Going to head out of town tonight and get away from light pollution

Things left in my room after the exam today: A sweater, one foam headphone ear cup, & a bracelet. But mostly a lot of eraser crumbs #ITeachPhysics 🎢

Cool fact. Pasco wireless force probes and carts only work with the hooks they came with. A longer threaded hook interferes w/the flex of the strain gauge and prevents them from being calibrated. The one on the right is correct #ITeachPhysics

New awareness campaign

i tried to update my AAPT profile by sneaking my Bluesky profile into the field for X but it rejected it. Bummer

Great, Turnitin thinks using \imath and \jmath is "an attempt to hinder similarity detection." Every kid who did unit vectors correctly got a flag. Everyone who made them with regular i and j didn't. Opening the inbox and seeing all the flags was disconcerting 🎢 #ITeachPhysics

This is exactly why I asked to join the class after they stole all my papers to train their plagiarism machine.

If you've ever written for The Physics Teacher, you may be in this database Anthropic used for training. An article I wrote way back in the 90s is. #ITeachPhysics 🎢

This very much reminds me of the high school junior who walked into my office one day and proposed a science fair project to add gravity to special relativity. Utterly clueless.

🔭 APOD is 30 Years Old Today Image Credit: Pixelization of Van Gogh's The Starry Night by Dario Giannobile apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25061...

Anyone know of a study trying to correlate LLM use by students with non-academic disciplinary problems? #ITeachPhysics 🎢

Another great simile for LLM use by students. Goes with "using a forklift int he weight room."

I had a very unpleasant meeting today. After several hours of reflection and several beers to calm down I had an epiphany. Only imposters don’t have imposter syndrome.

I am quote posting this because I love the phrase "steaming cauldron of linear algebra" and want to remember it to use against AI doofuses.

PhET is the best site out there for grade school through undergrad sims - physics, math and chemistry. I hope you're using it and can maybe kick in a few dollars to replace the funds lost by this absolutely stupid decision. giveto.colorado.edu/campaigns/50... #iTeachPhysics 🎢

Ok Siri, I get it that Titania is a moon of Uranus and a Shakespeare character, but it's also just TiO2 and doesn't have to be capitalized every time.

This is why we make them show work on math & physics tests. I made up the problem - I do not need you to tell me the answer. I need you to demonstrate understanding & skills.

Thermal images of a ballistic pendulum before & after catching a ball. The after image shows a hot spot where the ball interacted with the catcher part of the pendulum

This was the wrong day for TIAA to send me a marketing email about two powerful forces that will help me grow my nest egg.

It never fails. I decide to not wear a sweater today because it's supposed to 60° and the boiler shuts off over the weekend. It's 58° in my office right now

My cat is about to hyperventilate trying to smell the dogs on the tv dog show.

This is like the early days of internet filters at schools when kids couldn't search for info on breast cancer. Poorly thought-out over-reactions are never a good idea.

Today is Retraction Day, when we observe the anniversary of the retraction (Feb. 2, 2010) of the fraudulent paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism. 🧪#medsky

If you require people to book meetings with you via an online calendar but don't block out all your existing meetings you've pissed me off and might not make a sale.

We had three snow days and I came back to school to find this in the office fridge. Apparently you have to open the door regularly to prevent freezing.

We’re going to have fancy, custom medals at science fair this year.

We were seeing a 98% drop in exposure over on Twitter. The censorship was so extreme we thought it best to start over somewhere else. We chose Bluesky. Help us gain our following back Follow Retweet Repeat Join the park side @altyellonatpark.org

I asked my class to estimate the angular displacement of an object from an ang. velocity vs time graph. A significant number of them figured out the function represented by the graph and integrated it instead of counting squares to find area. Is this common? #ITeachPhysics 🎢

I was grocery shopping yesterday and went in expecting Christmas muzak. Instead I got Godzilla by BOC.

My calc-based class did my replacement for the toilet paper challenge yesterday. Find the ratio of distances for a ring and disk to hit the end of the ramp at the same time. I ran into trouble w/ kids looking up the TP Challenge answer online & developed this. #ITeachPhysics 🎢

Today I bled for physics. A bicycle wheel gyro demo went wrong and I scraped some knuckles on the spokes

Tomorrow is angular momentum day! The demos always seem generate more engagement than most other topics. #ITeachPhysics 🎢

It's registration time for the S25 semester. We have a significant number of kids wanting to take nothing but math & science courses and going over my head when I beg them to take an art, music, history, or lit class. The humanities seemed devalued here too. #ITeachPhysics 🎢

So Wired Magazine did a profile of me! www.wired.com/story/murder...

A really interesting look at the pros and cons of going massively viral, whether you wanted to or not www.vulture.com/article/blue...

Today's lab - determine the unknown mass of a SmartCart by using only its internal sensors. Solutions inlcuded the impulse-momentum theorem, completely inelastic collisions, an explosion, and just plain-old N2L. #ITeachPhysics 🎢

The vampire can't get into your house unless you invite him. His offer to debate you about this situation is his first step across the threshold.

Today my classes will measure the coefficient of rolling friction of a Pasco SmartCart. I didn't save any real data from last year but here's a fake graph similar to what they'll need to make #iteachphysics 🎢

We had no measurable rain from Sep 25 to Oct 31. Since then, 105 mm. Arkansas climate is now either drought or flood. There's no in-between

I keep getting angry that candidates haven't taken down their election signs. Then I remember that I voted early two weeks ago and the actual election isn't until tomorrow.

Grading lab reports and found this typo: lounge angel What's your guess for what the student meant? #iteachphysics 🎢

Here’s a heavily processed long exposure photo of last night’s aurora from Hot Springs. Barely visible to the unaided eye over the casino lights.

Mine wasn't - so I got a better one. It took a year longer than average for experimental physics but I left reasonably well-adjusted.

What do you think #iteachphysics. Is it time for fresh carbon paper for my projectile motion labs? 🎢

Tomorrow I'm using our 30+ year old Pasco freefall adapters in lab. They can be cranky but mostly still work like champs. #iteachphysics

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #2,352,210!

Since I stopped posting on twitter I've gained about 50 followers there. As best I can tell only one is an actual person.

Teenaged boys are awful. It's the 3rd day of school and I've already walked into a bathroom to find an unflushed toilet twice.

Too bad Canvas doesn't have an account here yet. I've some thoughts about the new Assign To that I'd love to @ them about. We use a product that syncs Canvas grades to our SIS and the checkbox to ensure an assignment is synced is on the Edit page. Assign To saves nothing for us

During my annual summer office purge I found this in an old binder. Data from a small radio telescope at Green Bank I took in ‘94 at a workshop. It’s M87 in the 1370 to 1440 MHz band.