Tag Archives: science

Doing STEM

‘Doing STEM’ or ‘Doing STEAM’… there is a saying, “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”

I don’t want this to sound like a rant, and I don’t want to knock teachers for trying to do STEM projects. I do want to say that if 5 years ago a teacher did a project with kids where they broke them into groups and had them assemble a limited number of straws and a specific length of tape into the tallest possible tower, and if they do it again today it isn’t suddenly a STEM project.

Now, if that same lesson included teaching geometry and/or structural integrity; or if students had to design it such that their design had to have a function such as offices or apartments; or hold a weighted satellite dish; or if it had to factor in wind resistance (such as a blow dryer at close range); or if they had to model their design first and estimate the height they will achieve… if there was some thinking, designing, modelling, or estimating that was required before or even during the build process, well then it’s looking more like STEM.

Hands-on does not equal STEM. Building something does not equal STEM. Group challenges does not equal STEM. Meaningful integration of cross-curricular concepts, where problem solving requires thinking in more than one subject area relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math is STEM. It doesn’t have to check all the boxes, but it should include thoughtful integration of at least a couple of these.

It’s about making the cross-curricular connections explicit, or at least thinking through how the outcomes and expectations relate to these connections. It’s about developing competencies in the areas of STEM and not just doing a project that looks like STEM.

We don’t really understand

We don’t really understand exponential growth. It’s too hard to comprehend because when we look at growth, we tend to focus on what we’ve seen already, and project forward, but what has already happened is always less significant in length or size than what is still to come. So when we compare what has happened already to what is still to come, we are not comparing equal things.

Fold a piece of paper in half 6 times. How thick do you think the stack would be? Let’s have some fun and look at the folding paper challenge:

It was an accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than 8 times was impossible. On 27 January 2002, high school student, Britney Gallivan, of Pomona, California, USA, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times and was the first person to fold a single piece paper in half 9, 10, 11, and 12 times. The tissue paper used was 4,000 ft (1,219 m; 0.75 miles) long. ~ GuinnessWorldRecords.com

So she needed a 4,000 foot, (1,219 metres) long piece of paper to achieve this. It’s easy to look at this image of her folded paper and figure out how big it was at 11 folds and before that 10 folds, by halving the amount once then twice. But what if she were to fold the paper more times? How many more times would this image represent?

This image represents folding the paper just 3 more times… a total of just 15 folds.

At 23 folds this would be about a kilometre high (3,280 feet). At 30 folds, you would be entering space. 42 folds gets you to the moon. The 51st fold would get you to the sun. Beyond that it doesn’t matter because our brains won’t truly appreciate the scale anyway.

So I can see the difference that folding a piece of paper just 6 times (64 pieces of paper high) to 12 times (the first image of Brittany above) looks like, but I really struggle to extrapolate from this that 24 folds would be 2 kilometres high.

So when we look at things like technological advancements, we don’t really see well into the future. When I bought the 16k adapter for my Commodore VIC 20 computer to get me to a whopping 36k of memory, I could not fathom the idea that I’d one day be buying 2 Terabytes of memory to store photos that were 8 megabytes large. And I’ll have an even harder time imagining what kind of data I’ll be storing 10 or 20 years from now.

Watch out Metaverse here we come! What does this mean? It means that in 20 years we’ll look back at the technology we have right now in the same way someone who lived 160 years ago would look at our technology today.

That’s mind blowing!

Downward Spiral into the mud

My grandfather had a saying, and I’ve shared it often, “Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty but the pig likes it.”

The pig has some success no matter what. This is something that I think is playing out with anti-vax and conspiracy arguments… they have some success every time we argue. The reason for this success is that they are operating from a fixed mindset, their minds are made up… but they are often arguing with people who have a growth mindset and are open to some level of persuasion. It’s a guaranteed downward spiral, with some of their fixed and misguided ideas seeping into the consciousness of people who try to factor all things in to their understanding.

An example of this is when the twin towers fell in New York. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories that started with the premise that ‘steel towers can’t crumble like that just because a plane crashed into them’. Spoiler alert, they can. But at the time we had no examples to go by, no science to support the possibility, and so just raising this concern could put doubt into a reasonable person’s mind. Then came the videos. Google something like “twin tower conspiracy video” and you’ll see what I mean. These videos are well crafted and convincing.

