Lee Trampleasure's Blog

Snow on Claremont Avenue in Oakland/Berkeley hills

Hayward’s “D Street” fault creep, curb offset evidence erased

Sadly, improvements in city streets can wipe out geologic evidence. D Street has been a great field trip stop to see earthquake fault creep, and appears in many guidebooks and web sites. But in 1997, Hayward repaved the road, including the sidewalks (they all needed it). When they repaved it, they straightened all the curb lines, thereby erasing the evidence of fault creep. I just visited it in December 2009 (twelve years later), and no evidences of creep has yet presented itself through cracks/offsets in the sidewalk.

But the creep on the Hayward fault in this region is about 0.1 inch per year, so there’s about an inch of stress built up under the sidewalks and curbs. Hopefully (for us geology types), someday soon the sidwalks/curbs will shift, and we’ll be able to return here for tours.

In the photo above, you can see the street runs uninterrupted. The photo is facing east looking across Mission Street.

You can see a photo of the old curb offset on Dr. Sue Hirshfeld’s website here. Her complete tour is here (note: the links on her site have not been updated as of this time, and refer to the old webiste “csuhayward.edu”–if you find any dead links, simply replace the “hayward” portion with “eastbay” and the link will work).

Handout for using the TI 83 / 84 calculator in a science classroom.

I have updated my Analyzing data using your TI-83 or TI-84 calculator handout. New features include:

• Using the Table features to have the calculator solve for variables.
• Using Draw to calculate the slope of the tangent to a curved line.
• Standard letter size (8.5×11 inches) for easier printing.

You can download a copy here: TI-graphing-calculator-tips-for-science.pdf. It is in PDF which includes all the TI keystroke fonts; if you’d like an editable copy, email me and I can send you a WordPerfect version, or you can use any of the multitude of online “PDF to Word” converters.

If anyone is looking for the key fonts (shown in the image above, like [2nd] and [Zoom], you can find them here: http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_key_font_83p_84p.html

New East Span Bay Bridge earthquake simulation video

Sorry, I couldn’t get the video below to not autostart. Click the Pause button to stop it if you don’t want it to run.

Loma Prieta 20 year anniversary

This Saturday (October 17, 2009) marks the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Everyone who was in the Santa Cruz/SF Bay Area has their story of where they were, and KQED’s Forum call-in program had a great hour yesterday. It’s been long enough ago that for my students (juniors and seniors in high school) the earthquake is now only history. Following is my story of life with Loma Prieta.

When the earthquake struck at 5:04 PM, I had just returned from my workday delivering bread for Uprisings Baking Collective. We baked in the basement of Casa Zimbabwe, a four story building in the Berkeley Students Cooperative. My general reaction to earthquakes is “Cool, feel the shaking,” and that’s just what I did for the first several seconds of Loma Prieta. After several seconds (5, 10, 15??), my earthquake drill training started to kick in as I realized this was not ending as quickly as usual. I headed for the door between our office and the hall, placing my self in the “safest place in the building.” There were probably about 5-10 of us in the bakery area, and I remember some people were heading outside.

When the earth stopped shaking, we all sort of said “Wow, that was big,” and headed back to work. Nothing had fallen off shelves, or any other obvious damage, so we had bread to bake and paperwork to complete.

A few minutes later, the bakers started saying that they had heard on the news that the Bay Bridge had fallen down. “No way” I thought, they must be exaggerating (in the end, “fallen down” was a bit of an exaggeration, but part of it had).  Some of us headed up the block to the Pacific School of Religion (at the top of Berkeley’s “Holy Hill”) to see what we could see. I remember seeing smoke from the SF Marina District, but not much else is in my memory (we probably could see the smoke from Hustead’s Towing in downtown Berkeley, but I can’t remember this).

I finished up my paperwork, and left the bakers to their work. On my way home, I stopped by my sister’s apartment (on Vine, just west of Shattuck) to see how she was doing. She was fine, and I faintly remember hanging out for a while with her and some of her neighbors/friends, watching news on the TV.

