One of my little obsessions is with the practice of teaching. While I’m nominally an engineer, whose job it is to essentially make machines work, I’m a pretty good teacher in a small scale environment (e.g. explaining some new technology to a small group of colleagues) and I think I’m good at constructively engaging and maintaining the attention of the average child. And while I do recognize the critical role of teachers in our society, and the dire need for scientifically and mathematically literate teachers, I don’t think I’m the right person to do that.
But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by the topic. Here are a few recent things that I found engaging.
The Principal Story ran on PBS last year and focuses on two school principals who are trying to educate in an environment where everyone expects failure. They are not afraid to scrutinize teacher performance or even fire teachers, but there remains a lot of dysfunction there in the teaching corps, even within the principal himself/herself. They put a withering amount of energy into their efforts, with some impact on their personal lives. And at the end is a coda where Arne Duncan is interviewed about questions raised, and not just softball questions either.
The Street Stops Here is a documentary about St. Anthony’s, a parochial (Catholic) school in Jersey City, New Jersey. Known nationwide for producing great basketball players, the school has a perennial struggle to find the money to keep the doors open and keep educating some of the most deserving kids of the New York metro area. While the doc is structured around the basketball program and the high-strung coach Bob Hurley (yeah, father of Bobby), there’s a lot of insight into the world that these kids are coming from and trying to escape.
Whatever It Takes (via Independent Lens) is a similar story on a smaller scale. Edward Tom quit his burgeoning business career to take on the job of principal at a new public school in the South Bronx, one of the worst neighborhoods in the US, and follows him and his faculty and his students as they struggle through the first year of the school’s operation.
A March 2010 feature article in the NYT magazine really drew this into focus for me personally. My central problem with the career of teaching is that I don’t think I could maintain control of the classroom, or even control of myself when faced with various classroom order challenges. Brute intelligence is no match for a room full of choatic teenagers. The NYT article talks at length about the efforts of Doug Lemov, an education researcher with an organization call Uncommon Schools, who has gone around the country observing successful teachers. He’s trying to distill exactly what the techniques are that make the difference between a good teacher and a bad one.
The result,so far, is his book Teach Like A Champion, which proscribes 49 techniques that a teacher can use to maintain control in a classroom and effectively deliver new knowledge. Techniques like “No Opt Out”, which deals with the bored shrug of a student by asking another student for the answer and then doubling back to the original student for the same answer. Repeatedly, until he answers (basically repeating the answer he just heard from another student), thus showing him that he’s not going to avoid get picked simply by doing a crappy job.
The book even comes with a DVD containing short video clips of actual teachers employing these techniques in their classrooms. It is an inspiring sight to watch these teachers maintain a tight grip on their classroom, but do so in a positive way that doesn’t let the inevitable classroom disruption derail the day’s lesson.
It’s quite sobering to see the amount of energy and discipline that goes into running a classroom this way. And I can see that there are probably critics who will call these techniques rigid to the point of cartoonishness. I mean, school uniforms is one thing, but these teachers have the students standing at attention and responding in unison to barked-out commands.
And the teacher unions. Teachers know more about these issues than anyone, but then you have these ludicrous situations that result from a horribly distorted system, such as rubber rooms. I think there are valid criticisms on both sides of the debate, but it’s hard to separate when there’s so much shouting and posturing going on. I do still have faith that Obama and Duncan will at least make some progress in pushing this mess in the right direction.
I really don’t think I want to be a teacher, but the subject does fascinate me.
I (Chris) continue to be a giddy little boy when it comes to flying. I always want a window seat, and I really do spend most of the flight, even a 5 hour flight like this one, with my face pressed to the window looking down in amazement. And also looking at my GPS receiver, which I received for Christmas from my family a few years ago specifically for this purpose — seeing what I was flying over.
Arrived in SEA-TAC airport, took the shiny new 
So we punted and took the monorail out to Seattle Center. The monorail, built in 1962 for the Worlds Fair (coughknoxvillecough), is perfectly functional but looking a bit dated, and really only goes from Tourist Point A (Westlake / downtown area) to Tourist Point B (Seattle Center). Seattle Center is most known for the Space Needle (more 1962 municipal construction) and the Experience Music Project, both of which we planned to studiously avoid. There was a indie craft fair (excuse me, “
From there we backtracked a bit to where we’d spotted 
Escaped from there and on the way back to the transit station Sharon spotted a “variety store” advertising Asian wares. Inside we found a truly strange and wonderful place. 
