11:13 – Still working on kits. I’m doing laundry. Barbara just headed out to run errands. Among other things, she’s going to pick up a couple of 120 liter bags of vermiculite, which we use as an asborbent for packing chemicals. She was also going to pick up some 1% hydrocortisone spray for Colin’s legpits, which he’s scratching raw from allergic itching. We’ve tried diphenhydramine, loratidine, and most recently chlorpheniramine, none of which work very well. But this morning Barbara found a dozen 20 mg prednisone tablets that I’d squirreled away in the freezer. She just gave Colin a quarter tab, which may be enough to knock down the itching. I asked her if I should give our vet, Sue Stephens, a call and ask her to prescribe another 30 or 60 20 mg tablets, but Barbara said not to bother. Those dozen tablets she found are sufficient for 48 doses, which she probably won’t use up in a year or two. The 5 mg dosage is very low and she seldom administers it for more than a couple of days, so we don’t need to worry about tapering Colin off.
I’m still spending spare moments designing our new kits for 2014/2015. I’m well into Earth Science, which’ll be teachable as a middle school or high school level lab course, and I’m stubbing out AP Chemistry and AP Biology. And I keep thinking that we really need to do at least a first-year level physics course.
Strip mathematics and use Sears, Francis W. (1950). Mechanics, heat and sound. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Addison Wesley.
Regarding the scratching. A friend of mine discovered, while ‘drown proofing’ her smaller dogs with pool dips every day for a couple of weeks, that her chlorinated pool water removed the need for medicine all the time.
YRMV, but here in Southern California it worked. A bit cooler back east I suppose.
Sears’ book is a classic. I have a copy from 1952 (done with co-author Zemansky) and it is excellent. Most of the modern algebra based college texts are quite good as well – Cutnell and Johnson is the one I used most in the classes I taught. I don’t think that our host’s biggest problem in doing a physics kit will be a text to follow. Rather it will be keeping the cost, volume, and quality of the kits reasonable. Physics labs tend to be quite equipment intensive, and the equipment can be both temperamental and expensive. Mechanics tends to be the most difficult to do well. I’ve used everything from hot wheels cars and stopwatches to the fancy Pasco computerized stuff, and have found that the key to a good lab is whether it is capable of getting the idea across without overwhelming the student with the details of the experimental apparatus. I am very curious to see what our host comes up with, especially given the quality of the current kits.
Colin hates baths. In fact, he hates going out when it’s raining, which is pretty strange for a BC. I think we’ll stick with the drugs.
So his lucky he never had to work for a living herding sheep. Every shower he’d want to run for cover…
My thought would be that a first year physics kit will have more of a market than the AP Biology and AP Chemistry kits. But that may be because I never took any AP science classes.
“Strip mathematics and use Sears, Francis W. (1950). Mechanics, heat and sound. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Addison Wesley.”
“Sears’ book is a classic. I have a copy from 1952 (done with co-author Zemansky) and it is excellent.”
Roger that! It was the second that I used in college about 55 years ago. However, how can that still be any good? The LAUSD does a complete refreshment of all texts every 5 years. Or, is that the teacher/authors need another round of royalties?
OK, so much for physical sciences. What about the ever more popular social sciences? Can a kit be developed for Arab & Muslim Studies? (toc)
OK, (toc): tongue-in-cheek!
Possibly so. Physics is the least popular of the Big Three high school sciences, for several reasons. Most states and most colleges/universities don’t “require” high school physics even for entering STEM students, and it’s arguably true that they’re better off waiting to take a first-year college physics course as freshmen, particularly because few have real calculus, let alone diff-e, until then. In fact, many won’t complete a serious calculus/diff-e course until their freshman year in college.
In terms of planning a high school curriculum for a science-heavy student, I might skip physics, planning to have my kid take it in college. I’d try to do two full years each of biology and chemistry and, if possible, a third year of one or both.
this is the reason I said strip mathematics and use Sears, not Sears Zemansky, Sears (I own the 3 books since 1970..) has very little mathematics, and, as I guess, you are building some hands on, so it is enough.
I used this as reference with the textbooks on my highschool, time ago
PS Forgive my english, it is rusting
“Can a kit be developed for Arab & Muslim Studies?”
Roger that. I’d be willing to whip one of those up. Text, film, commentary, etc. It would mainly cover the one or two actual contributions to civilization that they’ve made, including a couple of the medieval philosophers, Avicenna and Averroes, and the rest would be their history of spreading a vicious and perverted cult of slavery and death around the world, and only seeing any part of modern times through the intervention of oil money and the major powers.
No can do, alas. There’s just no way to ship the high explosives they’d need for the suicide belts in the lab kit.
YO! Breaking Bad is good science…
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breaking-bad-science-20130927,0,5990191.story
“…no way to ship the high explosives…”
Good one! No need, though; they get the instructions off the net. YouTube probably. Alahu Akbar or whatever. Just saw a great clip of four hadji losers burying a 155mm round in the dirt somewhere over there with a fifth hadji overseeing the deal. But they kept tamping it down, tamping it down….and then kablam! A crater. No sign of hadjis. All gone. Footage taken via infrared from a mile away in a 130 gunship.
Heh.
Barbara just finished watching series seven of Army Wives. They had one segment where one of our forward bases in Afghanistan was attacked by a slew of muslim terrorists that got inside the wire. One of the US guys ended up sitting on top of one of the muslims and choking him to death. I commented to Barbara that some guys get to have all the fun.
In ‘Nam both VC and NVA regulars, usually sappers, would sometimes get inside the wire at air bases and forward Army and Marine sites. The sappers would train for a full year in North Vietnam and show up in shorts and sandals, with a pair of wire-cutters, an AK and satchel charges. They could whiz through triple-standard concertina wire and past mines and trip flares and sentry dogs in a matter of minutes, like greased lightning. Their tactic was to head for aircraft or HQ with the explosives, blow stuff up, and then fight their way out. 90% of the time they didn’t make it off the base; security alert teams (AF) would by then have arrived and blown them away, a jeep or small truck usually with a mounted M60 or .50 and grenade launchers, maybe a recoilless rifle.
In the northeast provinces of Thailand it was Thai Cong, Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge we had to keep ready for; they were pretty slick at sneaking onto the bases but not of the caliber of NVA sappers. Thai border patrol would catch them sometimes and put their heads on posts, all lined up at the border crossings.
Most of my gigs for the two tours were air base defense but my last six months or so was in aircraft all over the region, mainly choppers and the Spectre gunships, which are amazingly still in full use over there in the Sandbox and the Suck. Marines and special forces guys loved us to death. “Make it rain!”