Ya never know. Those people had to start with a predilection for
editorial precision.
Question: from what circumstances do youall think invention and
innovation arise?
Now that Sas has brought us back into the realms of annotated
autobiography
>> (and this discussion has become very Friamish, so I am
redirecting it away from the SFX site) I want to add
My papa did not have an icy hand. When he helped me build science
fair projects his hands were capable and warm, if a bit eager.
He encouraged me all along, and always made me feel that he delighted
in my mind and curiosities, whatever my age. When we made things
together, I felt wistfulness from him, that his choice of career moved
him away from research into management.
His faith in my mind, and support for my questions, meant I never
felt that since I was a girl, I'd be unable to do things.
I just assumed I'd find or invent a way. That was his most valuable
legacy.
Steve, your narrative brought back lovely memories.
Thanks
Victoria
On Aug 21, 2011, at 10:11 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Steve,
It was not the icy hand of the parent I detected, but that of the
EDITOR. Think about those ghost written personal essays that appear
in SA “written” by famous scientists describing their
breakthroughs. (Well, unless Aidan’s parent was a SA editor.)
Yuch!
Nick
From: Steve Smith [mailto:s...@lava3d.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 12:05 PM
To: disc...@sfcomplex.org
Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] 13 yr-old builds fibonacci tree solar
collector
I raised children (2 daughters, now 30 and 32) up in a drinking town
with a small science problem (aka Los Alamos) and enjoyed (or
endured) any number of science fairs and the like.
Almost exclusively, I saw two kinds of science fair projects. Those
thrown together by the kids themselves with varying degrees of
interest, acumen, and flair for presentation, and those either done
by or carefully supervised by an overzealous parent. It was not
clear that the judges recognized or acted upon the implications of
that division.
I provided my daughters with lots of encouragement, some ideas, and
the occasional hard question, but I never did their work for them...
and it showed at the science fairs and I was proud of them.
Daughter #1 was type-A and proceeded to excel in spite of the steep
uphill climb in this "popular science blood sport" and daughter #2
was quite happy to get a B for her efforts and move on to a project
or topic less fraught with false-competition.
The elder is now a PhD researcher in biomedicine (West Nile, Dingue
Fever). She loves her work and hates her job (already). She is in
her second Lab and trying to start her own. She competes daily with
other researchers whose parents probably did their science fair
projects for them... and what was quaint when she was growing up
(taking second or third place to other kids whose work product was
clearly not their own) is career numbing for her. Now these very
types are willing to say or do anything (up to and including very
bad science) to either keep their comfortable spot comfortable or to
advance their position. From her point of view, big science (or at
least medical science) is a pretty ugly scene. Many NIH and NSF
project reviewers seem to be cut from the same cloth as science fair
judges.
Now, for the subject of the science project. I don't expect a 13
year old (or the average hockey-parent highly informing the project)
to have very tight controls on the experiment (reflective surface
nearby? identical, calibrated cells?) or to have a firm handle on
the concept which they are supposedly studying.
There are at least two issues with the "fibonnaci tree solar
collector"... one is the distribution of the angles of the solar
cells and the other is the potential for shading. Having done my
own relatively ad-hoc work in this area (orientation of windows in a
passive solar addition, and the preliminary analysis of holographic
optical elements to enhance PVs) I know there are hidden variables
that are not being addressed (at least not in the report).
At best, this science project is a demonstration of an already
understood principle about the nature of fibonacci distributed solar
collection (photosynthetic leaves). Without looking closely at
this young man's (or his parent's) data, I can't tell what all was
going on, but I'd suggest that if these cells were wired in series,
that the ones oriented toward the eastern horizon had an interesting
effect of preconditioning the others oriented otherwise. On cold
mornings in the dead of winter, there are not that many hours in the
day where a solar cell gets enough incident light to actually get
above the threshold of functioning. I speculate that by one or
more cells getting an "early start" by being oriented toward the
rising sun, the current generated may actually begin to warm the
other cells enough that they in turn begin to generate electricity
significantly earlier than they would otherwise. How that plays
out against the amount of time in the day that these extreme
orientations are totally useless (a small resistive loss?) is both a
question of geometry and of various thresholds.
All that said, I think the 13 year old (or his parent) did fine and
may even grow past his parent's involvement to think independently
and do his own work. He now has an inkling (no matter how he came
by it) of the value of optimizing in a multidimensional problem
space and looking to biomimicry for ideas in engineering.
- Steve
--
Los Alamos Visualization Associates
LAVA-Synergy
4200 W. Jemez rd
Los Alamos, NM 87544
www.lava3d.com
s...@lava3d.com
505-920-0252
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