When I attended a K-12 school in Sri Lanka, we had eight class periods that started at 8:30 am and ended at 3:05 pm. Within the day, there was a 15-minute recess from 10:30-10:45am and one hour for lunch from 12:05-1:05pm. When he were in middle school grades and below, during the recess period we would dash out to play pick-up games of cricket or soccer or whatever, and during the one-hour lunch break we would quickly wolf down our food in order to continue the games we had started earlier in the day. These were wonderful breaks in the days. As we entered the higher grades, we did not use that time for play but instead spent it hanging out and chatting with our friends. [Read more…]

Do people in a crowd start to behave in some sort of collective way, in which each person is influenced by those around them to such an extent that the crowd seems to have a collective will of its own and acts like a single large entity? [Read more…]

Most people know that the winter solstice December 21 corresponds to the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. But some go further and think that this date also corresponds to the time of latest sunrise and earliest sunset. That is not true. The earliest sunset occurs around December 8 and the latest sunrise around January 4. [Read more…]

As I reported earlier, a whole lot of people including me, fell ill over the holiday break with what was very likely a norovirus infection. Carl Zimmer has just written a fascinating article on the remarkable family of noroviruses, based on an paper published in a recent issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases by Aron Hall of the Centers for Disease Control. Zimmer writes: [Read more…]

Well I am back blogging, refreshed after nice holiday break spent at home. We had both daughters and their significant others with us and since this happens so rarely now that they are grown and have their own lives and careers, I took advantage of the opportunity to just hang out with them. [Read more…]

I heard this report on NPR four days ago about a project to take photos of Mount Everest that exactly match those taken over the last century to see what changes have occurred, especially the extent to which the glaciers have receded. [Read more…]

No. Nobody violates the law of conservation of energy, just like nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. But it does seem like Christophe Hamel rises to a greater height than from where he jumped. [Read more…]

When I first started teaching at CWRU over twenty years ago, I recall giving a physics final exam in which students wrote their answers in the familiar blue books. When I started grading them later, I found one in which the student had made little or no attempt at answering the problems. Instead he had spent the entire time sketching quite elaborate drawings of guns firing and other violent images for page after page. At that time, there wasn’t the heightened sensitivity to violence on college campuses that there is now and no training to be alert to such warning signs, and so apart from giving the student a zero on the exam, I did not do anything. [Read more…]