If you are someone prone to the idea that there is some cabal that has a master plan to rule the world, the fall of the twin towers easily fits that narrative. However, if you are someone who looks at evidence and makes sound decisions based on the information you have, too much of this convincing misdirection and misinformation could influence your thinking. In other words the spread of well constructed fake news has influence on all parties… meanwhile simple logic and boring facts only work on those with growth mindsets willing to do the research work.

The pig wins the moment you engage you in the fight. They get you dirty. Here is a study done at MIT, ‘Does correcting online falsehoods make matters worse?‘, which looks at how pointing out mistakes doesn’t help the argument:

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

And the article goes on to say,

“We might have expected that being corrected would shift one’s attention to accuracy. But instead, it seems that getting publicly corrected by another user shifted people’s attention away from accuracy — perhaps to other social factors such as embarrassment.” The effects were slightly larger when people were being corrected by an account identified with the same political party as them, suggesting that the negative response was not driven by partisan animosity.

Now in this case the ‘evidence’ will often degrade, and so it may not be too convincing, but research like this suggests that the conspiracy or fake news spreader is very unlikely to change their minds given sound evidence against their ideas… but when their false ideas are well crafted and instil doubt, the same can’t be said for thoughtful people who aren’t fixed in their opinions.

Social media engagement is more likely to influence people towards believing aspects of fake news that to promote facts and sound evidence. It’s a downward spiral, and it’s getting us all a little dirty.

What are the motives?

One of my pet peeves in education is people who talk about the fact that there are bad teachers, as if to say it is somehow unique to the teaching profession and not to any other profession. I’ve met proportionately very few teachers that I would consider bad compared to bad actors in many other professions. Another profession that seems to be low in bad actors, in my opinion, is medical doctors. Most people go into these professions wanting to serve and help others.

This is why I don’t understand the blatant disregard for well-being that seems to be present in anti-vaccine doctors. I went down a rabbit hole this morning, watching a well known podcaster, professor, and researcher speak to 2 doctors that clearly have compromised stances on covid 19. It was painful. Intelligent people making moronic claims [[update]]. One of them professing that he developed the MNRA vaccine process. One of them talking about about his carpet cleaner’s ailments after taking the vaccine, and how this person could not get anyone to share the horror of his story. I couldn’t get myself to watch the whole thing.

What I don’t understand is the motivation behind these otherwise intelligent people choosing to talk about science fiction and call it science? What’s the benefit? Who gains from this? Conspiracy theories depend on so many people acting in bad faith, people across the globe in different countries colluding and keeping secrets, all for the purpose of maintaining a narrative that makes no sense.

In BC, the spread of covid-19 in senior’s homes was an embarrassment. It benefited no one: not the homes that make money by recruiting more seniors; not the health municipalities that had to count the deaths; not the families that had to watch from a distance, unable to visit their loved ones. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that senior’s homes affected by covid had significantly more deaths than those not affected. Again, this was a provincial and even national embarrassment. Yet, conspiracy theorists talk about co-morbidity and try to pass these ‘extra’ deaths off as if they would have happened anyway. It’s so ignorant to do this, and yet it becomes a blanket statement that disregards examples like this that prove how dangerous this virus is.

And again for whose benefit? That’s the big question that baffles me? Who gains from promoting these dangerous ideas? I truly don’t know.

Everyday amazing

I’ve always been amazed by airplane flight. I don’t truly understand Bernoulli’s principle and the idea that so much weight can be lifted off the ground based simply on propulsion and lift under carefully designed wings still seems unlikely to me. And yet in less than 30 minutes the plane I’m on is going to taxi down a runway and start a 4,239 KM (2,634 mile) trek across (about half of) one of the largest countries in the world… and I’ll be sitting on a runway in Vancouver in 5 hours. Amazing.

