What’s the Rush?

I have never seen students in such a rush to do math.  Before they have even finished writing the number used for a calculation they are punching the calculator to get to the answer as quick as they can.  But they get lost in what the number represents and don’t know where to go next.  Slow Down and be Neat!  Its a concept that never really occurred to me until I’d spent a decent amount of time tutoring chemistry, in particular empirical formula calculations, basic stoichiomestry, limiting reactant, etc. and have been forcing my students to not only obey the golden rule chemistry math (i.e. “every number needs a unit guys!!), but also to neatly right on their equations and conversions.  Boy what a difference it makes.  You can literally see what to do next fall into place when they take the painstaking time to neatly write things out.  In fact, what has been really sinking in has been that if they carefully right out units “all the way” (i.e. not just “mg”, but “mg Na”) the math just kind of falls into place.  There is a natural tendency to rush to do the math.  It is a trend we have been bucking and working to do the math last.  For folks who like to rush (something in the past I have been guilty of myself), it is a hard habit to create but in the end it turns dividends!

Mastering Vocab and the 3F Rule

A large contingent of the students I tutor are those competing for entry into the nursing program, which means they are all taking A&P and stressed to the max.  Now it’s true that a lot of anatomy can be rote memorization.  But there are 2 major concepts I have been trying to hammer home:

1) Learn Your Roots

The amount of vocab in A&P (and science in general) can be very intimidating.  But if you can learn root words, you can quickly master more than you think you can.  Learn that lysis means “to break” and you can quickly master glycolysis, hydrolysis, lysosome, etc.  Just to name a few.  Learn “gly” or “glyco” hints at sugar and you are well on your way to glycolysis, glycogen, etc.  Learn that most enzymes end with the suffix “ase” and you can quickly identify them on site.  It is a simple concept, but it is shocking the eureka moments I see whenever I explain it to students.  It can really help give them a running start at what they think a new word means…

2) The 3F Rule…”Form follows function”

Again in a effort to simplify things, I have been working a lot on getting students to understand the “flow” of A&P and how amazingly efficient physiological designs are (for the most part; human knees notwithstanding).  A few examples of note from recent sessions:

• The Sarcoplasmic Reticulum is perfectly designed to swath the muscular fiber bundles in a muscle to get uniform contraction across a broad area.
• The spindle fiber machinery of mitosis is really the only logical way you would separate DNA material in a cell.  In a terrific moment, I asked a student “How would you design the process?” as a poor man’s initiation and by golly his design was pretty close!
• The neuron, both its gross morphology as a receiver/transmitter of information, and it’s function as a simple transistor, combined in a web of neurons, is almost exactly how a computer works!
• How could you design a muscle fiber contraction apparatus better than the ratchet-effect of the sliding filament?
• Why is the left ventricle of the human heart so muscular?  Because it has to force blood through the whole body, while he right simply has to get it to the heart of course!
• Plumbers every day install check valves almost identical in design to the tri-cuspid and mitral valves!
• Does not the design of a capillary bed make perfect sense when you realize you want to increase surface area to promote gas exchange?

Another Analogy…But A Work in Progress

I’ve mentioned a number of times the huge power I find in analogies and how key they are to making complex material digestable.  I implemented another useful one the other day.  It was all about diagosing reaction types for intro chemistry students I was helping.  As always, they were getting lost in the weeds on the terminology, and I was loking for a simple way to explain them…

1) Combination Reaction –> A Marriage

2) Decomposition Reaction –> A Divorce

3) A Single Replacement Reaction –> Cheating on your spouse

4) Double Replacement Reaction –> Well…(I need a better way to explain this!…a little too risque I worry)

For better or worse, this turning chemical reactions into interpersonal relationships is REALLY working!

Making Quicksand

Well today we made quicksand using the tried and true home experiment of cornstarch mixed with water and (for effect) food coloring.  We victimized, largely for effect again, one of The Crew’s lego men, who seemed none-too-happy about being dunked in quicksand.  They had a great time exploring all the physical properties of it, how if they moved the lego man quickly through, he get “stuck”, but if they slowly dragged him through he could flow gently through the “liquid”.  Their favorite part (and mine as well) was that if they took a glop of our blue goo and quickly balled it around in their hand, it would make a stiff ball, but as soon as they stopped forming the ball, it would revert back to liquid and ooze through their fingers.

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So what is quicksand anyway, well in short, it is a mixture of a solid and a liquid in a colloidal suspension.  In our case it is starch molecules evenly interspersed among water molecules; in the old western movies, it is the same concept but sand molecules amongst water.  The reason we could “ball” our goo into a solid is that with quick force and constant movement, the relatively larger starch molecules bump into each other, trap the much smaller water molecules and create the characteristics of a solid.  When the movement stops, the starch molecules are allowed to once again flow through the liquid, and the suspension retakes the characteristics of a liquid.  This is a little different than quicksand in nature, where the ratio tends to be more solid (sand) and it is the rapid movement of someone trapped in quicksand that cause the sand to flow more and bring on characteristics of liquid.

