NogFod at the Primary Source Holiday Bazaar

NogFod is proud to be a vendor at the 2008 Primary Source Holiday Bazaar at the Watertown Hellenic Center (25 Bigelow Ave, Watertown, MA). Primary Source is a non-profit that promotes history and humanities education by connecting educators to cultures throughout the world.

The Bazaar runs from 3-7 pm followed by a trivia night from 7-9. Stop by our booth and take a Stroop Test (you can even practice ahead of time here) for your chance to win a free shirt! We will also be raffling 2 free shirts along with great prizes from other vendors.

We hope to see you there.

Erik Berg
Co-founder of NogFod
Education-Promoting Apparel

Central Asia Institute

In our efforts to find a charity that has the greatest impact, we have decided to change course slightly. From now on, NogFod will donate 50% of our profits to the Central Asia Institute (CAI). The CAI was founded by Greg Mortenson (read "Three Cups of Tea" for a great biography) to build schools and provide for the education of children, especially girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The mission of the CAI fits with NogFod's mission perfectly, and we feel that our donations can have a great impact in that part of the world, and consequently for the entire world.

Read more about the CAI at www.ikat.org

Sincerely,
The NogFod Blog
www.NogFod.com

The World Clock

It's morbid, but it's mesmerizing. This is a world clock that runs based on statistical data about the rates of various events. No, computer technology has not gotten good enough to register every time a person is actually born... although, I imagine that is not far off. And it is not currently measuring each barrel of oil removed from the ground or the rising temperature of the earth in billionths of a degree. These numbers are based on historical statistics, but the trends are perfectly clear. If any of these numbers concern you, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Educate yourself. Then take action. Herbert Spencer (an English philosopher and coiner of the term "survival of the fittest" to describe Charles Darwin's conception of natural selection) said, "The great aim of education is not knowledge but action." I agree with Spencer wholeheartedly.

World Clock Website

Noggin Fodder is taking action to helping solve the world's problems by providing education so that many more people around the world can take action themselves. Visit Noggin Fodder's website to learn more about the importance of education.

Sincerely,
Erik Berg
Co-founder
Noggin Fodder
Feed Your Mind
Save Your World

Three Cups of Tea

Upon the suggestion of JJ, I went out and bought Three Cups of Tea, the biography of mountain climber-turned-philanthropist/humanitarian, Greg Mortenson. While I have yet to read further than the cover flap and introduction I have already learned something that, in retrospect, seems incredibly obvious. In my thinking about the importance of education I have looked at the world primarily through a science teacher's eyes. The benefits of education that I tend to focus on - ending global warming, changing world energy use, limiting world population growth - are all related to science. Yet I missed one of the most obvious benefits of providing education to developing countries: Education is the most powerful "weapon" in the war on terror. In the words of Three Cups of Tea author, David Relin, "Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madrassa."

Sincerely,
Erik Berg
Co-founder
Noggin Fodder
Feed Your Mind
Save Your World

More on World Population

The other day I posted a video that showed world population growth over the past 2000 years. To make it more clear how important this issue is, here is a graph of world population over the past 250 years. Notice the difference between developed and developing countries. Fortunately, education has been shown to stop population growth and one dollar goes a long way in funding education in developing countries. Please help us fund education charities in developing countries by supporting Noggin Fodder.

Sincerely,
Erik Berg
Co-founder
Noggin Fodder
Feed Your Mind
Save Your World

World Population

This video is an incredibly powerful demonstration of the growth of the human population from the year 1 AD to 2030 AD.

We obviously can't continue on this path. One way to end this exponential pattern of population growth is through inevitable competition for resources, with the requisite famines, wars, and death. The other, more favorable way is through education. The fastest growing populations on earth right now are in developing countries. It has been shown that the most effective way to curb population growth is access to education, especially for women.

Help us contribute to education and slow human population growth by supporting Noggin Fodder.

Sincerely,
Erik Berg
Co-founder
Noggin Fodder
Feed Your Mind
Save Your World

Resonance and old age

I love YouTube. Being a science nerd and teacher I can find tons of videos to demonstrate various topics that I'm interested in or that I teach in class. But it bugs me that there are no explanations of what's going on in the videos. This video, for example:

It would be great is the half million people who have watched this could get more out of it than, "Wicked cool!" So here I'll take a stab at it:
The hand sprinkles tiny plastic beads on a metal plate attached to a speaker. A sine wave generator is playing through the speaker to generate pure tones of various frequencies/pitches (starting low and getting higher). At certain frequecies standing waves a created in the plate that have nodes (places with no shaking) and antinodes (places with lots of shaking). In a guitar string the nodes are the ends and the antinode is the middle. But more complicated patterns can be created. The patterns get really crazy when you chenge from a 1-dimensional string to a 2-dimensional plate. The beads pile up at the nodes and are bounced off of the antinodes, creating the cool patterns.

Here are some neat things to look for as you watch:

• The patterns only become visible at certain pitches when the lenghts of the waves being produced are evenly divisible into dimensions of the plate.
• When the patterns pop out the volume also gets louder since the plate is resonating (for a great example of resonance, check out a video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse).
• The patterns become more and more intricate at the pitch goes up. The higher frequency means shorter waves, so more wavelengths fit within the size of the plate.
• You can use this as a hearing test to see how old you are. As people age they lose their high frequency hearing. If you thought that the sound cut out before the video ended then you're old!

Noggin Fodder
www.nogfod.com
Feed your head.