer group, which I really treasured...
I hadn’t been paying attention to the speaker at our gathering, was talking to my former little circle from high school, until I heard my name over the PA. I still can pick out my name from background noise, a protection mechanism finely honed in high school... When my group told me to go up to the front, receive my prize, and return; I kept asking them if this was for a literary composition. I was seriously curious about what this prize was for, hadn’t been paying attention; they were a little, well, at least to a minor extent, mortified. Once I figured that out, I didn’t let on, kept the inquiry going...
Thank you, for more than you know... I will treat this as a truly most prized possession, obviously for far more than its curiosity or intrinsic value...
http://www.collisionavoidance.org
Formal Lab Report - Galileo Thermometer
Galileo was Wrong
OR
If You Give an Engineer Something that He Hasn’t Seen Before
You are Going to Get an Argument
Galileo is credited with making this thermometer. Therm (how hot is it) meter (let’s measure). Not sure if they had D’Arsenval Galvanometers yet (real meters like the one in my pocket [hey, I’m an electrical engineer]), or even knew yet that the closed line integral along the wire path of the electric field (the voltage, or electrical pressure) is equal to (came from) the negative of (there is this polarity adjustment) the surface integral (across the open area of the coil cross section) of the time rate of change of the magnetic field (changing magnetic field strengths cause voltage induction). They were, finally, getting to the idea of test equipment in order to measure things, in order to see how stuff works. That is what an engineer is; use your knowledge of how stuff works to build something useful, so people will feed you and you won’t starve. Hey, it’s better than working, and you get to legally play with stuff that can conflagrate. Anyway, way back, Galileo made this thermometer, it worked. When some fool (pure scientist) bumbles across some observation (that nobody else has documented before), he gets to explain it (which winds up hurting society because all the kids have to memorize it, and scientist aint no engineer). Galileo proclaimed that constant masses will sink in a liquid (if they started out as floating) as the liquid heats up. Well, he got the whole idea wrong...
Think about this. The floating, later sinking when things warmed up, thingy is a constant mass (you didn’t chop it up and take some away, there was no nuclear explosion where mass gets converted to energy), but the same is true of the fluid (you didn’t break the glass while pointing it at Barry Jensen, though you could see the fear in his face because he knew that the fluid chosen was both volatile and combustible, and had significant previous experience with Blair Peshak). OK, so, the thermometer does measure heat (a form of energy), so the test equipment design works, but what is the actual physical phenomenon here?
What we know is, mass is the number of atoms (also some atoms are heavier than other atoms, it’s really the product of the two properties). We also know that, when you heat things up, they get larger. For example, if you want to press fit two things together, cool the pin (the goesinta, or male part) so it will get smaller, and heat up the part with the hole in it (the wentinta, or female part) so that the hole gets larger (the stuff where the hole wasn’t will expand as it heats up, so, the hole will also get larger to accommodate the stuff removed when the hole was drilled). Put A into B (machined such as to be a tight fit at the temperature difference), and wait for them to reach the same temperature. Now you will never get them apart again (and you didn’t have to rivet your fingers, and you didn’t start the welding shop on fire).
The deal with this thermometer is, see, DENSITY (you know, the engineer is more dense than the scientist, should separate the two groups in school so the dense don’t hold down the not so dense; put engineer in industrial arts and the scientists in physics and chemistry [that should hold back societal progress]). The Galileo thermometer is based upon the principle of temperature related density variation. And we aint into differential calculus here, though it works as a language to concisely describe what is going on.
It really goes like this: When you heat things up, they get bigger. Everything with a positive coefficient of thermal expansion. Same mass, larger three dimensional space. Einstein might claim that, when you heat things up, it’s really that the universe is collapsing. Hey, he wasn’t an engineer, engineers don’t care... The real deal is, different types of compounds or mixtures do so to a different degree of extent, per unit temperature rise.
The “mass” has a density (mass per unit volume), and it decreases (the density, not the mass) at a smaller rate (per degree of temperature rise) than the density of the “fluid” (the “mass” and the “fluid” were selected by the engineer to be that way in the design).
Density is what floats your boat, so to speak. Ships are big and heavy, but they float in water even though the stuff that they are made of doesn’t. See, the deal is, the weight of the water displacement (the water that had to get out of the way of the part of the boat below the water line) is the same as the weight of the whole boat (remember, steel is more dense than water, but the boat is hollow and the density of air is much smaller than that of water, so the thing built of stuff more dense than water will float in water if the engineer designed the shape right).
It is NOT that a constant mass will sink in a fluid (if it started out floating in the fluid) as the temperature rises; it is that the reducing but relatively more constant density item will sink in a fluid of greater density reduction over that temperature rise. As a scientist (bumbling fool), you never really got to know that; just all of society’s kids have to memorize your mistake. As an engineer, you have to know that, and also be able to use that to build something that society will pay money for (or else you starve).
Here is the exam question: if there were an available cheap negative temperature coefficient material that could exist at all interesting temperatures in either solid or liquid form, your choice; to increase the sensitivity of the instrument, would you use it for the “mass” or the “fluid”? Here is the accompanying essay question: Why? (Here is where you get to grade understanding, and here is where you get to point out what is a double negative and introduce Boolean logic, which is what computers work on).
This is the “get even” part, but also the real lesson part for our educational system: See, back in high school, Barry Jensen, and Bob Vorwalski, and most particularly Bruce Maaser, used to pick on Blair Peshak: “You aren’t a real scientist, you are only an engineer (you aint as smart as us).”. So did the high school guidance counselor (“Well, I would advise you against becoming an engineer, there is unlikely to be good paying jobs for steam locomotive drivers in the future.”). Doug Johnson didn’t care, he was entertaining the girls; while none of us could get a date. We all wanted to be Doug Johnson, or, more accurately, wanted what he got away with.
