http://ben.telemuse.net Ben Jolitz on art, science, and life in high school 2008-05-02T06:28:25Z http://ben.telemuse.net/35 It is that wonderful time of year for AP students at high schools everywhere. A time you have spent the school year preparing for, where two to three hours of testing will determine whether or not you learned the material. Never mind the enormous gap...... ben 2008-05-02T06:28:25Z http://ben.telemuse.net/34 Congratulations to Professor Andy Fraknoi of Foothill college for winning "California Professor Of the Year". We've enjoyed his Foothill astronomy lectures and series for many years, hope to see more! ben 2007-12-02T04:52:09Z http://ben.telemuse.net/33 Better than Google Sky, the Minolta Planetarium gets the new Infinium S projector. With new features, better details, and a faster rendering engine, the Infinium S and the control mechanisms are ready for sky exploration in the twenty-first century. The Minolta Planetarium, located at De Anza college, has finally reopened three long years. In 2004, the MS-15 used was becoming antiquated and less useful. The challenge of maintaining it was rapidly growing, much to the chagrin of De Anza. After contacting Minolta, De Anza decided to renovate the planetarium and replace the projector. The new guy is the Infinium S, and it offers many new features. The most strinking lies in the rendering of the Mily Way. Instead of a static image, the Infinium draws every little dot with varying intensity to simulate the three dimensions of the sky. ben 2007-08-22T02:53:48Z http://ben.telemuse.net/32 I attended BarCampBlock this week. BarCampBlock is the anniversary of the first BarCamp, originally held at SocialText, and for BarCampBlock, it was held not only at SocialText, but spread out among several other buildings (IDEO, Edgeio, ...). I arrived after the end of most tracks on the first day. I talked with many developers and technologists after the last track ended. One man wrote a flash application that would allow people to "leave" their voice mark on their friends social network page. Another, from Restaurant Breeze, revealed CrazyMenu, a web-2.0 interface for collaborating on dining and places to eat... ben 2007-08-21T22:21:40Z http://ben.telemuse.net/30 There are integral times of growth vital to young men and women hoping to join the ranks of the worlds scientists. Although growth is never guaranteed, many of us still try for it. Some are even lucky enough to be selected, out of many applicants or groups, to valuable internships, like the one at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics in UC Santa Cruz. The privilege of working on college level experiments before attending college expands the experience of many interns lucky enough to get the internship. Even if people split off into semi-isolated groups, a complaint I heard this year, it is interesting to note that everyone must work together to make both of the highlight experiments, ADOM and Muon Lifetime, work. ADOM is the Aerial Detector of Muons, a small muon scintillator with two photomultiplier tubes at opposing ends and a Quarknet DAQ board with a radio transmitter all carried on a gondala below a weather balloon. ADOM's purpose is to measure or count how many muons excite the scintillator. On the ground, one might then dissect the times from the data to figure out the muon count rate. ben 2007-07-30T01:44:58Z