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Monday, October 24, 2022

Evanstonian article about EMPATHY Project

 A big thank you to Ethan and the Evanstonian staff for the nice article about our EMPATHY Project. This is the effort to raise money for friends in Malawi, in order to ensure children have enough food for an entire school year so they can remain in school. With this becoming a national model, we hope that some 10,000 children will benefit from this program! 

If willing and able, donations can always be made here

Friday, October 14, 2022

Two AI sites you may want to try

 A couple AI sites, courtesy of Luca:

Drawing one: https://www.craiyon.com/

You need an account for this one, but it will write whatever you prompt it to: https://beta.openai.com/playground.

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Some Money for Malawi!

 THANK YOUs go out to everyone who helped either in school or online, where we raised a quick $1020 to send to our friends in Malawi! This is equivalent to 1.042 million kwacha, and will be used by some new schools to prepare land for planting crops as they go into their spring and planting season. Our model will help over 10,000 children once the couple dozen schools harvest their crops towards the end of their summer in 2023. Each harvest will feed the kids at the school for an entire year, and this model has largely been adopted as a national model to avoid famine and kids missing school due to hunger.

See our EMPATHY Project site for details. We also have a GoFundMe site to raise money any time. 

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

For those who like the MATH in Physics: REAL Quantum Mechanics, the Hydrogen Atom

 Back in 2013, a student who was in multivariable calculus wanted to apply the math to something in physics. She was a real go-getter, so I suggested she try to do REAL Quantum Mechanics and use her MV to figure out the hard-core derivation of a hydrogen atom's energy states and wave function. Katie took that challenge and ran with it! 

Check out her paper!! She hand-wrote a ~30 page paper as a 'how to do QM' guide for other students. She derived everything, learned the solutions to different partial differential equations (using things like Legendre polynomials, spherical harmonics, Laguerre polynomials, etc.). It is beautiful, impressive work! Katie is presently working on her PhD in physics, and continues to be amazing. 

This paper shows the power of higher level mathematics in physics, as well as the level of difficulty of QM and how impressive the scientists who discovered all this were. 



Monday, October 10, 2022

Storing energy using a "Sand Battery" - very clever!

 Here's an interesting idea that is working in Finland:

Use SAND to store energy from sources like solar and wind energy! Called a sand battery, excess energy not being used in real time from, say, solar cells, can be stored in the form of heat for future use (such as when the sun goes down). Sand batteries are being used in towns in Finland with great success, so it will be interesting to see if this catches on in other places. 

Clever ideas like this will only help with the transition from fossil fuels to 'clean' energies around the world. 



Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Hurricane Ian Storm Surge - devastating power of nature

Thanks to John B. who found this video: This video is from Hurricane Ian in south Florida. This is a storm surge, where the 150 mph wind blows the top layers of water from the Gulf of Mexico, and pushes it up on the land. Keep in mind that the coastline is just a couple feet above sea level, and the surge was anywhere from 8-16 feet high depending on where you look. Disastrous flooding results, and as seen in this, small buildings and homes are removed by the water.