If you are a sci-fi fan like me and dared to watch the new two-parter ‘Supernova’ you may have felt a little worried about the prospect of our sun losing the plot and frying the Earth. Or did you get Earth-frying envy? If so try out this lovely interactive where you get the chance to zap the Earth and surrounding planets with a CME – or Coronal Mass Ejections if you prefer. Just remember to wait until the black sunspot points to your target before letting fly.
Yesterday’s NESTA report into the worrying state of science experimentation in UK schools made me smile:
“The opportunities for science enquiry learning, in particular more open-ended forms of practical experimental work, continue to be inhibited by familiar issues. These include resourcing, time, concerns about health and safety, and the perceived restrictions of curricula and assessment systems..Yet this research shows that more innovative and creative approaches to science education can support the achievement of curriculum learning objectives, and encourage learners to consider further study in science.”
I mean surely, that was why Andy set up Crocodile Clips and others like him to provide educational software to enable scientific experimentation? I’ll just have to be patient and ask him when I next get to see him at BETT in January. In the meantime a free Galilean thermometer to the first person who can tell me my connection to ‘Croc Clips’ beyond once advising Andy on usability issues (btw the usual competition disclaimers apply)?
As per sod’s law the laptop died on me last week, and it turned out to be a fault connected to the battery. Of course I took it back to Michael who I bought it from, who suggested I buy a new battery (which I did)! In the course of chatting with him he mentioned his boiler had packed up recently and it turned out the pump was kaput – a new one was fitted only for it to die too. It turned out there was a fault in the pump which was shorting the other devices or something. And so to the moral of this story? Don’t buy laptops off guys called Michael?! Or for the more nerdy as an example of ‘dynamical keys’ in action. Dynamical keys are the key to understanding how to successfully change a system (though perhaps sod’s law is immune?): “An attempt to control a complex system, perhaps through natural selection or an organizational or political policy by operating on only one feature of the system, will not eradicate or otherwise nullify the system. The system will mutate and evolve to compensate for the environmental assault. The secret of real system change is to locate the dynamical key that supports or unravels the entire system. The next policy would be to guide the reorganization of the entire system around a new dynamical key (Hubler, 1992).” I lifted that from Stephen Guastello‘s book Managing Emergent Phenomena, which also uses the concept in simulation games.
