Bills and Bats

FUNNY MONEY: A few days back, we were in a store and at checkout the cashier asked if $2 bills were ok for change. 

"Sure!" I said, telling her I doubt CJ and Annabelle had ever even seen one. Heck, I thought that I hadn't even seen one since the '70s. 

Sure enough, they hadn't.  The kids marveled at the 'funny' money and asked if it was real. I told them it was genuine United State currency, and that back when I was their age and $2 bills were new, they were supposed to be the next big thing, more popular than $1 bills. 

Today, we finally got around to doing a little research regarding the $2 bills. Turns out that when they were minted in the mid '70s, they weren't really new at all. They were just being reintroduced after a 10-year hiatus.
 
In fact, $2 bills date all the way back to the mid-1860s (who knew?). The photo leading today's blog is a note from 1862. That's Alexander Hamilton on it, BTW. He was the first secretary of the treasury (again, who knew?). Back then, I'll bet $2 would go quite a ways!

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving has all sorts of fun facts about $2 bills/notes. For instance, the first time Thomas Jefferson appeared on the $2 bill, was on Series 1869 notes. That same portrait of Jefferson has been used on all $2 US Notes, as well as all $2 Federal Reserve Notes

The 1976 reissue I thought to be new was part of the celebration of the US bicentennial. For Series 1976, the back of the bill was changed from Jefferson's Monticello to an illustration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

The bill is rare because it has had relatively low printing numbers to begin with, and since there are relatively few in circulation, it causes people to horde or hold on to ones they have, rather than putting them back in circulation. We're guilty of that. The two $2 bills we got are tucked away right now. 

NO EASY WAY: "Hitting a baseball is the single most difficult thing to do in sports." 
That proclamation was made by Ted Williams, and I think many would agree with him.

Today we read the book "No Easy Way: The Story of Ted Williams and the Last .400 Season." 

Before we started it, I asked the kids how they would feel if they only got 40 percent on their physics test. They both said they would be VERY unhappy, as .400 would be a big fat F.

I told them that if they were playing baseball professionally, that batting .400 would be EXCEPTIONAL. With that, we read about Ted, and his amazing season in 1941, where he finished the year with a .406 average. 

From the book we learned that Williams, like so many other pros of his era, had their baseball careers interrupted by World War II. Williams was sworn into service on May 22, 1942.

From further research, we learned that unlike some other athletes, Williams didn't spend his time being an ambassador and/or playing on a military team. Rather, he was a U.S. Marine Corps aviator, and his superior reflexes, coordination and reaction speed made him an excellent pilot. He was released from active duty in January of 1946, but remained in the Reserves. Many were surprised when Williams was recalled to active duty in 1952, at age 33, for the Korean War, during which he flew 29 combat missions. Interestingly, he was in the same unit as future NASA astronaut John Glenn, who described Williams as a fine pilot. In fact, for the last half of Williams' missions, he served as John Glenn's wingman. 

Between WWII and the Korean War, Williams missed out on nearly five years of Major League Baseball. There is wide speculation that had that not been the case, Williams might have broken Babe Ruth's home run record.

MIDTERM: We listened to nearly an hour's worth of "How Things Work" physics lectures today, wanting to finish up this week's topic of ramps and take our quiz today. 

We reviewed our notes before the quiz. We've learned what handy simple machines ramps can be. We learned what a joule is (a derived unit of energy or work) and how to pronounce it (like 'jewel'), and about support forces. We've learned a lot about energy (it's a conserved physical quality), and that you can transfer energy, but the overall amount of energy doesn't change. We learned energy takes two forms (kinetic and potential) and about different kinds of potential energy (elastic, magnetic, gravitational, electric, nuclear, and chemical ).  We learned about ramp force and how to calculate it, and that a constant velocity is sometimes zero. And we covered Newton's Third Law of Motion, learning that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

Before taking our quizzes, we read the course's online discussion forum. There, we found some hot debates people were having about seemingly half the questions on the quiz (without giving away the exact questions or answers). Yikes. It wasn't exactly a confidence builder. But we had to give it a go no matter what. 

I submitted my quiz first and, remembering the professor's previous statement that if you get half right, you're doing well, I was so hap-hap-happy to get a B. The kids did as well or better. We're now halfway through the challenging course and holding our own. Phew!

TUNE IN TOMORROW: On Friday, Mar. 22, NASA's Sun Earth Days team and NASA EDGE will present a live program about the sun's violent nature at the peak of solar activity. The 90-minute program from Wallops Flight Facility will share discoveries about heliophysics and planetary missions.  

It will air from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at this URL: http://www.ustream.tv/nasaedge

We will certainly be tuning in!

If you don't have time to check out the Web cast, the Sun Earth Days Web site is certainly worth a look-see. Lots of great resources there: http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2013/

HEAVY SIGH: If you haven't seen it already, this one minute Anti-Defamation League video is worth the 60 seconds it takes to watch it.
http://youtu.be/3KyvlMJefR4