Re:Folding Paper with a Hydraulic Press
by ajuc on Thursday May 19, 2016 @03:59AM
(#11728721)
I meant the science stuff, not the feminism/atheism/mythbusting rants.
Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature. It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better.
As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - school physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video. Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze, and seeing winter for yourself.
It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where to get, and how to handle.
I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be slightly inconvenient").
Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature. It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better.
As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - school physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video. Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze, and seeing winter for yourself.
It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where to get, and how to handle.
I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be slightly inconvenient").