Reaching the Sweet Spot

When I worked for a real estate developer for 10+ years, we used to have a term called “reaching the sweet spot”.  It was the point in time where sales and construction started to hum in unison and everything was coordinated nicely.  I reached that point this week at tutoring.  I’ve developed a small following of students, know them on a first name basis and can sort of keep tabs on their test scores, assignments, labs and general overall performance.  It is a nice place to be and makes it an absolute joy to come to work every day.

The Point of It All!

One thing that is great about tutoring is that students have the opportunity the drop survey with comments on how a tutor did in ACE’s “suggestion box”.  I was lucky enough to have one handed to me from my supervisor just the other day from a group of students studying for a mitosis/meiosis quiz.  They wrote how they could not have passed the quiz without me and how they really wished that I taught the class.  It was an amazing feeling and I am comfortable enough with my own masculinity to admit it brought a tear to my eye.

It was nice to it came on the heels of a student the day before that was very frustrated with me that I wouldn’t just give her the answers to her homework and annoyed that I (politely I think) suggested she come back when she had her book, notebook and showed some attempt at trying it on her own.  It can be hard at times to try to show someone how to use a rod and reel when they really just want to be given a fish.

Geocaching, Roses, Sparks, and Green Screens!

The Crew and I took another adventure the other day.  First, we went to the Children’s Museum in West Hartford.  The kids had a great time, got to pet a skink, fell in love with turtles, and had to be dragged out of the place after almost 3 hours.  A few pics…

Here is The Crew listening to the Skink demonstration. Crew is in lower part of picture. Hard to keep Little Buddy involved as he was obsessed with a "bunny rabbit" display that was close by.

A terrible picture of Little Buddy playing mad scientist with his own "Jacob's Ladder". I tried to get him to give a maniacal laugh but to no avail.

The Crew in the live weather studio set up warning us of a coming blizzard. The director (Little Buddy) had a bit of trouble keeping out of the shot. Please notice The Actress fully into character while The Analyst is far busier trying to figure out how all this works.

And of course when asked later what the best part of the museum was, I got "Lunch!"...typical.

After the museum we headed over to a local geocache at Elizabeth Park in Hartford.  What a beautiful place.  I had stopped by there one morning back in the winter before ARC class and had made a mental note to come back in the summer.  I was psyched that we had the chance and could do a bit of geocaching in the process.  Apparently the park is the former property of a well to do industrialist and statesman Charles Pond who left the park to the City of Hartford.  It was named after his wife Elizabeth (history of Elizabeth Park).

The centerpiece of a park is a huge rose garden with roses climbing trellises and arbors all around.  On this day it was incredible – you could smell the roses from about 50 yards away.  It was one of those things that every once in awhile makes you wish you lived in (or close to) a city – cities so often have such wonderful public places that you just don’t get in suburbia.  There is something to be said for TND! But I digress…

We scored the geocache, wonderful cache too with a nice story about how it was the spot where the cacher(?) proposed to his wife, etc.  A few pics…

The Crew running into the rose garden. Little Buddy trying to keep up. Beautiful place!

A rose. I forgot to write down what kind!

Running underneath the arbors towards the house in the middle of the garden!

Takin' a break in the middle. Chance to catch breath and for Little Buddy to do his patented "suck thumb and curl hair" move.

Found the cache! Wonderful story inside. Cool hiding spot in a sea of rhododendrons. Avoided all "Muggles" on the way...

 A Bit About Jacob’s Ladder…

It wasn’t until writing this post I ever knew the electrical arc b/w two rod device you always see in campy sci-fi pics was called a “Jacob’s Ladder”.  Now this isn’t to be confused with the Biblical Jacob’s Ladder from the book of Genesis where Jacob sees a vision of angels going up and down stairs to heaven and foretelling the expansion of the Jewish tribe.  Nor should it be confused with the most excellent Huey Lewis song.  Nor should it be confused with another rather disturbing definition I found online that we won’t talk about in a family friendly blog (jeez the internet is weird sometimes).

Cool time lapse photo of a Jacob's Ladder from Wikipedia

This Jacob’s Ladder is created by the electrical current run through two rods that are close together at the base and slowly diverge as the rise.  Essentially, the two rods hold a voltage difference that exceeds the “breakdown voltage” of the air between them (for air around 30kV/cm).  The atoms in the air between the rods ionize (the voltage difference provides enough energy for electrons to “break free” and move between the molecules in air to create ions), their electrical resistance drops accordingly and they for a moment become an electrical conductor…a wire made out of air if you will.  This creates heat, which causes the air to rise and the arc travels up between the two rods until the separation is too great to maintain this ionization.