We spend a lot of our day taking full advantage of technology we don’t really understand. I’m holding a phone that will magically publish this post to the internet, where it will sit on a website, all the while not knowing how this all works or what http stands for? I can talk to someone half way around the world with virtually no delay in the conversation, but sound travels much slower than that. I will listen to my wireless headphones without knowing how Bluetooth works. All around us we use advances in technology, taking advantage of tools most of us barely understand.

But this ignorance can work against us. Without really understanding the world around us, some people make shit up and think it’s science. How can anyone believe in a flat earth in this day and age of flight? And that’s not even the craziest thing people believe! It’s one thing to be blissfully ignorant of the world around us, and yet another to think that conspiracies live everywhere and that our opinions matter as much as the science.

Two amazing things that surround us:

1. The mystery and marvels of technology and innovation.

2. The blind ignorance of humanity to how this all works.

I’m not sure the gap between these two are getting any closer. The more amazing the the technology, the greater the opportunity for conflagration of lies, deceit, and exaggeration of fears into a dumpster fire of conspiracies, ‘fake news’, and ‘alternative facts’… with people knowingly and unknowingly adding fuel to the flames.

But for now, it’s time to put my phone on airplane mode, take advantage of having a window seat, and stare out at a runway… Marvelling at how this massively heavy plane can leave the surface of the earth, and soar for hours, trusting the science of it without really understanding how it all works.

Beyond space and time

Part 1 – Time travel

When people imagine time travel, they often don’t realize that they are also talking about space travel as well.

How Fast Is the Earth Rotating on Its Axis?

The Earth rotates on its axis once each day. Because the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles, a spot on the equator rotates at approximately 1,037.5646 miles per hour (1,037.5646 times 24 equals 24,901.55), or 1,669.8 km/h.

At the North Pole (90 degrees north) and South Pole (90 degrees south), the speed is effectively zero because that spot rotates once in 24 hours, at a very, very slow speed. (Source)

In addition to this rotation, the earth is hurling around the sun at 30km (19 miles) per second! And, our sun isn’t stationary in the galaxy, it travels 792,000 km (483,000 miles) per hour (and still takes 230 million years to complete a rotation).

These numbers are mind boggling. Now, going back to the idea of a time machine, if I was able to go back in time to only 5 years ago, the earth that existed back then was millions of kilometres away from where the earth is now. I’d have to travel through time and space.

Part 2 – The light of the stars

When we look at the stars, we only see their history. The closest star, our sun, is not where we see it, it is where the sun was 8 minutes ago, because that’s how long it took the light to reach us. For stars that are light years away, they could already have gone super nova, and wiped out their solar system, and generations later our ancestors will still see that star, not knowing it no longer exists. We are literally looking back in time when we look out into space.

Part 3 – the edge of the universe

A concept I can’t wrap my head around is what’s beyond the edge of the universe? And if you have an answer for me, what’s beyond that? This to me is the definition of infinite… the idea that no matter how far away something is, there has to be something still farther away.

If you had a string that was infinitely long and you cut it in half, you’d have two strings that are infinitely long. Think about that for a while… then try to forget it. 😜

Why should we believe that our universe is the only universe? Could there be multiple universes in the empty void beyond our own? Could our entire universe be an atom in a massive other universe? What secrets do the edge of our universe hold? We will never know because it takes too much time for the light way out there to reach us.

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These are 3 ideas about space and time that peak my curiosity and make me marvel at life, the universe, and everything… while we hurl through space on an insignificant rock around an insignificant sun, in an insignificant galaxy… thinking thoughts that significantly challenge my intellectual understanding.

Nature is amazing

After 17 years underground, the periodical cicadas are ready to resurface. These insects somehow know that 17 seasons have passed, and will be triggered to the surface by the warmth of a spring day… after skipping, yet counting, 16 other springs.

How is this information passed from one generation to the next? What is written into their DNA to give instructions like this? It’s one thing to hibernate for a winter, still another to sit dormant in the soil for 17 years.

Nature holds many secrets. There are many interesting things that happen in the natural world: salmon leave their birthplace in freshwater rivers and come back to the same location after 2 years of living in the salty ocean; monarch butterflies travel yearly from Canada to Mexico; some frogs can freeze for long periods and come back to life after warming up again.

