SUNDAY SOOS: Still playing catch up reporting our weekend activities. Sunday afternoon we wanted to go down to Kent to shop at Winco (yes, it's worth the drive), but decided to make more than a grocery-getting outing of it. So, we loaded up two dogs, a scooter and a bike and hit the nearby Soos Creek Trail.
Per the King County Parks Web site, Soos Creek Trail "features a gentle grade in a natural setting suitable for leisurely strolls, bicycle rides and horse rides." If only we had a horse ...The trail is 6 miles long. I think we hopped on about the halfway point.
There were a few points of visual interest though - mostly provided by interesting root structures like this. ...
When we set out from home it was super sunny, but by the time we were walking, the sun was struggling to break through a cloud cover.
I was curious how Soos Creek got its name. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to learn it's what the Skopamish Indians called their village at the mouth of the Green River. Settlers of the area spelled it Suise originally, but over the years it morphed to Soos. A lot of the land along Soos Creek used to be owned by the railroad company, but in the 1970s, King County Park System acquired it.
HOW THINGS WORK: On Monday we started our new/second Coursera class. It's called "How Things Work 1," taught by Dr. Lou Bloomfield of the University of Virginia.
Monday was the first day of the course, and we decided to dive right in. First, I went to the homework section to see what we were up against. This week, it was just one quiz, but unlike our astrobiology class, and more like the real world, you only get ONE attempt at the quiz. That freaked the kids out a bit. I told them we'd be fine. Probably. We decided to find out by watching all 7 video lectures on the topic of skating for Week 1.
We learned all sorts of cool physic-y stuff. :) We learned about inertia (that an object at rest tends to remain at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion). We learned Newton's First Law of Motion, that velocity is a vector measurement of the rate/amount and direction of motion, or the rate at which an object's position is changing with time. We learned that acceleration is the rate at which an object's velocity is changing with time. We now know a bit about net force, mass, and Newton's Second Law of Motion (F = ma).
After watching all the videos, it was test time. We were a little nervous since it was the 'first day of school' for this class. I couldn't help but wonder if we'd be better prepared for the test if we owned the textbook to go along with the class, so I followed the link and .... prepare for digression. GOOD GOD -- $172?!?!? It's a non fiction book, containing physics facts - principles which have been written/known about for decades/centuries - and these facts are readily available for a WHOLE lot less (like FREE) from any number of sources. I mean $172 damn dollars?! I like books. I buy books. I have copies of first edition books, and books autographed by astronauts that cost a FRACTION of what the publisher is charging for this textbook. This book is not bundled with a CD or a new car or anything ... Naturally, I checked out the electronic version of the book as an alternative. That has to be lots cheaper, right? I mean it costs the publisher NOTHING to print or ship. But wait, it's not even on sale. You can BORROW (that's right, not own, but BORROW) an electronic version of the text for a year for $52. FIFTY TWO DOLLARS! For a loaner PDF about physics 101 ($1 goes to charity, BTW).
Curious, I went to Amazon and searched for "introduction to physics" books. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of them, starting at under a dollar for electronic books, and lots and lots of titles for around $10-$20 if you don't mind 'used' (which often means virtually untouched but previously owned). I did find I could buy a used copy of How Things Work for $39. That's more like it.
I read a couple of articles about the cost of textbooks. A story in the Huffington Post says the American Enterprise Institute a think tank, reports textbook prices are 812 percent higher than they were in 1978. The textbooks' price even outpaced the 559 percent increase in tuition and fees over that time period.
All this said, I realize the irony of me complaining about the price of a textbook for a wonderful, free class. ... Back to that class. ...
So, we took the Week 1 quiz. It was challenging, which is good. It wasn't just a matter of regurgitation concepts or examples we'd heard in the videos. Rather, we had to take the info we learned and demonstrate that we understood it, as the questions presented scenarios and we had to figure out how/which laws of physics were involved. I was THRILLED when I scored a 9 out of 10. CJ scored the same and was near tears. He was mad because he knew the right answer to the one he missed, he just checked the wrong box. Annabelle was our only perfect score of the day.
SO CLOSE: I put probably 3 hours into the never-ending My Little Pony mural today. As a result, never-ending has changed to damn-near done. I should be finished tomorrow, with 30 minutes of work, tops. Hooray! Photos to come.
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