In the course of the next few days, at the bakery we had to redesign our routes to get to SF, Marin, and the Peninsula using the Richmond/San Rafael and the San Mateo bridges. I think we took a couple days off, but were quickly back getting food to the people. At one point I heard that an organization that cooked dinners for people with AIDS needed help getting prepared food from West Oakland BART to the Red Cross center in Oakland (they were cooking it in SF, then bringing it over on BART). Our vans, with their racks, were perfect for this, so I helped out for a couple days after work. I remember lots of vans showing up at the BART station, shuttling the food to the Red Cross.

As I drove around the Bay Area on my bakery route (I drove our SF/South Bay routes), I was able to get a tour of the minor destruction area (the heavy destruction areas were closed off). I remember seeing many houses damaged in the Richmond and Sunset districts in SF.

That about sums up my memories at this time. I’ll probably come back and add more as the anniversary refreshes my memory.

Generic science class data table

In my physic classes, we do a lot of labs. Students are encouraged to create their own data tables, but many aren’t so “linearly” inclined, and have difficulty creating neat tables. I created a generic data table they can use on any lab.

Design of the data table

Most of our labs require three measurements of ten different settings of their “independent variables.” I suggest to my students that if their first three measurements don’t look “close enough” to each other, then they repeat it again and see if:

1. any one of the now four look like “outliers” probably due to a mistake in their work on that run, or
2. if their results just have a large spread probably due to the low precision of the experimental design.

The data table includes a couple extra columns with this in mind.

We generate a rough outline of the lab procedures, but students often have to make decisions about the specifics of their lab. Thus there is a section for “Notes before conducting lab” and “Notes after conducting lab.”

You may download a PDF version of my generic data table here.

A short poem about love

In my life, every time that I've found it,
love appears in a different way
sometimes it's right where I'm looking
other times in an fog shrouded bay

How love is is also quite varied
erotic or gentle or wild
I don't know how the next one will appear
old soul or youthful child

For me love is like chocolate
you can be happy if its not in sight
but a dinner is not quite as sumptious
as when accompanied by that wonderful bite.

Lee Trampleasure

September 2009

Introducing the Book: Help Desk

“Progressive” thermostats to save energy

Sitting in my cold, air-conditioned classroom the last week, while it was 85-95ºF outside, a design for a new thermostat came to me. Currently, thermostats cool (or heat) a building to a desired temperature. My new design would create a floating target temperature, that moves up and down as the outside temperature changes. The goal would be to target a temperature that is half-way between the “comfort zone” (generally 65-72ºF) and the outside temperature.

For example, if the temperature outside is 92ºF and the comfort zone max is 72ºF, the air conditioning would be set to 82ºF.

An example of a cold day: If the temperature outside is 45ºF, and the comfort zone minimum is 65ºF, the heater would be set to 55ºF.

What’s the advantage?

Physics principles state that the greater the temperature difference between two bodies, the faster the heat is transferred between them. Thus, if the outside temperature is 92ºF, it takes less energy to cool a house from 92ºF to 82ºF than to cool it the next 10ºF, from 82ºF to 72ºF. And since hotter and colder days place higher demands out our electrical grid (especially hot days), these are the days where we need to save energy the most.

Other adjustments/design alternatives

• This new design could allow for adjusting the percent difference for hot and cold days individually. For example, if a person can handle heat better than cold, s/he might change hot days to only 25% of the way from the outside temperature to the comfort zone (using the previous example, cooling the house to 87ºF), but on cold days s/he would set it to 75% (the example above heat to 60ºF).
• The thermostat could easily be designed to have a maximum hot temperature allowed (e.g. never over 82ºF) and/or a minimum cold temperature (e.g. 50ºF). This would be useful in extremely hot or cold climates.

With wireless technology as simple and inexpensive as it is these days, it would be easy to place the outside temperature sensor in an appropriate location, not necessarily right outside the thermostat.

Questions/comments

Please leave your comments below. I’d love to hear what others feel about this idea.

Great “raw” video footage from typhoon in China

The video below is just “raw” footage from CBS News. There is no narration, just a collection of images. I really enjoy this format, you can focus on the images and not on what the newscaster is saying. Powerful.

Typhoon Slams China

Sun Aug 09 11:26:08 PDT 2009

“CBS News RAW”: Millions evacuated the area after typhoon Morakot slammed into China’s east coast. It was the island’s worst flooding in 50 years and left dozens missing and feared dead.

Watch CBS Videos Online