It is the same way in which lightening works, just instead of the voltage differential occurring between the ground and a storm cloud, it is between the two rods.

It is worth noting too that Jacob’s Ladder indoors can actually pose some health risks, as the ionization of the air creates free radicals which can be damaging to the mucous membranes of folks nearby.  Little Buddy’s was safely in a glass case.

A Bit About Green Screens…

So in the museum The Crew got to play weatherman in a “studio” provided by NBC 30.  They got to stand in front of a green screen and watch themselves give a weather report on the monitors.  They thought it was great fun.  As I said The Actress loved being on TV…The Analyst though was more curious about how it all worked though.  I tried to give a “I’m a dad – I know everything” kind of answer, but I really didn’t know.  So I looked it up…

The “green screen”, or by the technical term Chromakey is accomplished by the process of filming a subject in front of a specific color (green or blue – usually chosen because they are far from the dominant colors for skin tone and the camera is very sensitive to them) and then replacing that specific color with the image or video you want.  In digital television, it is as simple as at each pixel point, if the color on the screen matches the specific color designated, that point is replaced with the appropriate point for the image you want to display instead.  Very cool!

A few fun facts learned along the way…

• Red is the dominant color in skin tone.  I wonder if someone who is sick or “green with envy” disappears in front of a green screen – haha!
• When the subject material is green dominant (e.g. plants, etc.), they use a blue screen instead of green.
• The most important factor is the spectrum (ROYGBIV) b/w the subject and the key color.  Clothes for weather folks are carefully chosen accordingly.
• You can find all kinds of fun stuff about Chroma Key here.

‘Til Later,

Backyard Biologist

There She Blows!

So this is another entry from our Rainy Day Science Demo.  This is a classic one…the old vinegar meets baking soda reaction that is the centerpiece of every volcano project in elementary school.  To make it a little more interesting, we decided to forego the volcano aspect (well maybe “more interesting” is not the right phrase) and use a balloon to trap the gas created by the reaction.  Some shots from the scene…

The Analyst adding some vinegar to our water bottle.

Putting baking soda into a balloon using our homemade funnel - by far the trickiest part of the demo; the baking soda kept clogging up in the funnel.

The Actress placing the balloon over the top of the bottle as The Analyst blows up balloons in the background. Trying to teach a science lesson here and the package of balloons was the highlight of the event!

Tip the balloon so the baking soda dumps into the vinegar and what do you get? A blown up balloon of course!

So after the initial demonstration we attempted to turn it into a simple experiment.  I posed the question: “What do you think will happen if we have more baking soda in the balloon?”  The answer out of my little budding scientists…”It will blow up more!”  The beginning of their first hypothesis!

4T of baking soda instead of 2!

It certainly blew up more. In fact it blew the balloon off and splattered acetic acid onto the ceiling (found a week later)!

The Science Behind It…

So what is going on here anyway?  Well this “reaction” is actually two reactions that happen in quick succession.  To start with, vinegar is acetic acid (CH₃COOH) and baking soda is sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃).  What happens when they mix is a simple double replacement (AX + BY –> AY + BX) acid-base reaction:

CH3COOH(aq) + NaHCO3(s) —> CH3COONa(aq) + H2CO3

The sodium and hydrogen ions essentially “switch places” (.  The sodium replaces the H in the acetic acid to form sodium acetate.  Simultaneously the displaced hydrogen ion replaces the sodium to form carbonic acid.  Carbonic acid is a weak acid that quickly undergoes a decomposition reaction (AB –> A + B) to form carbon dioxide and water:

H2CO3 –> H2O(l) + CO2(g)

What you are seeing filling up the balloon then is the CO2 gas that has escaped from solution.

Cellular Respiration in Action!

Did a fun demonstration with The Crew today that nicely demonstrates cellular metabolism.  It is a pretty common lab in high schools (done a little more scientifically that the Crew could handle) and involves yeast metabolizing glucose and producing CO₂. Here are some pics from the scene…

The Actress looking ever so happy creating our sugar solution for the little fungi to feed on.

The Analyst pouring our sugar solution into our ubiquitous plastic water bottle.

The Actress pouring our little "beasties" into the sugar solution.

We had a lot of fun with the topic of yeast.  The Crew was completely fascinated that we were going to buy something “alive” in a package at the grocery store and asked over and over again if they could open it, what did they look like, etc.  Needless to say they were a little disappointed little critters didn’t come jumping out of the package when we opened it, but that went away as we continued on with our little demo.

S. cerevisiae

For a bit of background on yeast…Yeast is one of the most useful and most carefully studied eukaryotic organisms in nature.  In fact, the same species of yeast sold in the grocery store (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) was the first fully sequenced eukaryotic genome in 1996.  They belong to the kingdom Fungi (along with molds and mushrooms) and have a huge number of uses from baking to alcohol fermentation in beer making and even some potential applications in bioremediation of hazardous chemical spills.  For more about yeast.

