Trade-Offs

A fellow Twitter user recently posted, attention is valuable; be careful where you spend it.

I always promised myself that I would never be owned by things. So often, when people become attached to material possessions, they lose a bit of their freedom. The item must be cared for, maintained and protected. We invest our time and attention to the item. It gains value through our own personal investment. In doing so, we can lose objectivity and forget what is truly important and worthy of our time and attention. Sometimes the care of our possessions becomes more than we can handle, so we must recruit others to help. In doing so, we also lose privacy.

Let's take cars or instance. I use this as an example because I am not a big car fan, have little if any emotional connection to any particular car, and generally find them annoying, somewhat necessary evils.
But others see it differently. Some wash their cars weekly, inside and out. They wax them, buy accessories for them, even "soup up" the engines. They buy air fresheners to simulate the vinyl and synthetic upholstery off-gassing smells of a new car. They buy fancy stereo systems just for car use.
In spending so much time and effort, they become owned by the car (or substitute your choice of material obsession, because the idea here can apply to most material things).
We all have our weaknesses.
My own weakness is my website. I spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on it, and need to apply a little discipline to return to a more balanced place.

There is nothing wrong with taking care of our things. Maintaining our belongings can help them last longer and reduce waste. It is when we go beyond that line that we get into trouble.

In one of my child development classes, my professor made a point of reminding us about how these material obsessions of ours appear to children. He had some examples of how children made poor choices about their own safety based on their perceptions that certain material items were worth more (at least to their parents) than they were. I will spare your the examples here, but some were tragic, and the parents weren't greedy obsessive monsters, they were ordinary people acting much like any other people in our society.

How many times do we admonish kids not to touch a cherished item, or worse, spend as much or more time maintaining an item than playing with the kids? Or even just make them wait until we are finished doing so before it is their turn for our attention? This sends a strong message to kids. They learn that "things" are important and that they come second (or later) in importance.

In fact, this is a message that resonates through society; often we make choices that work towards our own material gain rather than the general benefit of humankind. These choices do not bring us joy or happiness, nor do they always reflect our true values. From financial investments, health care (esp. mental health care), immigration policies, foreign aid and development programs, low income housing issues, taxation, education reform, even wars, these obsessions accumulate and begin to shape our larger decisions and value systems on personal and national levels in subconscious ways.

It's time for a wake up call! I'm making a personal commitment to become aware of where I spend my time and energy so that it reflects the values I hold dear. I challenge you to do the same!

The Lemonade Energy Pages are Up!

The Lemonade energy pages are up now. There are dozens of energy-related experiments and activities to try out.

The categories are divided into electrical, solar, wind (including a sub-section loaded with experiments on air pressure), kinetic/potential energy, chemical, and insulation/conductivity.

The activities include lots of interesting and diverse concepts from practical tips for building your own Rube Goldberg machine, to making endothermic and exothermic reactions, building your own solar still and using a balloon to light a florescent light tube. You can see how energy can be stored in a flywheel using your own bike and see just how heavy a sheet of newspaper can be (you may not even be able to lift it!).

I chose these particular activities because they are hands-on, lots of fun, and memorable. They also lend themselves well to group work as well as further exploration into the given topic.

This time there are a couple of experiments that we didn't pre-test that are external links (stomp rockets and elephant toothpaste). When I get to these, I will provide any feedback if needed. I usually try and pre-test everything that goes onto the site before posting. If you have tried either of these, (or any other activities on the Lemonade site for that matter!) I would appreciate your feedback so I can make the site as useful as possible for all visitors.

Side note: I did pre-test the tempera paint stenciled t-shirts that I posted here on the blog earlier, but my most recent batch ran when I washed them. I suspect I did not use a hot enough iron this time, or it could be that I accidentally used washable tempera. If you try this one out, you may want to try out a piece of test fabric first.

Summertime and Newfoundland

After 2 weeks vacationing out east with my family, I guess I've stayed on vacation to some degree. This is not necessarily a bad thing--I've been enjoying the kids and the summer. But it means that I haven't been keeping up with posts!                                                                                                                                    

I am a person who is drawn to natural places. Places I loved as a child have been destroyed, and I am dismayed when I hear some speak of soccer fields and golf courses as "green spaces" (green in colour maybe, but that's about it!). Places of wild beauty, like Temagami and Clayoquot Sound (and most of Vancouver Island that still hasn't been raped and pillaged) own huge chunks of my heart.

This year my family and I went out east and I met: The Rock.