See why mothers in 1966 told their daughters: “Dear, don’t date engineers; they’re weird.”? It becomes a self solving Darwin; engineers don’t replicate, die off, the development of the nuclear weapon is postponed, society remains safer in existence longer. But is dumber as a result and life for everybody is harder as a result.
Which is dumber, the dork engineer or the admired politician? That is obvious; the problem is, it is the politician that is in charge, and it never took any form of science or math, because it was too hard. You can’t separate people into groups of perceived smarter and dumber, because, if you do that, one group will become less challenged and less engaged, and therefore will become dumber. And that is a disbenefit to society, not to mention the victimized individual.
I got into a heated debate with Ann Humphrey over this, truly one of what JFK called the “best and brightest whiz kids”. Her point was, you have to separate, or the slow kids will hold back the faster kids, the standard will deteriorate to the best that the slowest kid will be able to do, there are only so much resources. If I were not just a dumb engineer, it would have occurred to me at the time (I could have won that debate) that all you have to do is to create an environment where bullying is not at all tolerated to any extent, where peer tutoring is heavily rewarded, where kids are engaged in class. Hey, you remember peer pressure from high school... Use that as a part of the educational system design, for force multiplication. Besides, it is a different one of us that is best at any particular one of the many things. Probably the more motivated one, for that subject... So, why not benefit from the best motivator for each area of knowledge, for the group? Now, go design an educational system that will do that.
The only possible argument against this is, Barry Jensen might have succeeded in teaching Blair Peshak chemistry in junior high (Harry Johnson let him do that to everybody in high school, if only to escape the constant corrections from the audience), only to be unintentionally killed in a conflagration as the result (most recently, potentially, by a thermometer wielded by Blair Peshak). Well, OK, that is what adult supervision is for. Safety referee and moderator; not content containment, and certainly NOT separation by IQ (which is only a measure of what you retained from the non-challenged level in public school). I propose that there is no such thing as innate intelligence, just dumb adults and kids bored out of their minds by of the number of mistakes that they need to rote memorize. There is an attention coefficient, and that needs to be measured in order to motivate, not drug.
Here is my engineering proof: They let me teach in college. Not as a graduate student, as a faculty member. In engineering and in computer science. Seniors and graduate students. They did that because, they said, their graduating students couldn’t get jobs, and I made all of these things (had a good reputation). (Changing using my first name to using my middle name covered all of the records of conflagrations from the administration files from my public school years.) Now, a funny thing happened: As the teacher, I learned more than I handed out. OK, mostly from researching what part was handed out by an engaged student, and coming back to correct that later (without mentioning the author of the error). And the students learned, and retained, more as a result; because of the perception that they were driving. We were all more motivated and engaged, and the level of correct understanding increased in the final result for all parties. OK, and a few entertaining conflagrations that terrorized the school administration... They’re aint no free lunch...
http://www.collisionavoidance.org
Thursday, August 30, 2012 4:58 AM I published some on this web site about my WHS experiences, terminated to the relief of the city population in 1966, and offered opinions on how to do high school better based on my outcome from deficiencies in the WHS education curriculum and policy, and following life experiences. I offered constructive criticisms, mentioned the university experiences as faculty that I had subsequently, and left a list of improvements that public education needed to address; but left unanswered how to do that.
I may have found something on an experiment in that area, recommend reading: http://www.utdanacenter.org/downloads/products/manornewtech_casestudy.pdf
I found that separating students into bunches, usually started in early grade school based on reading ability, is a disastrous mistake. It sets expectations for the poor initial readers to be failures in life, and actually stunts their learning because people generally shy away from what they do poorly, and seek shelter from peer embarrassment rather than seek peer aid. Need to fix that, along with "see spot run, run spot run". Boring beyond belief...
I found that categorizing students by IQ, which is nothing but a memory test of previous learning, is a disastrous mistake. Why we do not do that at university. It has been my experience that, in any group of people, there is always one best able to handle any particular challenge, and it is always NOT the "sharpest tool in the shed". Synergy is where the group is greater than the sum of its parts, and comes about only from the differing "experts" enabling "overlap" which allows the group to succeed. It is time to bury John Wayne.
The educational challenge is to motivate the individual and to incorporate the individual into the group as a contributing mentor. To accomplish this, administration must kill ALL forms of bullying. Harry Johnson tried this model at WHS when he let Barry Jensen try to teach 10th grade chemistry at WHS. Compliments to Harry and Barry, and Berry went on to be university faculty in exactly this endeavor, but the students made sure it would fail because we didn't have the contributory education model down yet, still don't. We bullied, and I regret my part in it (there is absolutely nothing wrong with students teaching students so long as it is expertise teaching non-expertise and adult supervised). John Wayne taught us to demonstrate superiority over competitors, really really really wrong model.
We have a failed educational system in this country. Among industrially advanced nations, we rate something around 36th in our ability to produce scientists (principle discoverers) and engineers (people who use discovered principles to build things that aid society). I can't even name all 35 countries that are a better place to live and work and bring up kids. The ability to read the old English of Shakespeare may be a fun academic exercise, but it doesn't keep the lights on, and it most certainly is not an indication of level of intelligence. The "Subversive" may have been fun to write for, and the thrill of not getting caught always a draw for high school students, and there is a necessary place for introspection and political humor, but this is not the mark to strive for (we thought it was, we were wrong). The Odeon Resonator incident may have wreaked catastrophe while terrorizing the vast majority of students and absolutely all faculty, blanking police radio and, in certain parts of town, television for a while, but Jon Harkness was absolutely right about Advanced Integrated Science and group research projects...
Sent from Keith Peshak
keithpeshak@localnet.com
512-636-0851
From: Keith Peshak