A Pocketful of Licorice

Back to School

highlighter obsession

welcome back blackboard

hot off the presses

ready for distribution

my beloved Carol poster

40 by 40: #40 cry happy tears

 

Watching this happen, live, at 1:30 in the morning. Granted, it was 1:30 in the morning. But still. The triumph of human ingenuity makes me cry. I'm so proud of nerds!

explaining my absence

I'm living in the land of chemistry this week. I'm taking a pretty intense AP Summer Institute through the Mass Math and Science Initiative. It's actually kind of awesome, because before I was apprehensive about teaching AP and now I'm really excited. But it's taking up all of my time. I love chemistry so much. Because I'm a nerd. 

 

Science!

So, I got this area sort of set up, but I'm probably not finished. It doesn't look quite right to me yet. So far, I like the chair and the bookcase next to each other. I think I like the lamp and the by-color book arrangement. Though, in general, I don't like bookcases completely full of books. I prefer the books broken up with other stuff, so I might change this up a little. I like the old picture of my dad, but I don't like the frame anymore. The picture is sort of stuck to the glass. Not sure how that happened. 

And I like the top part. Brachiosaurus got painted pink. I don't think pink is any less realistic than his former bright green. He could have been pink. If you can't prove it wasn't then it could have been. That's just science. He is strolling past the lovely beach vista of my Salvation Army painting, approaching my Crooke radiometer. Though in this position, the radiometer never really gets direct sunlight. Ergo, it never spins. Sigh. You can't have everything, I guess. 

I think wall art is in order next.  Any suggestions?

curiosities

Recently, my department head at school was cleaning out some of our storage areas, getting rid of old or obsolete equipment to make room for more current supplies. He allowed me to scavenge a little bit as much of it was useless and was going to be discarded and I found this. A Crookes radiometer. It took me a bit of googling to figure that out, by the way. Ever try to look up something that you don't know the name of, based only on a vague description of what it does? Put it in sunlight and the vanes inside spin around. There is some debate on how it works. Here's what I think. The black sides of the vanes warm up faster than the white. Then the air molecules near the black surfaces warm up by coming into contact with the vanes. And somehow this creates a little convection current. The more intense the light, the faster the vanes spin. Simple, right? Not exactly quantitative, but still kind of cool. I took it home because I thought it would make a cool decoration. For now it is with my collection of antique bottles. I'm a big fan of archaic science equipment and curiosities. 

I also ended up with a large model of an earthworm, cross-section-style so you can see all the innards, which are clearly labeled for your convenience. And a similar cross-section model of a small fish - a perch, I think. By large models, I mean over a foot long. Cool and a little grotesque. I didn't take those home. They are my classroom mascots now.