MSM 586: The Nightingale Floor

Summary:

Shawn and Troy talk about Genius Week, the end of the year, and more. Dave is a natural disaster, oops, talks about natural disasters. 

Jokes:  

John ordered a small vault and a stereo online.

They arrived safe and sound.


All forest mushrooms can be eaten.

The secret is finding the ones that can be eaten more than once.


Listening to a good unknown composer to me — Joachim Raff.

He should have had a kid named Riff.


Eating boiled oatmeal or cornmeal in water or milk can be grueling.


I changed my mind but it still doesn’t function any better.


It would seem rather ironic to pass away in one’s living room.


When you think about it, wearing a tank top in the summer is way too heavy and impractical.


A feisty dentist and hot-tempered manicurist got hitched.

Will they fight tooth and nail?

Middle School Science Minute  

by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)

Natural Disasters

I was recently reading the May/June 2023 issue of “Science & Children” a publication of the National Science Teaching Association.  

In this issue, I read the “Editor’s Note” column, written by Elizabeth Barrett-Zahn.  She wrote an article entitled, “Natural Disasters.”

Our student population has been through a great deal in the last few years: a pandemic with gaps in school access, increased natural disasters, social unrest and violence.  Instead of backing away from teaching about natural disasters, we must provide opportunities for our students to see how scientists and engineers are actively working on solutions.

 http://k12science.net/natural-disasters/

Reports from the Front Lines

The Social Web  

Mary  Reichard  @ReichardWorld

Line of the week: “I’d like to start my life again and ruin it differently. I have new ideas.” Attribution unknown

Marvin Olasky  @MarvinOlasky

We hit rock bottom on civics education. Can we turn it around?

Historic Vids  @historyinmemes

Anti ninja floors (Nightingale floor) used in Japan to alert of any trespassers

https://twitter.com/i/status/1664363298630844423

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightingale_floor

Susie Dent  @susie_dent

Word of the day is ‘joblijock’ (19th-century dialect): any disturber of domestic peace – small children bouncing on the bed/lawnmowers at dawn/the one bird whose song has to be louder than all the others at 5am [etc].  

Kristin Scearce @kscearce@mstdn.social

Libraries are the best!

Missing The Point @MissingThePt

Schrödinger would have written posts that were simultaneously funny and not funny.

Doug Holton @dougholton

Handout: Open Educational Resources & Open PedagogyLinks to resources on the basics of finding, using, and authoring #OER resources, textbooks, etc., including info on student-generated resources (#OpenPedagogy).  I’ll add a 2nd page to the handout in the coming weeks w/resources on #H5P & #Pressbooks in preparation for a workshop.

Ron King  @mthman

Another great advisory activity…AI generated Would You Rather questions. Settings include “Serious, Intellectual, Funny, and Absurd & Hilarious.” #mschat #edchat #mtbos https://autoclassmate.io/tools/would-yo

Strategies:  

Dialects

Can be fun to talk about how words are pronounced with kids. (I took a couple of these and both were wrong though). 

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/american-accent-quiz

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/american-accents

Resources:

Comic Book+

Here we have a bunch of titles many with very familiar names.

This crew started their lives off appearing in newspaper Comic Strips. Later their exploits were either reprinted in book format, or completely new stories were created for the comics.

Big Joe Palooka appears, along with his pal Humphrey, another spinoff from the strip. Other goodies include two Terry and the Pirates series along with a bunch of Fritzi Ritz and Alley Oop books. The Captain and the Kids also set sail on these pages.

In addition there are a large amount of issues featuring a variety of comic strip reprints courtesy of United Features.

We have 47 titles and 840 issues in our ‘Comic Strip Spinoff Category’ for you to enjoy.

Mission and Disclaimer: The mission of Comic Book Plus is to present completely free of charge, and to the widest possible audience, popular cultural works of the past. These records are offered as a contribution to education and lifelong learning. They are historical documents reflecting the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. We at Comic Book Plus do not endorse the views expressed in these, which may contain content offensive to modern users.

We aim to house only content in the Public Domain. If you suspect that any of our material may be infringing copyright, then please use our contact page to let us know. So we can investigate further.

https://comicbookplus.com/?cbplus=comicstripspinoff

Language Reactor

Language Reactor is a powerful toolbox for learning languages. It helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native materials. Studying will become more effective, interesting, and enjoyable! 

https://www.languagereactor.com/

Emojiton

The Smart Emoji Finder

https://emojiton.com/

Diffit

We’re building Diffit to save teachers time, while making it easier than ever to get every student the differentiated resources they need to thrive.

In seconds, teachers can:

📝 Adapt existing materials for any reader

✨ Generate leveled resources for any topic

☕️ Edit, share resources with students, and get back to life

https://www.diffit.me/

Web Spotlight:

A Swedish newspaper is having AI rap its articles in an attempt to get young people interested in the news

https://www.businessinsider.com/swedish-newspaper-experimented-ai-rap-articles-to-appeal-to-youth-2023-5

Making A Billion-Year Lego Clock

Building a mechanical Lego clock that keeps time for 10000000 years. The clock has dials to display seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, mega-annums and galactical years (time required for the Sun to orbit once around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy). The first component resembles a grandfather clock with a weight-driven pendulum anchor escapement. The escapement wheel rotates 1 tooth per second. Different gear trains transmit motion from the escapement to all complications from days to years to decades. As soon as the weight touches the ground, a rewinding motor is triggered to raise the weight and “recharge the clock”. This happens every 2 minutes. A solar powered battery fuels the energy storage for the electric rewind motor. Under a cloudless sky the solar panel generates more energy than consumed by the Lego pendulum clock. A bigger energy storage could be added to run the clock at night time. To increase solar panel efficiency the solar panel is mounted on a tilting mechanism that is connected to the 24h complication, following the sun during daytime. Similar to an astronomical clock, this Lego timepiece features complications beyond minutes and hours. It displays units of times based on orders of magnitude of the second. Days, mean months and years are counted. The biggest unit is the “billion year display” that is basically a mechanical counter displaying years in decimals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRzgCylePjk

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