Tilts at Windmills

Will this have a “net” effect? (Election ‘08)

2008-08-28T13:47:32Z

So if you’re curious what’s been taking up my free time, here’s the answer–communityCOUNTS, both dot com and dot us. Dot com is my turnkey solution for small media outlets, and dot US is my attempt to change the way we interact with the presidential candidates. You’ll remember dot US from this great NPR interview. Now I’m trying to build up interest with the video below. Please, share it with your friends.

How to Navigate by the Sun

2008-08-13T06:24:24Z

For those of you interested in such things, “Yes” I will be finishing the relativity series. It’s just that the animation will take a little time, and I’ve had other priorities. Until then, however, enjoy this latest Explainer.

Now you can find out where you are even if you don’t have GPS. Learn how to find south along with your latitude and longitude using only a few household items. I should note, that in using the home-made quadrant cited, the precision of your findings will be rather low. Don’t worry, you’ll be within a few hundred miles. ;)

Transcript:
The Tabletop Explainer
(Honda Pilot DIY Contest Entry)
How to Navigate by the Sun

Today if you want to know where you are, chances are you’ll use one of these, but we’re going to go ahead and focus on using the materials here and the sun to figure out due south, your latitude, and your longitude.

Our measurements of time are based on the apparent motion of the Sun, the stars, and the moon. Which means a lot of information is packed into your watch.

Take for instance the idea of noon. Before standardized time zones, noon was simply the time of day when the sun crossed an imaginary line connecting due north and due south, called a meridian.

Let’s look down on the earth from the north pole. Here in Somerville, noon occurs when the Sun is due south. In Beijing it’s the same thing.

Anyhow, at local noon in the northern hemisphere, the sun is due south, at midnight, it’s half a world away.

We could make a clock with an hour hand that went around once every 24 hours, but most hour hands go around twice a day. This means the hour hand moves half as fast as the sun appears to.

Meaning if you take your watch and point the hour hand at the sun, halfway between the hour hand and noon is due south. In the southern hemisphere it’s due north.

So the next time you need to find south, just take your watch hold it parallel to the ground, point your hour hand at the sun, and halfway between the hour hand and noon is due south. Now that’s if you’re in the northern hemisphere. Keep in mind, your watch doesn’t run local time. So if daylight savings time is in effect, you’ll have to subtract an hour, and thanks to standardized time zones, you’ll be off by a few minuets. Plus there’s the fact that the geometry of the situation means that things will be less precise around sunrise and sunset, but you get the idea.

Now how does something like this [points to sextant] help us find out where we are. Well this is a sextant, and it’s really just a super-protractor.

You look at one object, like the horizon, through the sighting scope and a half mirrored piece of glass lets you line up the reflected image of some other object like the sun, the sextant telling you the angle between the two. [fade to table of materials]

You can make a similar device called a quadrant from these materials here. It’s basically a protractor that we are going to affix a straw to as a sight and a string too, to help us find the vertical. You can print these plans out from the URL you’ll see here.

http://www.davidcolarusso.com/handouts/quadrant.pdf

A quadrant lets you measure the angle between the horizon and an object, in this case, the sun. So do not look through the sight. Instead, place an object behind the quadrant, and look for the shadow cast by the straw. When the shadow’s a circle, you’ve got the sun lined up.

Two numbers can describe every place on earth: latitude and longitude. These are measured in degrees from two imaginary lines, the prime meridian, and the equator.

All points at a certain longitude are the same amount of degrees east or west of the prime meridian, and all points at a certain latitude are the same number of degrees north or south of the equator.

We know from working with our watch that at noon here in Somerville, the sun is due south. That is, it falls on an imaginary line connecting north and south—a meridian. So let’s look at the noon-time sun.

Keep in mind, the sun is really far away. So anyone pointing at the sun will point in the same direction.

Knowing this, if the sun were directly above the equator, we could find our latitude by simply finding the angle between the sun and overhead.

That is, 90 degrees minus whatever our quadrant reads.

Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t stay directly over the equator. The earth has a tilt in its axis. So over the year the sun moves above or below the equator by roughly 23 degrees.

This is called declination, and we simply add or subtract it from our measurements.

Sailors used to produce books listing the sun’s declination for every minuet in the year, but today you can find this on the web

We know local noon is when the sun crosses the local meridian, and probably noticed that a meridian is also a line of longitude. So if you know when noon happened you already know you longitude.

All we have to do is convert our time to GMT, the local time at zero longitude. Every minuet the sun covers a quarter of a degree. So if your noon took place 5 hours and 4 minuets after noon GMT your longitude is 76 degrees west.

3 hours before GMT, 45 degrees east.

Of course, we had to find local noon first.

To do that, plot the mid-day measurements from your quadrant against your watch time. They’ll make a curve and the top of the curve is local noon.

I’m David Colarusso for the Tabletop Explainer.

On Education is now Tilts at Windmills

2008-08-11T23:36:12Z

This September I will be attending Boston University full-time as a law student, and I expect this will effect the focus of my blogging. So I’ve decide to go with a more general name, settling on “Tilts at Windmills.” It seems to me this could have been the blog’s title all along. Of course, this means a URL change too. No longer am I blogging at “/edblog” from here out, it’s just “/blog”.

“Why law school?” you may ask. The short answer, “I think I can do more with the law.” Only time will tell if I’m right about that.

So be on the lookout for some wicked-cool legal postings, but don’t worry, I won’t forget my roots. I have a mile-long list of would-be Tabletop Explainer episodes, one of which should be produced this week. Unfortunately, it’s not the next in the relativity series. It’s a how to I plan on entering in a video competition. Heck, I have to pay for law school somehow.

