Learning to Read, Unschooling, and the Donalds

When asked "How do unschooled kids learn to read?: My best answer so far is, "Randomly."

No. 2, our four-year-old, who is rather uninterested in the whole alphabet thing is learning to sight-read while denying that he can. He seems to have taken to heart the Spiderman admonition that with great power comes great responsibility and he wants none of it. He'll look at exit signs, turn to us, and ask "What's that exit for?" When I ask, "Are you learning how to read," his quick response is "No!" His most amusing reading slip-up to date has been to tell us throughout our road trip from San Francisco to Wyoming that he'd seen Donald Duck's. I thought he was perhaps just going pleasantly divergent until we drove through a town small enough that we were right next to a McDonald's when he proclaimed "There's Donald Duck's! I love the food there!" He peruses Donald Duck comics frequently, and had put the two words together.

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The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

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