I agree. Slide rules are the perfect tool for high school and undergrad physics classes:
1. Most physics problems don't require the extra digits of precision offered by electronic calculators.
2. Slide rules force students to decide what the magnitude of the answer should be.
Basic slide rule use should be covered in Week 1 and electronic calculators banned. Slide rules got us to the moon and back; they can certainly serve for Physics 101.
While others have posted on the impossibility of setting up a quality astrophotography rig for $1000, it might be worth focusing instead on what this guy CAN do with $1000.
I would like to hear suggestions from others, but here are some example of what I'm thinking about: Time-lapse photos of meteor showers. Timing of occultation events (e.g. when the moon just grazes a star, giving information about the contours of the lunar surface). Searching for new comets. Observation (indirect, of course!) of sunspots and solar flares. Quirky efforts like year-long time lapse photos to illustrate the analemma, e.g.: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020709.html
Man-made objects can be a lot of fun, too. Photos of the silhouette of the ISS, if one is lucky enough to be in the correct position as it passes in front of the sun or moon. Heck, just watching satellites fly overhead, especially Iridium satellites as they flare, and the ISS when the shuttle's docked (with the combination being about as bright as Venus these days), and the heavens-above.com website is a big help with all that.
I recommend browsing through previous Astronomy Pictures of the Day ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ ) to get some ideas. A lot of it is professional astrophotography but some of it is the work of dedicated amateurs, some of whom didn't have >$1000 rigs.
This was in '92 or '93, when I was single and rented a large 4 or 5-bedroom house in Silicon Valley with a bunch of friends. After a couple of years living there, I had assumed responsibility for finding new roommates for the house, which I usually did by posting on Usenet. I think I usually mentioned it was a non-smoking house.
One day not too long after I had posted an ad, I got a call from a guy who identified himself as "John Draper" and I recognized the name from a book I had read about Steve Jobs. Just thinking that it was some other guy who shared the name, I jokingly said "Oh, hey, Cap'n Crunch, right?" and he said "Yeah, that's me". We chatted for a while about his phone phreaking days and his then-current interests in programming and so forth. All the while I'm thinking to myself "Wow, Cap'n Crunch" but also "Do I really want this guy living with me?"
We wound up renting the room to someone else, but based on some of the other posters' comments here, I can only imagine what life would have been like with Cap'n Crunch in the house...
There comes a time in every important Jobs project, usually when the thing appears to be finished, that he sends it back to the drawing board and asks that it be completely redone. Some people say this trait is pathological, a sign of his control-freak perfectionism or his inability to let go. "It's happened on every Pixar movie," Jobs confesses. It's also what he did when Ive presented him with a plastic model of what was to be the new iMac. It looked like the old iMac on a no-carb diet, a leaner iMac in the Zone. "There was nothing wrong with it," recalls Jobs. "It was fine. Really, it was fine." He hated it.
Rather than give his O.K., he went home from work early that day and summoned Ive, the amiable genius who also designed the original iMac, the other-worldly iPod music player, the lightweight but heavy-duty titanium PowerBook and the ice-cube-inspired Cube desktop, to name but a few of his greatest hits. As they walked through the quarter-acre vegetable garden and apricot grove of Jobs' wife Laurene, Jobs sketched out the Platonic ideal for the new machine. "Each element has to be true to itself," Jobs told Ive. "Why have a flat display if you're going to glom all this stuff on its back? Why stand a computer on its side when it really wants to be horizontal and on the ground? Let each element be what it is, be true to itself." Instead of looking like the old iMac, the thing should look more like the flowers in the garden. Jobs said, "It should look like a sunflower."
Many printer drivers use more ink than is necessary for satisfactory printing. My company has just introduced a new product that allows you to control the amount of ink you use to print. "Using patent pending software algorithms, InkSaver optimizes printer data so that your printer uses less ink - even when printing at your inkjet's highest resolution." See our website at www.strydent.com.
When I lived in the South Bay, I used to go to a Greek place on DeAnza Blvd south of Stevens Creek called Yiassoo. It's on the east side of the street in what used to be an old Taco Bell. Great gyros - back in 1994 anyway.
Foresight Exchange is an online "stock market" game in which players trade claims about what might happen in the future (who becomes the next U.S. president, how long Apple Computer will survive, etc.) Participants compete with play money. The 2GHz claim currently predicts a 2GHz CPU by Oct. 2001.
If you're debating whether to buy index funds or actively managed funds, remember that the success of index funds doesn't even depend on the efficient market hypothesis. Just the fact that their expenses are lower insures that you'll beat the average return of all actively-managed funds, and the principle of "regression to the mean" guarantees that it's impossible to pick actively-managed funds that will beat the average return. For more on this topic, and to find out why an S&P 500 fund is NOT the best index fund to buy, check out this speech by Vanguard's Chairman John Bogle.
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I agree. Slide rules are the perfect tool for high school and undergrad physics classes:
1. Most physics problems don't require the extra digits of precision offered by electronic calculators.
2. Slide rules force students to decide what the magnitude of the answer should be.
Basic slide rule use should be covered in Week 1 and electronic calculators banned. Slide rules got us to the moon and back; they can certainly serve for Physics 101.
While others have posted on the impossibility of setting up a quality astrophotography rig for $1000, it might be worth focusing instead on what this guy CAN do with $1000.
I would like to hear suggestions from others, but here are some example of what I'm thinking about: Time-lapse photos of meteor showers. Timing of occultation events (e.g. when the moon just grazes a star, giving information about the contours of the lunar surface). Searching for new comets. Observation (indirect, of course!) of sunspots and solar flares. Quirky efforts like year-long time lapse photos to illustrate the analemma, e.g.: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020709.html
Man-made objects can be a lot of fun, too. Photos of the silhouette of the ISS, if one is lucky enough to be in the correct position as it passes in front of the sun or moon. Heck, just watching satellites fly overhead, especially Iridium satellites as they flare, and the ISS when the shuttle's docked (with the combination being about as bright as Venus these days), and the heavens-above.com website is a big help with all that.
I recommend browsing through previous Astronomy Pictures of the Day ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ ) to get some ideas. A lot of it is professional astrophotography but some of it is the work of dedicated amateurs, some of whom didn't have >$1000 rigs.
This was in '92 or '93, when I was single and rented a large 4 or 5-bedroom house in Silicon Valley with a bunch of friends. After a couple of years living there, I had assumed responsibility for finding new roommates for the house, which I usually did by posting on Usenet. I think I usually mentioned it was a non-smoking house.
One day not too long after I had posted an ad, I got a call from a guy who identified himself as "John Draper" and I recognized the name from a book I had read about Steve Jobs. Just thinking that it was some other guy who shared the name, I jokingly said "Oh, hey, Cap'n Crunch, right?" and he said "Yeah, that's me". We chatted for a while about his phone phreaking days and his then-current interests in programming and so forth. All the while I'm thinking to myself "Wow, Cap'n Crunch" but also "Do I really want this guy living with me?"
We wound up renting the room to someone else, but based on some of the other posters' comments here, I can only imagine what life would have been like with Cap'n Crunch in the house...
"Most bone growth occurs at night, study finds"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6876520/
From the Time magazine article in January 2002:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020114/cover.
Many printer drivers use more ink than is necessary for satisfactory printing. My company has just introduced a new product that allows you to control the amount of ink you use to print. "Using patent pending software algorithms, InkSaver optimizes printer data so that your printer uses less ink - even when printing at your inkjet's highest resolution." See our website at www.strydent.com.
When I lived in the South Bay, I used to go to a Greek place on DeAnza Blvd south of Stevens Creek called Yiassoo. It's on the east side of the street in what used to be an old Taco Bell. Great gyros - back in 1994 anyway.
Foresight Exchange is an online "stock market" game in which players trade claims about what might happen in the future (who becomes the next U.S. president, how long Apple Computer will survive, etc.) Participants compete with play money. The 2GHz claim currently predicts a 2GHz CPU by Oct. 2001.
If you're debating whether to buy index funds or actively managed funds, remember that the success of index funds doesn't even depend on the efficient market hypothesis. Just the fact that their expenses are lower insures that you'll beat the average return of all actively-managed funds, and the principle of "regression to the mean" guarantees that it's impossible to pick actively-managed funds that will beat the average return. For more on this topic, and to find out why an S&P 500 fund is NOT the best index fund to buy, check out this speech by Vanguard's Chairman John Bogle.