Tuesday Doings

PULLEYS: The kids completed some science homework today for the pulleys and levers unit they're in the midst of. 

They were tasked with constructing a single fixed pulley. It took them a fair amount of talking and scrounging and testing, but they came up with something that, indeed, fit the bill.

Another part of the same assignment was to find levers pictured in magazines and cut out examples of type-1, -2, and -3 levers.  Here are some items CJ found.

 Annabelle found a couple, but got frustrated and decided it would be more fun to draw the rest.

UP WITH THE SUN: Tomorrow morning Solar Impulse, the plane that gets all its juice from our one and only sun, will be taking off again.

© Solar Impulse | Merz | Rezo.ch

Solar Impulse will take off at 5 a.m. MST from Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport tomorrow morning, bound for the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. It will be the second leg of its cross-country journey, which started on May 3, when Bertrand Piccard flew the plane from San Fran to Phoenix.  

Wednesday, André Borschberg will be in the pilot's seat, attempting to set an absolute distance world record in solar aviation - over 830 miles. The previous record was 693 miles, held by Solar Impulse and Borchberg on a Switzerland to Spain flight in 2012. 

The team of Solar Impulse says they hope the flights "inspire everyone to be pioneers and change-makers to bring solutions for today’s challenges." People who join their movement (by entering their contact info on the Solar Impulse Web site at http://www.solarimpulse.com/join_us/) can take a virtual ride in the plane, as their name will be on a USB key kept in the cockpit and transported across America as virtual passengers.

Each leg of the cross country journey will be streamed live on www.solarimpulse.com as well as on Twitter and Facebook. The plane's position, altitude and speed will be shown in real time, while cockpit and mission control cameras allow viewers to experience the journey.

WEEKEND REWIND: Yesterday's post about our weekend focused solely on the pig roast we witnessed. There were other goings on, of course. For instance, the kids got a chance to check out some chickens.

And here's Rudy, the fine looking and vociferous rooster.

The kids also got in a quick game of Twister. What a classic.

Funny how the mat looks so much smaller now than it did when I was a kid.

On the way down to Siletz, we stopped at a the Baldock rest area between Portland and Salem. There, we found an interesting living feature called "Grove of the States."

Once upon a time, it featured trees for each of the 50 states. Some of them looked lovely, like this New York sugar maple.

However, a lot of the specimens seemed to be really struggling in their not-native environments, like this North Carolina palm.

And some trees were missing entirely, holes where the former rootballs were located, as was the case with the Arkansas Pine.

Despite the voids and a whole lot of signs in various states of disrepair, it was a nice pit stop.

SPEED BUMP: For the first time, we seem to have hit a bit of a speed bump in our Einstein class. We finished watching all the week's lectures, took the test following each of those and aced them, took the overall weekly test and aced that, but the problem set for this week is vexing us. What's really frustrating is that overall, this week content wise had been lighter and less difficult (at least on the surface) than last week, by far.

We're trying to generate equations that will let a person transfer points from one person's point of view to another's on the same spacetime diagram. We have the starting points to work these equations, but try as we might, the ones we come up with don't match any of the four options on the problem set. Grrr. We have a couple more days to complete the problems, but I don't know what's going to change between now and then. We've already watched, rewatched and rewatched the lectures, and worked and reworked. We'll sleep on it, or as Albert would have said, we "vill t'ink" some more, but I'm not very hopeful that the physics fairy showing up and solving these puzzles. Frustrating, indeed.