Swinging and Shaking

THE SWING OF THINGS: Look, the kids at another park. Don't they ever do any school work? 

Honestly, the swinging was in the name of science. They're working on a unit about pendulums, and swings are a perfect example. At the park, they tested swings of different lengths and  seeing how the length of the pendulum affects how many times they swung back and forth.

They conducted a related experiment at home, using string, a paperclip, a penny, some tape and a pencil to first construct a pendulum that would complete 15 cycles in 15 seconds. Then, they figured out how to make one that worked as a minute timer. 

 Bee did most of the building, while CJ was the official time keeper. 

SHAKE IT UP: Science surrounds us, even at the National Football Conference championship game last Sunday, where seismographs were used to capture the action in an interesting way.

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network's Seismo Blog has in-depth analysis of the seismic activity in the Seahawks' stadium when they beat the Green Bay Packers in rather crazy fashion.

The PNSN's graph above shows the original "Beast Quake" (how the stadium shook during a 67-yard touchdown run by Marshawn Lynch during the 'Hawks playoff win over the Saints in 2011) in blue. Some seismic activity from this past Sunday is shown on the other lines. In green is the "Fake Quake," or the crowd's reaction to the fake field goal and TD pass by Seahawks' punter Jon Ryan.   The Dance Quake isn't from a single play, but it's the crowd's collection reaction after a late go-ahead touchdown and two-point conversion, while kicking off. The "OT TD" in gray was the jubilation when the 'Hawks scored the game-winning touchdown in overtime. As of Sunday, "Dance Quake" is now CenturyLink's largest seismic event on record. 

I loved the PNSN blog's commentary on "Dance Quake." They wrote: "Clearly while most fans were jumping up and down in unison there were many who were either not very coordinated or JUI (Jumping Under the Influence)." 

Go Hawks. :) 

Here's a play-by-play of Sunday's game (seismically speaking).

I think this type of coverage of the game is a cool way to inject some science into game day. Bravo to those involved.

CLASSY: We 'binge watched' seven lectures for our "Introduction to Classical Music" class today. Instrument families, melodic structure, modulation, tonality, cadence, musical texture, counterpoints, chromatic scale, monophonic, homophonic and polyphonic, fugues, cannons, strophic, binary, ternary, the eight style periods (from middle ages to post modern) ... we covered a LOT of musical ground today. 

I caught myself at times only listening to the music, rather than the words explaining the music. Oops. 

During the lectures, we got to hear parts of a number of works. We learned that Ave Maria is really the work of multiple people. While doing math homework today, I played an Andrea Bocelli's version of it. 

We listened to a classical music version of "Call Me Maybe" (Carly Rae Jepsen's pop music ear worm).

Honestly, I don't like either version of it, haha.

And we were reminded that Barry Manilow had a big hit in the 1970s by writing a song, "Could It Be Magic?" using Frederic Chopin's "Prelude in C Minor" (or more specifically, Prelude Op. 28, No. 20, in C minor) as its intro. 

Now that one, I loved, and remarkably I remembered every word to the song, despite not having heard it in, oh, 40 years or so.

TUT TUT: I can't even believe the news today that King Tut's burial mask has been seriously, irreversibly damaged. The account of how it went down (literally) reads like "Dumb and Dumber." The kids were aghast. Read it and weep, as the saying goes: 
http://io9.com/king-tuts-burial-mask-has-been-irreversibly-damaged-1681085211?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow