Welcome back and thanks as always for being here reading about STEM. Today I have links about building paper airplanes as a fun way to learn about physics. And links about the technology Aztecs used to grow food and the personal impact of data centers. Plus a kangroo Dad joke and cute plotting hamsters. Hope you find these stories fun, useful, and interesting.
Fly Paper Airplanes
Paper airplanes might seem frivolous when thinking about kids and STEM. But they’re both serious and fun to create. I never made fancy paper airplanes so I’m always on the lookout for neat designs. It’s also easy to veer into origami and paper folding. I made time to do a little research and found a few interesting things.
One, paper airplanes may have been around a couple thousand years. Paper kites flew in China 2000 years ago. It’s possible any culture with paper and a tradition of folding paper made what we call planes. Folded paper that you toss to see how far it’ll go.
For another, I found found several sites with different approaches to paper airplanes. One site has ideas for kid parties. I never thought of trying to fly through rings, for example. Another site explores them as science projects using the scientific method. And yet another site includes creating launchers. Another site also has 50 different designs to try.
Have a little fun and learn about physics, drag, pitch, lift, and thrust. And make it into game. It’s also a great way to get kids outdoors.
4 Simple & Fun Paper Airplanes | STEAM Activity for Kids
https://www.engineeringemily.com/4-simple-fun-paper-airplanes-steam-activity-for-kids/
How Far Will It Fly? Build & Test Paper Planes with Different Drag
Paper Airplane Party Games
https://www.foldnfly.com/lounge/party-games.php
Build Paper Airplanes with Launchers that Fly Fast and Far – STEM Project Fun for Kids!
https://youtu.be/AqCSnfMYlKs
https://www.youtube.com/@STEAMPoweredFamily
https://www.steampoweredfamily.com/
The Public Paperfolding History Project
http://www.origamiheaven.com/historyofpaperplanes.htm
Paper Airplane HQ – 50 Designs
https://www.paperairplaneshq.com
Aztec Floating Gardens
Chinampas are rectangular beds of built up dirt mounds used to grow food in shallow lakes. The Mesoamerican culture used them to create fertile land to grow food crops. Mesoamerica includes the area from central Mexico south to Honduras and Nicaragua. Lake Xochimilco in the Valley of Mexico had shallow water perfect for chinampas.
This sustainable agriculture system used shallow lakes, pilings, and dirt. They drove wooden stakes into the shallow lake bed to form rectangles. Then wrapped the stakes with a wooden skirt of reeds and piled dirt inside. The word chinampas translates to “in the fence of reeds” in Nahulatl, the Aztec language.
What’s brilliant about this solution to growing food is that it is self-sustaining. The river provides irrigation. And a way to navigate by canoe around the rectangular beds. When canals between these beds silted up, the canals were dug out with the dirt placed on the beds.
The Aztec culture did not invent chinampas. They were only the first to use the technique on a mass scale to support large communities. Until the Aztecs arrived, one or more households used chinampas to source their food.
The soil in chinampas reminds me of terra preta, or black earth, from the Amazon Basin. It’s highly fertile organic matter. Only the chinampas didn’t add burnt charcoal or charred material to their dirt. But both chinampas and terra preta used food waste and crop residues to make soil.
Chinampas in Mexico is an indigenous and highly sustainable agriculture system
‘Chinampas’: The Ancient Aztec Floating Gardens that hold promise for Future Urban Agriculture
Chinampa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa
Images of Chinampas: share for teaching & education
https://permies.com/t/63991/wetlands/Images-Chinampas-share-teaching-education
Ancient Amazonians created mysterious ‘dark earth’ on purpose
https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-amazonians-created-mysterious-dark-earth-purpose
Terra Preta de Indio
https://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/research/terra%20preta/terrapretamain.html
What I’m Reading: Data Centers
This is a new idea for content, to share 1-3 times a month what I’m reading about STEM. With additional links to follow if you’re also interested in the topic.
As you know, AI is everywhere. What’s hard to grasp is how much water and power AI software currently uses. And what those demands mean for people. This article explores the on the ground impact of data centers on people living in Ohio in the US. Today it’s impossible to be in the natural world without seeing technology in the sky and now on the ground looking across once open fields.
From the Switchyard article: “It’s unlike anything that has come before. For seven decades, the balance between economic growth and the power requirements to sustain that growth followed divergent trend lines. We had steady growth while our power needs remained mostly flat. In the 2010s, for example, the US economy expanded by a cumulative 24 percent, but electricity demand remained unchanged, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. That balance is now being radically upended. And the unprecedented energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a potentially calamitous divergence. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.
By 2050, the global electricity demand for AI and data center will be nine times higher, at 4,500 trillion-watt hours of electricity. That’s up from only 500 trillion-watt hours last year. A figure impossible to wrap your head around. “I’ll see if I can get some perspective, but it is a very large amount,” wrote Mark Thomton from Wood Mackenzie, when I asked for some way to translate the unit of measurement into something more comprehensible. He emailed back, within the hour, apparently stumped. “Unfortunately, we don’t have an easy way for you to conceptualize it.”
But one part is possible to visualize: the lines. Electricity flows through thousands and thousands of miles of high-voltage lines within the US grid—an astonishing 150,000 miles of transmission corridors, enough to circle the equator six times.”
Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment — Switchyard
https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-4/power-failure
Global data center electricity use to double by 2026 – IEA report
Water-guzzling data centres
https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres
Data Centers and Groundwater Usage
https://www.joycefdn.org/news/data-centers-and-groundwater-usage
Ranked: The Top 25 Countries With the Most Data Centers
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-top-25-countries-with-the-most-data-centers/
The Environmental Toll of a Single ChatGPT Query Is Absolutely Wild
https://futurism.com/the-byte/environment-openai-chatgpt
Finding Articles with site:
I want to pass along an interesting search tip that might be useful. In my social media feeds I’ll see an interesting article, go to the website, and their search engine fails. Then I go to a search engine, type the article title, and use the site: parameter. Finds the article every time. What’s up with that?
In plain English. I saw an article, “My Uncle the Hit Man” in the New Yorker magazine Instagram feed. Sounds interesting. I went to the magazine website, typed the article title and could not find it in their search results. I then went to Google or Duck Duck Go and typed, My Uncle The Hit Man site:newyorker.com. Bingo: it was the first search result.
What’s up might be equally interesting. The article is from 2001, for one. The magazine site has recent articles about a comedy on the same topic. Search engines, however, appear to focus on titles and content as they crawl websites. Maybe more than publication dates. For now, at least, this technique works to surface content directly.
And here’s the article if you wonder what it’s like to find out your uncle is whacking people.
My Uncle the Hit Man
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/08/06/harold-konigsberg-hit-man-blood-relation
This Week
Our Sunday email this week will have fun often offbeat links about how microbes in the US prairie travel from the air, to bison noses, to their guts, and then out their back door to be picked up by insects and predators who eat insects. And an article about what AIs do when they’re bored, as well as how AIs are not ready to help manage medical emergency rooms. If you wonder whether to starve a cold or feed a fever, there’s a link for that too. Plus the history of chocolate and the worlds oldest cheese. Look for the email this Sunday.