Finally reaching 
From there we stopped by the CoCA Ballard gallery (freakishly small, literally the size of a closet) on our way to catching a bus out through the Magnolia neighborhood, and took a cool woodsy trail down to the Chittendon Locks, aka the Ballard Locks. Fish ladder. Good stuff. And this time took a closer look at the garden, with impossibly huge flowers.
Final stop: the touristy restaurant a block from the hotel. Walls covered in beer tap handles, attracting a mix of tourist dullards and drunk rednecks. We were served an assortment of meat in impossibly huge portions. And got the hard upsell from the wait staff.
Launch wasn’t going to be until Friday, but I’ve learned from previous trips that I need to get there and onsite at KSC early on the day before a launch because they will have some unique things planned for the media, like a tour of some facility that is otherwise off limits to the public. But you have to get there first thing in the morning and check out the signup sheets. Which I did, and found that they were offering a tour of the 
kind of a letdown (the ultimate would be the VAB or an OPF) but I’ll take it. So I signed up and then had a couple hours to kill before it started.
The briefing wrapped up and I killed some more time, and then got ready to go on the SLSL tour. Bastards left early. No tour. Bah!
and up front are various NASA representatives available to answer any question, and all around are various TVs showing the NASA TV feeds. So in a modest area up front, they had a space suit expert who had brought in a suit and was dressing up some poor young lady from public affairs staff in it and explaining the parts as he went along. This wasn’t the big white suit they use for spacewalks, rather the orange “launch and entry” suit that the astronauts wear when inside the space shuttle during the hazardous phases at the very beginning and end of each mission. Pressurized air, coolant loops, helmet with visors, and even an emergency life raft and oxygen.
After that, I grabbed a quick bite to eat at the cafeteria (the same one the workers use, another thrill) and then had a couple hours to kill until the next event. So I did a test setup of my telescope in the parking lot. I’d brought a telescope with me in March 2009, but this time I was bringing the fancier new one. I hadn’t actually used it in a couple months, and just threw it in the car for the drive down, so I needed to give it a full test before things got busy on launch day. 
I spent two hours swing it around, looking at the launch pad, osprey nests, airliners high overhead, vultures circling over the VAB, etc. It all looked like it was working and I packed it back up into the car. I had my head down looking in the eyepiece most of the time and laterfound that I hadn’t put sunscreen on my neck and now had a wicked sunburned “red neck”.
a trip out to the launch pad to see 
Got to KSC right on time and got in line for the busses. These were going to take us over to the 
20 feet while they let the dogs go down the line sniffing for … weapons, I guess, although they’d probably not be too happy to find dope either.
At one point my work colleagues interviewed NASA VIP Bobby Braun, and then just prior to launch astronaut Dave Wolf showed up to do on-air commentary with our reporter.
I’d brought my telescope in an attempt to track it on the way up. Tracking an object manually with a telescope (even a nice motorized model like the one I bought last year) is terribly difficult, because once you lose the object it’s very hard to get it back in view. Use of a finders scope (typically mounted on the side of the main telescope) is absolutely critical. I have one, that projects a virtual dot on the sky using an LED and a special lens, however I had made the unfortunate mistake of leaving the thing switched on. So at the moment of truth, 2:20pm, when I went to use it to track the shuttle racing up through the sky, the battery in the finder scope was dead. Damn it. I tried for a few seconds to catch it with the telescope and then gave up and just watched the launch with naked eyes.
Spun the car around and headed back in and got into the briefing room just in time to catch the briefing 🙂
The Hubble movie I’d seen already (via long drive down to Columbus!) but wanted to see again just to catch more detail; it’s actually not that great of a production in my opinion, but I’ve been spoiled by watching the May 2009 STS-125 mission progress live at work and also the daily highlights in HD. But the other movie, Magnificent Desolation, is fantastic! (tagline: “Only 12 men have walked on the moon. You’re next.”) The general idea is to reintroduce young audiences to what exactly Apollo was, and so what they did was incorporate actual lunar surface footage with really stunning simulations of the lunar surface. In IMAX it is truly breathtaking. Go see this if you can!
There are cruise ships heading in and out of Port Canaveral all day long, and an unbelievable number of people all hanging out on the jetty and the beach nearby, apparently just enjoying the sun. It was actually crowded (and noisy) to the point of being claustrophobic, probably because it’s a free beach with easy access. Avoid Jetty Park.
Here’s an excellent 
Another view. These are both actually slightly blurry. I keep forgetting to bring my tripod on these trips, although I don’t know if I would have been allowed to carry it on this tour anyway.