Personal Democracy Forum

2008-08-08T07:03:01Z

So I’ve made it to Lincoln Center for this week’s Personal Democracy Forum. Later today, I will be on a panel entitled “Building a Better Debate, With and Without TV.” I’m really excited about the conference, esp. since I think commuintyCOUNTS has a lot to offer this crowd. I’m particularly excited about the ability of small media outlets or community organizations using communityCOUNTS to engage local politicians in a meaningful discussion around issues that concern them.

I’ve been nominated for a Golden Dot Award for Poli-Tech Innovator of the Year

2008-08-08T07:45:01Z

Admittedly, I’ve been a little absent on the blogging front lately, but since returning to the states I’ve taken on three jobs and what seems like and endless number of committee appointments at school. However, one of them is getting me some recognition. My partners and I over at 10questions.com are up for a Golden Dot Award for Poli-Tech Innovator of the Year. The voting is open to the public, and I’d really appreciate your vote (second to last category).
Vote here: http://polc.ipdi.org/GoldenDots/voting.htm

Here’s the lowdown:

Ending days before the Iowa caucuses and garnering participation from then leading candidates, including Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, 10questions.com was the first truly people-powered forum for the 2008 presidential candidates. We allowed the public to post and vote on questions for the candidates. Candidates answered the top ten, and the public then voted on whether or not these replies actually addressed the questions.

10questions proved a valuable proof of principle, establishing viewer-chosen questions, not just viewer-produced questions, as a legitimate means of candidate interaction, and produced a good amount of earned media including coverage in Wired and the San Francisco Chronicle among many other print and digital outlets such as the political blogs of both the Washington Post and New York Times. Furthermore the participation of first-tier candidates in this format helped demonstrate such a structure’s ability to compel meaningful answers from the candidates.

Rome if You Want To

2008-08-08T07:59:26Z

So I guess we have an answer to the question posed in my last entry. The summer seems to have resulted in fewer postings. This has been mostly a consequence of some mad traveling and some major distractions. Before leaving Edinburgh to return home, I took a week in Rome. That was super cool. Then it was back to Edinburgh for some housekeeping, and major Community Counts action. I even did a national radio interview on NPR’s Day to Day. Then it was back to the States and DC, where I served as a resource at the Fulbright Orientation for this year’s participants. Then I flew out to Ann Arbor for a wedding, followed by a return trip to DC to visit family. Eventually, I drove up to Massachusetts to move into my new apartment and start preparing for the new year. As I write this, I still have most of my stuff in boxes, and school starts tomorrow. I’ve actually already been in for meetings, but everyone will be in on Monday.

With any luck, I’ll be getting back into the blogging groove, and there will be some more Tabletop Explainer episodes coming. A lot of people want to see the remaining relativity videos.

House Guest, End of Term, and the New York Times

2008-08-08T07:05:56Z

My apologies for not posting in a while, but I’ve been swamped. I first drifted away from the keyboard when a good college friend came to visit me here in Edinburgh. It was great getting to show her around town and introducing her to my friends and new adoptive home. Then of course there was the end of term. That’s right, the school year is finally over, but as you can imagine this presented some bookkeeping and the like surrounding my return to the states. However, the biggest “distraction” by far has been my involvement with Community Counts, culminating in a bit of a vindication last week when I found myself talking with a reporter from the New York Times. In fact, Community Counts was blogged about at both TechPresident and the New York Times last week. Pretty exciting eh?

That being said, I’m starting my summer holiday. I don’t know if this means you should expect more or less frequent postings. I would like to turn out some more episodes of the Tabletop Explainer (esp. the relativity series), but I’m not going to beat myself up over self-imposed deadlines. So fair readers, be sure you’ve subscribed, so that way you’ll be sure not to miss a posting when it comes.

Unblock Bebo

2008-08-08T07:07:39Z

So one of my big themes is how we as educators should be using, not censoring, social media. That being said, you can imagine my pleasure when I got an email about THIS. That’s right, the US Embassy in cooperation with the Imperial Museum and Bebo are working to “digitally link generations” through an online video contest. The embassy is asking UK students to play documentary film maker and put to bits the memories of the rebuilding of Great Britain post WWII. The winner has a chance to win:

a trip for two to the United States
a new laptop computer
a new digital video camera
cool video editing software

And in case you’re wondering, I named this post in reply to Digital Katie’s posting Bebo Blues.

Now with dotSUB

2008-08-08T08:31:09Z

A few months ago a pretty cool site was brought to my attention–dotSUB. It’s a video sharing site that allows registered users to transcribe and translate shared videos. That’s right. It means your videos can be made accessible to both the hearing impaired and those who don’t speak your language. The process is pretty simple, and I’m currently uploading and transcribing the Tabletop Explainer. You’ll start to see “dotSUB” buttons below embedded videos.

So if you speak two or more languages, head over for some translating fun. Here’s an example of a subtitled video. As of this posting, it’s only available in English. Want to change that? Register. View this link; then choose a language under “Translate This Film.”

And the winner is…

2008-08-08T08:31:27Z

Sorry it’s taken me this long to post the winner of this year’s Phylm Prize. It was a nail biter. In fact, no two judges voted for the same number one. So we had to have a run off. To see the winner of my $100, watch the video below. Then scroll down and catch the top ten entries in their entirety.

Here are the top ten highest ranked entries, according to YouTube ratings as of May 31, 2007. They are ordered by date of posting.