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🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦Question for everyone: I have a vague recollection of hearing someone say “<Person> was probably the last person to know/understand all of science” - Where “science” refers to the knowledge at the time of that person’s existence. Is anyone familiar with the quote, or failing that, would anyone like to make the case for a worthy candidate? Would we have to go back to Aristotelian times, or would Isaac Newton or Ben Franklin make the grade? Keep in mind, I’m not just looking for a smart person, I’m looking for a polymath that had understanding across the sciences. This is going to open up the question of which sciences to include, of course… For example, I think astrology can be included (the old version that actually cared where the planets were, not the modern “for entertainment purposes only” stuff), as there was a real drive to observe and build predictive models behind the questionable divination motive. Psychology is probably excluded simply because by the time it arrived, science was too broad for one person to comprehend everything. Please repost/boost with more hashtags - I know I’ll miss a few. <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Science" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Science</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachScience</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Astronomy</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Biology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Biology</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Chemistry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chemistry</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Physics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Physics</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachPhysics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachPhysics</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachChem" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachChem</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachBiology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachBiology</a>

🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦<a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Stargazing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Stargazing</a> fans, now is the time to go out and look for planets - Saturn will be lost in the glare of the Sun soon. I was out with Frankie the other night and conditions were very clear (for city skies, anyway). Venus is incredibly bright - probably responsible for some UFO reports these days - as is Jupiter. Mars is easy, too. Uranus should be visible in binoculars, just down to the right from the Pleiades.Teachers, don't wait until spring, they'll all be on the wrong side of the Sun to show your students!(Pic is a simulation of the night sky over <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Ottawa" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ottawa</a> for February 14 - I advanced the time to get rid of the Moon)<a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Astronomy</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachScience</a>

🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦I'm preparing to give a cosmology talk to a group of octa- and nonagenarians in a few weeks... The challenge is to give a digestible talk on Big Bang theory to a group of people who are intelligent but mostly uninformed on the topic... In 40 minutes!When I was asked, I thought, "easy, I've done this for grade 9 students dozens of times" but then found out about the time constraint. I could spend more than 40 minutes just talking about how we came to measuring distances in the cosmos, never mind the evolution of it. Never mind the technical details, I could spend 40 minutes just reviewing how our view of the universe has expanded from just our solar system, with a celstial sphere just beyond Saturn, to thinking the Milky Way *was* the universe, to where we are now, observing the vast billions-of-light-years-wide bubble that is our observatble universe. Or how about talking about the evolution of tehcnology (never mind the evolution of the necessary mindsets!) that made the observations possible?Geez, just explaining line spectra and redshift could take 40 minutes.I'm tempted to prepare talks on everything and present the talk as a "choose your own adventure" book. Maybe they'll have me back to explore the paths not taken?Any advice on how the astro communicators would approach this is welcome (or suggestions for perspcetives I might have missed!). <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Astronomy</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Cosmology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cosmology</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachScience</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/BigBangTheory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BigBangTheory</a>

🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦Okay, *far* too many things to do today, and of course I go into avoidance mode and procrastinate a little... Some people clean the house, I watch QM videos!I'm not sure I would recommend this video to someone who hasn't taken some university math, but if you have ever studied or taught intro quantum mechanics, take a look at this, it is excellent. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo</a><a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Chemistry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chemistry</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Physics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Physics</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachScience</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/QuantumMechanics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#QuantumMechanics</a>

🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦<a href="https://mastodon.scot/@marisa" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@marisa</a> When I was a student teacher, many decades ago, I researched gender bias in the classroom. My rationale at the time was that I didn't think there was any, so I must have been missing something. Boy did I learn! (for reference, if any of this is relevant, it was 1987-88 and I was 23. And male 😊)The surprising thing was that practices that favoured good education for boys over girls were shown to be in use by male AND female teachers. And the tendency of women to second-guess themselves (in contrast to the male tendency to consider themselves practically faultless – 😄, and 🙄) was present even in women that I thought were minor deities - Amazing teachers, some Ph.D.s in the mix, you name it. From then on, I made it a point to try to tip the scales in the other direction. I'm sure I fell into the usual rut on occasion, but *most* of the time I kept the bias in mind and tried to correct for it.<a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/Education" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Education</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/GenderBias" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GenderBias</a> <a href="https://ottawa.place/tags/ITeachScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ITeachScience</a>

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