Here’s an establishing shot — obviously a panorama stitched together from many individual photos. The turbine generators pictured above are inside the buildings at the bottom of the dam — in this case, we were inside the building closer to us in our vantage point here, to the side (west) of the dam.
The golden building built into the face of the cliff is the dam’s visitors center. And behind it you see one of the electrical transmission line towers. It’s leaning over like that because the wires from the left are flying up from below, from the turbine generator building at the bottom of the canyon. In the distance you see the bridge, which within weeks will probably have the last girders finally in place to span the river.
Climbed up a hillside near the entrance to the 
One final parting view before we hit the road for the long, desolate drive back to Vegas.
All this electric vehicle activity is very reminiscent of the internet buzz in 1992-1994. That was well before nearly anyone reading this had heard of the internet, much less actually used it (I got into it in mid 1993), but some of us were there and could see the tidal wave coming. I think what we’re seeing here with the Tesla Roadster is like UIUC/NCSA’s Mosaic, and this fall we could be seeing the equivalent of the Netscape browser that would storm the world in early 1994. The mystery is to what extant the GM Volt or Nissan Leaf will catch on; and keep in mind that both will be in limited production for the first year. Will the GM Volt be analogous to Internet Explorer, with bugs and broken standards but backed by an enormous marketing operation and a corporate behemoth prone to dirty tricks? I think the analogy falls apart there, and in fact right now it’s looking like GM is playing its cards right, engineering (promoting) a truly groundbreaking car. Certainly by late 2010, with both the Nissan Leaf and GM Volt coming to market, all this is going to start getting a lot more attention in the mainstream media and public mindshare in general.
An interesting concept that I came across: gasoline engines are so wildly inefficient (i.e. waste heat) that those cars are less sensitive to other inefficiencies such as aggressive driving, high speeds (wind drag), operating all the accessories, etc. Electric motors are far more efficient, so when you size the motor to the car, you actually end up with less margin for all the other things — you have less of a monstrous energy wasting machine to throw around. So you become more sensitive to things like driving behavior affecting your range. Also, this means that the impact of all these EVs to the electric grid will be less than I’ve written about (in Part 1). We wouldn’t need to convert all of those imported oil joules to electric generation and transmission — only 20-30 percent.
The biggest problem is, there are half a dozen different charge connector standards, such as the inductive paddles as used in the late/lamented GM EV1, or the conductive connector used by Tesla. Fortunately, all the major (current and future) makers of plug-in EVs last year agreed on a new connector standard, called SAE J1772. 
Which indirectly led me to this 
Plug In America is an organization that has been advocating for electric vehicles for a long time. these people are overjoyed to finally be seeing the fruits of their labors, with the first two mass-produced cars coming to market and countless more in the next couple years. Well, not countless, they are counting! They maintain an excellent 
Public charging stations for electric vehicles are starting to become more widespread, especially in California. EV Charger Maps maintains a crowd-sourced 
[see 
But that’s hardly the car for the average Johnny Paycheck. But by this fall, two new models will be in dealerships and in the hands of consumers and getting a ton of press: the Nissan LEAF and the Chevy Volt. GM is increasingly betting the farm on the Volt so you’re seeing it all over TV, in brand advertising and the inevitable gee-whiz TV reports about EVs and energy independence. But the Volt won’t actually be available for sale until November, and even then it’s going to be a limited launch in a few select markets (as I write this, those markets appear to be California, Michigan and Washington DC.)
While the GM Volt was announced over three years ago, Nissan didn’t say a thing about their plans until surprising us just months ago (August 2009) with The Nissan LEAF. This is a pure EV — all battery and motor, no gas generator or gas tank like the Volt or other hybrid cars. It looks like a Versa, if you’ve seen that Nissan hatchback.
So the Nissan will be the next car to market, beating the Volt by a couple months, and it may come out in higher volumes and steal the show from the Volt. That said, it is a pure EV, with no “range extender” gasoline generator, so people are going to be swimming in “range anxiety” and frankly it’s not a car that you’re going to use for long trips, at least not for a few years until charging stations become far more widespread. The maximum range is 100 miles, after which it’ll need several hours to recharge. Right now this is typical for EVs. 
Nissan is doing a roadshow with this car, the “Zero Emission Tour”, and it passed through Atlanta last weekend. They had the car set up for viewing in Lenox Mall, with a posse of young shiny PR droids standing around smiling and answering questions. You couldn’t actually touch the car, much less get in it — they had it roped off. But you could get a good look at it and see that this thing is real and it’s coming. 