The Crew putting the balloon on top of the bottle to capture any escaping gas.

Presto! After 20 minutes or so our balloon starts to inflate. But with what??

After about 40 minutes, our balloon is almost fully inflated. The Crew was impressed!

The Science Behind It…

So what is that mystery gas in the balloon anyway?  Why is is CO2 of course!  That ever famous byproduct of cellular respiration.  You remember, the old dreaded…

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ → 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + Energy (as ATP)

or…Glucose + Oxygen –> Carbon Dioxide + Water + ATP (the energy currency of cells)

or…Glycolysis –> Pyruvate Decarboxylation –> Kreb’s Cycle –> Electron Transport Chain

or…

Kreb's Cycle after completion of Glycolysis

Now did I go into any of this with the Crew?  No, we were content with “cool – look – the little creatures eat and breath and what they breath out blew up the balloon” – maybe we will do the aerobic and anaerobic biochemical pathways next week!

What is nice though is being able to see these reactions occur in the real world.  It makes it all a lot less abstract.

Introductions & Eye Color

So one of the things I intend to do with this blog is share our family adventures and some of the science/nature adventures I have been having with my kids now that they are old enough to appreciate such things.  As such, I think some introductions are in order (with some respect for privacy):

The Wife

I haven’t always made smart decisions (I still regret not becoming a teacher straight out of college – no matter how much my real estate career afforded us), but I married VERY well.  In short, the wife rocks.  She is incredibly patient with all my absent-minded professorness (what we call me never knowing where my keys are), my hobbies (I fish a LOT) and everything else.  She is beautiful and has this just way about her.  The only way I have ever been able to describe it to her is she has “grace”.  She can make ANYONE comfortable and knows everything about someone in short order.  There are people I have met 10 times and I can barely tell you their name.  Above all, she had to take a huge life adjustment and return to work after the real estate thing ended.  She is a trooper for sure!

The Analyst (Age 6.5+)

My oldest son is almost a carbon copy of me.  He is awkward in social settings, has no issue being by himself for hours on end, not entirely athletically gifted, but a warm, empathetic kid whose heart is in the right place 100% of the time.  He is my analyst.  He needs his ducks in a row, loves to get to the details of things, thinks intently (to a fault like his dad) about most things and is very emotional.  He is obsessed with Legos and has just shown the beginnings of a fishing obsession (which I happily encourage).  He is a really neat kid.

The Actress (Age 5+)

My daughter is physically the carbon copy of my wife (from me she gets hair texture (fine) and tanning ability).  Personality-wise we are not quite sure where she is from.  We call her the actress because I am not sure I have met a more melodramatic person in my entire life.  Unlike The Analyst, she has not interest in intellectual pursuits, but simply wants to talk to everyone in the entire world, play, dress up in fancy clothes, be the damsel-in-distress, etc.  No interest in sports at all (she defines a girly-girl) but is incredibly in tune with the emotions of everyone around her.  She is a classic expressive-driver (at some point I have to do a post of personality styles – of which I am a huge believer).  She is also the world’s best cuddler.  She is my princess.

The Buddy (Age 2+)

It is tough to know a lot about the personality of a two year old and the verdict is still very much out on this one.  I think this youngest son of ours is all boy – rough, tumble, dinosaurs, trucks, etc.  He is a fickle little guy who switches his allegiances from mom to dad at the drop of a hat but he is my little buddy.  The one thing he got from me is accident proneness.  He has at his tender young age broken an arm, sprained his ankle and lost a tooth.  Poor little guy.

The Dog

Rounding it out is our boxer.  She is a monumental paininthebutt (I knew boxers were high energy when we got her but come on!) but we love her and she is a wonderful nanny to the kids.

So that is the fam.  You’ll see them around in these posts.

A quick chance to get a little biology in…  How cool heredity and genetics.  How cool is it that The Analyst has my hair color (blond) but wife’s hair texture (thick) and The Actress has my wife’s color (brown) and my texture (fine).  Very cool stuff.

The Actress also demonstrates that eye color is not the simple Mendelian genetics of brown eye dominant -blue eye recessive that is so often taught.  Both me and The Wife have blue eyes (mine are paler blue than hers).  The Actress has brown eyes.  Now if it were simple Mendelian that would be impossible as my wife and I would be a cross of homozygous recessives (blue x blue).  But eye color is actually a complicated process of polygenetic inheritance (phenotype involving more than one gene), partial dominance (where one allele is not completely dominant over another) and epistasis (where Gene A controls the expression of Gene B).  It is a careful mix of the type and amount of melanin present in the iris.  Phew – no paternity test needed ;-)!