Ancient Rome in 3D for Google Earth Educators Competition

A new layer is available in Google Earth. If you haven't updated in a while it may be time to do so. You can now look at Rome as it appeared in 320 A.D. Which is totally cool. Be warned you nedd a pretty new and beefy computer to do it.

3D Ancient Rome suggests 2 GHz dual core processor with 3 GB RAM and a good video card with at least 512 ram. They don't list any minimum specs. My desktop computer couldn't hack it. It's running WinXP with a 2.8 GHz Pentium IV, 1 GB ram and an ok nVidia graphics card. As I started to load the data things started to crawl to the point of being totally useless.

So I decided to try my MacBook which has a 1.83 GHz dual core with 2 GB ram with Intel integrated graphics. It kind of worked, but not in any sort of satisfying way.

I was able to get the historic terrain with no real problems then I tried for the 250 Landmarks. This was slow and just barely doable. Then to prove to myself how inadequate my two year old computer is I decided to be silly and try for the 5000+ buildings. I watched for about five minutes as buildings were added at a rate of about maybe 5 a minute or so and decided I didn't have 1000+ minutes to wait for the rest of the buildings.

The competition is to come up with ways to use this new layer with your students. I've already bee kicking around ideas I can use in Physics (I'll share them after the February deadline). Now all I need to do is find a computer I can use to run it on.

Open Source Physics

So, I just got done reading the Physics Teacher (journal from the AAPT). In the back of each issue is a list of cool websites. I just got done looking at one of them titled Open Source Physics. Now, given my bent on opensource and physics I had to check this out. Combine it with the fact that it is hosted at comPADRE and I knew it had to be good.

Open Source Physics has a collection of tools for computational physics. I've only scratched the surface, but I think it will be a center point of the honors physics course I'm designing for next year. The one piece to catch my attention first was the Tracker program. This is a java based video analysis tool. It also includes the ability to mathematically model motion. You can overlay the model right on the video. So you could model a perfect projectile path and show how an NBA player seems to float when they dunk a ball. The center of mass fill follow a parabolic path even though his head follows a nearly horizontal path.

So far I've done some basic motion analysis and it's pretty easy to do. Not quite as slick as LoggerPro, but it's free and very functional. I will be playing more with this and will be creating some tutorials for the FlosScience site.