It’s amazing that even today we are discovering new insects, new scientific anomalies, new discoveries about the world we live in, and the incredible mysteries of life. This year, millions of periodical cicadas are going to awake from dormancy after 17 years, molt, mate, and return to the soil for another 17 years. Incredible!

Humanity – versus – Reality

I saw a video a few days ago of hundreds of unmasked protesters, packed together in a square in the United Kingdom, singing ‘Stick your poison vaccines up your ass’ to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes’. I wanted to write about it sooner, but I could only come from an angle of anger and disgust. It would have been a good rant, that would probably have made me feel better, but I’m done ranting with the purpose of making myself feel better. I’ve been seeking out joy, determination, fun facts, and when dealing with our current situation, humour, as sort of coping mechanisms for dealing with the discord that seems to be pervasive right now.

There is an epic battle going on. It is a battle on many battle grounds. It is a battle happening across the world. It is a battle that pits humanity against reality. Here are six of the battlegrounds:

  1. The Covid-19 Pandemic: Many people are dying – versus – Protests against the preventions and lockdowns to prevent the spread.
  2. Vaccines: They save lives – versus – They are dangerous (or they will be used to monitor and track us).
  3. Climate change: It’s the greatest threat we face as a species – versus – It’s a hoax.
  4. Science: Seeking objective facts – versus – un-objective and agenda-driven propaganda.
  5. Freedom: Government are here to serve and protect us – versus – Governments are corrupt and stripping away our freedoms in an attempt to control us.
  6. Civil liberties: Issues like racism, gender identity, pro-choice, freedom of expression – versus – Religious values, as well as both right-wing (QAnon) and left-wing (Antifa extremists) using hateful tactics to argue their points.

I purposely didn’t use the word ‘Truth’ before now. I believe that we are living in a post-Truth era (with an intentional capital ‘T’).  I’ll leave you with Stuart McMillan’s webcomic about Neil Postman’s book, ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death‘. I recently listened to both 1984 and Brave New World back-to-back. I was struck by the contrast between a world run based on fear – versus – one run based on pleasure. I think that things are so messed up right now that we are stuck in a dystopian novel where both worlds exist simultaneously. Many people live in constant fear based on ‘facts’ that are cherry-picked, on half-truths, and even made up completely. Many more are living in a social media based alternate reality where their truths are based on a ‘news’ feed designed to entertain with a confusing mix of facts and fiction.

I don’t know how so many people could be naive enough to believe that the world is flat and other ridiculous conspiracies; That vaccines will be used to monitor you; That so many people can confuse mask use with being a sheep; Or that so many people can believe one group’s fight for rights undermines their own rights? Yet, across the globe, millions of people are so sure they are right, that protests and propaganda based on ignorance are now commonplace.

We are living in an era where humanity has no grasp on reality. Fiction and fact are interchangeable. ‘T’ruth is subjective. And a common, collective plan for peace and prosperity seems further away than any worlds that Huxley or Orwell could fabricate.

We are not alone

I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

When I comprehend the size and scale of the universe, it is inconceivable to me that humans are the only intelligent life that seeks to understand and explore the stars and worlds beyond our own. It just seems staggeringly beyond possible that we could be alone in the universe.

I also think about Arthur C. Clarke’s 3 Laws. From Wikipedia:

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future.

These so-called laws are:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His most famous of these is the 3rd one. Imagine being born 2000, 1000, 500, or even 150 years ago and being shown an iPhone or a self-driving Tesla. It would surely seem like magic or witchcraft.

I truly doubt that we will have any significant technology leap in my lifetime to see any meaningful human space travel beyond revisiting our moon. Our technology won’t get that magical so quickly. Therefore, if we were to meet aliens in my lifetime, it would be because they poses technology that seems magical to us.

So, at least in the short term, if we are visited, it will be from highly advanced aliens. I wonder what they would think of our divided, polluted planet? Would they see a primitive species? Which, if any, of our cultures would they look at and say, “I think they are on the right track”?

When I think of the idea that we are not alone, and that if we are visited, the visitors will be highly advanced compared to us, what would they say about how we treat each other? How we treat other species? And, how we treat our world?