They also had a charger stand. This is the thing that you’d have mounted in your garage, wired to your house power like a clothes dryer or electric oven. The “nozzle” plugs into the charging port in front of the car. Typically you’d leave it plugged in overnight and have it all charged up for you in the morning, ready for up to 100 miles of driving. The cost of electricity is nearly negligible, say a dollar or or two for a fill up.
For scale, that’s about the size of a silver dollar. Up to now there have been half a dozen different plug types, basically one for each car maker, and none compatible with each other. Now with this new plug standard, we can start building out public charging infrastructure. The port on the left is an older Japanese standard, I think.
Five years ago today, on January 14th, 2005, NASA’s Cassini probe at Saturn raced past Titan and deployed ESA’s Huygens probe to descend into that moon’s murky atmosphere. The probe was designed to only last a couple hours, long enough to parachute slowly down through the atmosphere, hopefully survive the impact on the ground, and then report what it saw at the surface for a few minutes before its batteries died or it sunk in the muck or who knows what. After months of analyzing the results, the scientists released these two astounding videos showing what this strange world looked like.
1. This 5-minute video collects the actual pictures that were taken by Huygens during the descent and creates a virtual movie out of them. With narration describing the descent (so turn up your volume!), you should first watch this video to get a sense of what was happening during the descent, and then continue to the real killer item below
2. Here’s the one that this blog posting is really about. This is an absolutely incredible view of all of the data that came back from Huygens during the descent. You can watch it all the way through and still not fully absorb all the types of information it is presenting to you. Truly a tour de force in scientific data visualization, and possibly the most amazing video I’ve ever seen in my life.
On November 16th, the space shuttle Atlantis and her crew launched into space on the 
Even at closest approach we were still 25-30 miles cross range from the groundtrack (and it was another 15 miles up!) so I wasn’t sure if we were going to hear the sonic boom. That is the main prize of a landing, besides actually seeing it fly over. And we heard it — a clear double boom! By the time we heard it, the shuttle was waaaaay past us, practically at the north horizon, so you can envision a loooong cone being dragged behind it, representing the sonic boom, like the image at left.
So there’s my data point: during a shuttle landing, at 25-30 miles cross range from the groundtrack you can still hear the sonic boom. I don’t know how high up the shuttle can be and still make an audible boom down at the ground. 120,000 feet? 200,000 feet? I asked around online and didn’t get an answer.
By the time I’d gotten there though, I’d formulated a new plan. Take one of the public tour buses and see if I can get myself to the right place at the right time and get some photos of the shuttle being towed as we drove by in our bus. At left is the area in question (from Google Earth); the shuttle lands on the airstrip in the distance in the upper left of the picture, then gets towed back towards the processing buildings, which are near the base of the huge Vehicle Assembly Building you see in the foreground.
Critically, when you leave the launch gantry you don’t have to get back on the same bus. They just have a constant stream of busses arriving and departing, taking folks to the next stop. So I now had another opportunity to time my departure to try to intercept the shuttle under tow.
A couple minutes later, as we approached the towway, we could see the tail of the shuttle poking above the trees! (The top of the shuttle’s tail is nearly 60 feet high — 5 stories) The driver slowed down as we drove past the moment of catching a good glimpse but said he wasn’t allowed to stop. That’s alright, I was madly snapping photos and was able to grab one good one, seen here. Again, so you understand the context, we were driving past and looking down a long road towards the landing strip, where the shuttle had landed and was now being towed back to its regular hangar.
The bus stopped.
To the right is an aerial photo from a mission a couple years ago showing what I had lucked into. If you look closely (click to enlarge), you’ll see the shuttle being towed with the convoy of vehicles behind it. Just behind those, at the right edge of that picture, you can make out some more vehicles at the side of the road. Those are the tour busses, and I was in one of them.
It turns out that when they tow the shuttle back, about 30 minutes prior, they stop traffic on the road that it’ll be rolling over and literally sweep that section of road clean. They run street cleaners or brooms or something and then walk it down (a mile or two) inspecting for any remaining debris. Seems expensive and excessive, right? Well, they are towing the shuttle back on its own wheels (way too hard to get it up on a dolly), and can you imagine what an operation it would be to have to change a tire on that beast if it had a blowout? It ends up being much easier and cheaper to instead just spend the money and time to clean and inspect the road just prior to rollover. Risk management.
After they do that surface inspection, though, nobody is allowed to drive on the road until the shuttle has rolled over it and reached the building it’s going to. That meant stopping any southbound traffic, and so I had lucked into one of the most impossibly great photo opportunities imaginable that day.
(A week after this, I sent one of these photos to a friend at a certain major media organization, and she liked it so much that