Newfoundland spoke to me. The land is dominant in a way that took me by surprise the moment we drove off the ferry. I suddenly understood why the Newfoundlanders I have known are the way they are--strong, tough, kind, resilient, non-judgmental, warm and caring. The bleakness of the tuckamore sweeping out to wind-scraped meadows of caribou moss and wildflowers--strong, tough, beautiful and nurturing--shows just how much a land can shape its people. It is a place devoid of material excesses. You won't find a Tim Horton's or McDonald's every few kilometres (except in Cornerbrook or St. John's perhaps). You're more likely to be invited into someone's home for tea. It seems like Newfoundlanders would prefer small villages to towns or cities. Historically this has led to many "resettlement" plans, but the small villages (sometimes less that 100 people, not often more than 600) seem to have a staying power that defies conventional economics.

So often, in my semi-urban existence in southern Ontario, the land becomes something to cross, build upon or manipulate as if it were put there purely for human convenience. From where I sit in my comfy house with A/C and all modern conveniences, it appears to be the people who shape the land.

Don't get me wrong--the ancient white pine forests that once adorned NFLD are long gone, and the fisheries may never recover as the larger fisheries continue to break laws, cross boundaries and fish in completely unsustainable ways. Offshore drilling remains a constant environmental threat.


But there is a resiliency there, perhaps borne of the wind and climate of the place, maybe from as far back as the massive geological collisions and retractions that formed the island, that speaks of a land not easily tamed.

In NFLD, the land still speaks, and it calls to me.

Weird Musings About Time

In a much earlier post, I talked about my relationship with science. If you happened to have read that, you will know that I am not a scientist. I am interested in science, but don't really speak the language or have any formal training, and as such, my musings are pretty much for my own entertainment. This usually comes at times when I am overtired and cannot sleep, so my thoughts are not usually very coherent!

I once read a piece--I think it may have been written by Robert Fulghum--in which the author explains that whenever he meets a new person, he asks them if they know the answer to the meaning of life (assuming 42 isn't it). He explains that while it may seem odd, he'd feel pretty silly if he met someone who knew the answer but he had missed the chance to find out because he neglected to ask. After all, the stupidest question is the one left unasked.

In this spirit, I am going to ask/speculate here about a few things I've wondered about regarding the physics of time.

Perhaps you will be able to clear these up for me and allow me to gain a good night's rest.

1. What happens to time as temperature falls towards zero degrees Kelvin? At zero, does time actually stop? This goes along with another question, which is, how can we accurately measure time? An atomic clock is the current best accuracy we have, but it would seem that the fall of temperature would distort the measurement when taken to this extreme. Any thoughts on this?

2. This one is from my 12 year old son from a conversation we had tonight at dinner (yeah, we talk about this sort of stuff over dinner!): what if the explosion of the big bang was not spherical, but rather cone-shaped or bi-conical (like lighthouse lights)? What might that mean in regards to time in our universe? Could it predict a parallel universe? Could our lack of symmetry (particle and anti-particle imbalance that allowed our universe to form without particles immediately canceling out) be counterbalanced by a universe on the "other side"? How about 3 cones, or 4?

3. If we could step outside our universe to view it, what would it look like? Would time not exist there, and if so, how would that affect our view? Would the universe become invisible as light takes time to travel? Can there be light outside of time? If we could see it, would we see all of past and present for the universe happening at once? Or would it "appear" as a giant black hole? Could we detect anything at all from it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on any or all of these, or any other similar "imponderable wonderings" you yourself may be having.

Power Pages

Coming soon to a website near you: the power pages full of energy-related activities and experiments.

A sample of some of the activities I'm working on:
- make your own solar still, solar cooker and solar dehydrator
- explore the effects of high and low air pressure
- make a glow in the dark geyser
- explore the role of colour and light in heat absorption
- use edible insulation to bake ice cream (this is already on the site)
- make hot ice and use household items to create heat as well as cold
- explore potential and kinetic energy with marbles and your own Rube Goldberg machine
- make your own rubber-band powered vehicle
- make your own balloon-powered vehicle

There will be lots more there too. This should be up and running by mid July.
Can't wait? Here's a chemistry quickie:

Easy Endothermic Reaction
Materials:
citric acid (sold to keep cut fruit from browning and also in craft stores for making bath bombs--The Bulk Barn sells it in containers that look like spice bottles)
water (warm but not hot)
baking soda
a spoon or stirring rod
a heavy glass container or mug
a thermometer (one with a probe-like end works best)

Method:
Dissolve a teaspoon of citric acid powder in 3-4 teaspoons of water and insert a thermometer. After a few seconds, record the temperature. Slowly add a teaspoon of baking soda a little at a time. Record the temperature, then wait 3 seconds and record it again. Repeat every 30 seconds or so for about 5 minutes. What do you notice?

Now, for the interesting twist my son discovered yesterday:
Wash off the thermometer, then leave the mixture out for an hour or so. Record the air temperature, then stir the mixture and measure it's temperature. Wait 30 seconds and measure again, then another 30 seconds and measure (and record) yet again. Now remove the thermometer and wait 30 seconds are record the air temperature again. What do you notice?

Chemical reactions that cause a drop in temperature are called endothermic. Exothermic reactions create heat.