{"id":166,"date":"2009-10-04T05:13:28","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T10:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/04\/they-might-be-giants-is-interfering-with-my-teaching\/"},"modified":"2009-10-04T05:13:28","modified_gmt":"2009-10-04T10:13:28","slug":"they-might-be-giants-is-interfering-with-my-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/04\/they-might-be-giants-is-interfering-with-my-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"They Might Be Giants is interfering with my teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From time to time in the past, I&#8217;ve given my intro astronomy class the following assignment: <em>Listen to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y&amp;feature=channel_page\">Why Does the Sun Shine<\/a>, by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theymightbegiants.com\/\">They Might Be Giants<\/a>, and critique it for accuracy.<\/em>\u00a0 The answer is that it&#8217;s mostly very accurate, but there are a couple of things it gets wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll have to be careful assigning this in the future, though, because TMBG have written a followup song, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA&amp;feature=channel_page\">Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)<\/a> that gives away part of the answer.<\/p>\n<p>I learned about this via the radio show\/podast <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wnyc.org\/shows\/radiolab\/\">Radio Lab<\/a>.\u00a0 One of their <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wnyc.org\/radiolab\/2009\/09\/21\/it-might-be-science\/\">recent podcasts<\/a> was all about TMBG and their new album of science songs for kids. (The part about the Sun starts at about 12:15, but it won&#8217;t kill you to listen to the whole thing.)<\/p>\n<p>(In case any of my future astronomy students are reading this, the correction song reveals only one of the two things wrong with the original song; the Radio Lab interview reveals the other.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From time to time in the past, I&#8217;ve given my intro astronomy class the following assignment: Listen to Why Does the Sun Shine, by They Might Be Giants, and critique it for accuracy.\u00a0 The answer is that it&#8217;s mostly very accurate, but there are a couple of things it gets wrong. I&#8217;ll have to be &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/04\/they-might-be-giants-is-interfering-with-my-teaching\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">They Might Be Giants is interfering with my teaching<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}