Bryan McClelland, an entrepreneur in Manila, Philippines, is making bikes out of bamboo. Seems like a good idea as there is lots of bamboo available for a raw material. Some of the bike parts are made of metal. His claim is that bamboo has the same tensile strength as steel and a higher strength to weight ratio. He sells them for between 500 and 600 dollars. Check out the video below. So would you ride one of these bikes? I would.
Here is a link to their website.
Today was the northeast Pennsylvania regional MathCounts competition. It was held at the Penn State Worthington campus in Dunmore. We left school early this morning, around 7:30 am and arrived at 8:15am. After checking in, the team ate donuts provided by the MathCounts and university.
There were thirteen teams competing. They started with the target round, followed by the sprint round. After a short break, the team round was given. My A team was a little nervous, but it turned out, they did pretty good, taking third place overall. For lunch, we all had chicken and pasta in a room adjacent to the student cafeteria. After lunch, it was time for the countdown round. We has one student finish 4th, but did not advance. During the competition, WNEP Ch 16 arrived and took some video. They had a story on the local news tonight and I have the link below.
Update: Our number 5 student will attend the state competition in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 18th. Congratulations K. , I know you will do well there.
Happy New Year, it’s 2011. I had some time today to finally upgrade to the latest version of Headway, 2.06. I had the old version of 1.0 and the last time I tried to update, I almost lost everything. Today, things went smoother and the upgrade went well except for a few small glitches.
I learned my lesson from last time and made a complete backup of the site. I have the backup on my hard drive and on my server. I’m still working with video and have learned a great deal about web video. Yesterday I had some time to work on a technique called green screen. I got it working in iMovie09 and I’ll post a small video using this technique.
Other than that, I’ve been spending time with my family and taking it easy. Easy like reading books on science and web video and shopping with the family. With time being the limiting factor, I would like to spend 90% of my time on content and the other 10% maintaining the site. It should be easier now since Headway and WordPress can now be automatically updated, saving a lot of time.
I gave a demonstration of dry ice to my students last week. Here is a video showing what the graduated cylinder looked like at the end of the day. I put a few drops of red food coloring in the water and then put a few pieces of dry ice in the water.
I have this drinking bird on my desk and the kids can’t stop watching it. It keeps drinking the water all day long. As long as I keep adding water to the beaker, the bird will keep drinking. It’s not really drinking the water, just dipping its beak in the water. The water evaporates and cools the beak, thus the liquid moves up.
From Wikipedia
- The water evaporates from the felt on the head.
- Evaporation lowers the temperature of the glass head (heat of vaporization).
- The temperature decrease causes some of the dichloromethane vapor in the head to condense.
- The lower temperature and condensation together cause the pressure to drop in the head (ideal gas law).
- The pressure differential between the head and base causes the liquid to be pushed up from the base.
- As liquid flows into the head, the bird becomes top heavy and tips over during its oscillations.
- When the bird tips over, the bottom end of the neck tube rises above the surface of the liquid.
- A bubble of vapor rises up the tube through this gap, displacing liquid as it goes.
- Liquid flows back to the bottom bulb (the toy is designed so that when it has tipped over the neck’s tilt allows this), and vapor pressure equalizes between the top and bottom bulbs
- The weight of the liquid in the bottom bulb restores the bird to its vertical position
Last week we went to Samal island to swim at the beach. We took a small boat (bangka) ride from Davao to Samal. The ride is about 15 minutes. As you can see the water is very clear at Paradise island Resort. We stayed until noon and went back to Davao where we went to People’s Park for a stroll. We stayed in Davao for the night and then went back to Digos.
I’m trying a new video player for this post. I’m using the same flv video as before but I’m not using the plugin to play the video. I’ll see how this one works.
This past Sunday I went for a ride up to Makilala in Northern Cotabato to visit the family of my brother in law, Fernando. It was about an hour to get there riding on his motorcycle. The ride was nice, but it started to get hot when the sun came out. We left early from Digos, around 7:30am.
By the time we got there, the temperature was a little cooler because of the altitude and the cloud cover. We brought some pancit caton and pan, which is a noodle salad that you can eat with bread. We met his mom and dad coming from church and then headed for their house up in the mountain. We walked for about 20 minutes up the mountain to their house where we all ate the pancit. I was amazed how quiet it was up at that house as I couldn’t hear any cars, trucks or that faint noise that comes from distant trucks on a highway. Just peace and quiet.
While we were there, some of the relatives showed me how they harvest the rubber tree and gave me a chance to try. They are able to sell the liquid coming from the tree locally. On the way down from the mountain, Fernando dropped me off so I could walk over a small suspension bridge that spans a river. He met me on the other side, where his sister lives.
On the ride back we stopped to see the new stadium Davao del Sur is building. It was much bigger that I thought it would be and is due fro completion in another year or so.
My classes finished the Mars Habitats last week. Everything turned out super. Here is a small video of the final day. Click here to visit my school web site and see a more detailed video.
This time of year is perfect for an outside science project. My classes are learning about Mars and the possibility of going there in the future. We will be starting the Mars Habitat project this week. Today we picked the themes for the six habitats. Tomorrow, I will announce the lead engineer and assistant engineer for each class. Each class will build two habitats and all of them will be connected with tunnels.
I’ll show the students tomorrow how to fold the habitats using paper and tape. It’s not that hard to do, but practicing with paper helps when they are working with the plastic.
Here is the rocket launcher that I use for my science class. We build rockets from 2 liter bottles of soda. You can see this rocket launcher in action on the school web site here. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.
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