From: SFPhysics@aol.com
Date: Mon Feb 04 2002 - 13:07:46 PST
From: SFPhysics@aol.com Message-ID: <72.17189862.29905222@aol.com> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 16:07:46 EST Subject: Ron Wong's answer to South Pole Longitude and Raleigh's string method...
Greetings Pinholers:
Ron, your answer was your usual simply brilliant response. Since I cannot
simply give you 100 points as promised, next time there is a NCNAAPT
Conference that we both attend, let my buy you a friendly libation of some
sort.
> If we assume that Al really meant the cosine when he
> invoked the sine, then
> Al Sefl's "back of the envelope" solution, 1.16
> miles, is right on the
> money. His results are only good to 2 significant
> figures given the numbers
> he chose to use. So 1.16 miles = 1.2 miles which, to
> two significant
> figures, equals 1.205 miles.
Yes, I did mean cosine. My mistake was to use the auto spell check and the
@#$%*& thing did not recognize cosine so it typed in sin which it does seem
to like and I then hit send without proofing anything.
My teaching style was such that I gave students extra credit for finding
faults with my logic, data, math, etceteras. This kept them alert and we had
a lot of fun. It also taught the students to think and to question all
aspects of problem solving. Just getting a correct answer was never enough.
Thus, I truly like the way Raleigh used string to show the students the
relationships of latitude and longitude distances versus degrees. It reminds
me of the Thomas Alva Edison story of the mathematician who was assigned to
find out what the volume of an incandescent light bulb was. Day after day
Edison dropped by to visit the poor fellow who had all kinds of equations
written on the blackboard trying to bring all the variables of the slightly
odd shaped hand blown glass envelopes into one expression. Finally Edison
after a week was up, walked over, picked up the glass bulb, filled it with
water, and dumped it into a graduated cylinder.
This brings me to the comment that in teaching Physics we often tend to gloss
over the actual principle being taught to go for the mathematics behind it.
With so many students weak in math this may be a serious lapse of content
that we are not addressing at the high school level. I now see more of this
as I do volunteer work in the local classrooms.
Best wishes to eveyone on the list and again a BIG thanks to Ron for his
great response to my back-of-the-envelope methods,
Al Sefl
Retired but missing the interaction with really bright Physics students who
challenge those neurons to keep firing in the correct order...
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