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.

What we can learn from ants.

The other night my family and I were talking about the problems our society faces in the future: global warming, diminishing natural resources, general destruction of the environment.... all that good uplifting stuff you hear so much about lately. And the questions was raised, "But what can I, as an individual, actually do?" By now you've heard that if we each just did a little bit it would add up to a lot. But, for me, and I think most people, that's a generally tough idea to grasp. First of all there are nearly 7 billion people, so my contribution is 0.00000001% of the whole. What the use? Secondly, if I actually do something, what's to say everyone else will do it as well? As I mulled these questions over in my mind I remembered this clip about an ant colony my dad had showed me a few months ago. Each ant does its small part and the net result is something truly mind-boggling (If you don't have 6 minutes, skip ahead to the middle to see the really cool stuff in the second half). Enjoy....

Noggin Fodder

www.nogfod.com

Feed your head.

The earth is really very small...

Have you ever sat and thought about how big the earth really is? Maybe not, but it's a worthwhile activity sometimes. When you hear about all the bad stuff humans are doing to the earth it's easy to convince yourself that the earth is too big for us insignificant humans to really affect things. Admit it, you don't really believe we could produce enough carbon dioxide to change the climate of the entire world. And how could that little can of hairspray possibly destroy the ozone layer? When I'm having trouble agreeing with all the evidence that says we are indeed changing the world environment... and not in a good way... I find it helpful to look up at the sky at night to put things in perspective.

As planets go, the earth is really small! Sure we're way bigger than Pluto, but that's not even a planet any more.

When you add Jupiter to the picture the earth begins to look very small.... but at least we can claim to be the biggest planet that's not just a big ball of gas.

The sun contains 98% of the mass of the entire solar system! Next to the sun, Jupiter is insignificant. The earth?... barely noticeable now.

Astronomers apparently aren't all that creative. They call stars like the sun "dwarfs" and stars like Arcturus "giants."

Apparently in awe of what they were finding astronomers were unable to muster a creative word in naming these types of stars. Rigel is a "blue giant," Aldebaran is a "red giant." Betelgeuse (pronounced: beetle juice) and Antares are "red super-giants."

Astronomers lack of creative naming aside, where is the earth in the last picture? The sun, 1 million times larger than the earth, is a single pixel.

So next time you start thinking the earth is too big for us humans to mess it up, look up at the sky and realize that we are all stuck here on an insignificant speck that is the only insignificant speck we have. "But we'll just find another planet to go to when we ruin earth," you say. Don't count on it. These pictures don't take into account the even more ridiculous distances between all these planets and stars.

My advice: The earth is really very small.... Don't mess it up!

Noggin Fodder

www.nogfod.com

Feed your head.

Punctuate.

I don't recall the last time punctuation was brought up as a topic of conversation at a party.  And I'm fairly certain "You know what this world needs?... Better punctuation!" is a pick up line destined for failure.  Yet Lynne Truss has sold millions of copies of her book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." The title is based on a panda bear joke that is bound to make at least every English teacher I know laugh. From www.eatsshootsandleaves.com:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.

This is an admittedly bad English-grammar-nerd joke. So if that didn't entertain you, here is a real panda that eats shoots and leaves.

There are, in fact, a lot of entertaining examples of how punctuation can affect the meaning of a sentence. My favorite:

A woman without her man is nothing.

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

Which do you like better?

I hope my punctuation has been correct....

Noggin Fodder
www.nogfod.com
Feed your head.

Entertaining Gas: Sulfur Hexaflouride

In this YouTube video, an unknown hand demonstrates the density of an invisible gas, sulfur hexaflouride.  The gas is so dense that an aluminum foil boat floats on it, like water.  The boat is sunk when the dense gas is scooped out of the tank and into the boat.  


Everyone, at some point, has given themselves a Chipmunks voice by inhaling helium. Helium is much less dense than air and when it passes through your vocal cords they vibrate at a higher frequency giving your voice a higher pitch. Sulfur hexaflouride passing over your vocal cords makes them vibrate much more slowly, giving you a deep voice.  In this video, some guy in a white lab coat demonstrates the effects of sulfur hexaflouride on your voice. He knows his science, but get a tad nervous. As he trips on his words he inhales a little too much gas and nearly vomits. The gas also sinks to the bottom of your lungs and would stay there unless you turn upside down to let it fall out (also an entertaining part of the video).


Enjoy,
berg

Noggin Fodder
www.nogfod.com
Feed your head.