ChatGPT is Becoming a Religion

It's been a few years since ChatGPT and Large Language Models exploded onto the scene (c. November 2023). But its roots went back further than that, and its applications have gone beyond students cheating at school.

Tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz, offers her take on enterprise. The information comes fast and furious, so fasten your seatbelt.

ChatGPT is Becoming a Religion

A new form of techno-spirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that the AI is a type of all-knowing God, or that it has been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us. 

Is this a new form of religion or mass psychosis? In this video, I dive deep into the rise of ChatGPT/AI worship and unpack how decades of pop culture influences have primed us to view technology as God-like. I dig into how tech became fused with spirituality, Silicon Valley founder worship, what the academic research on this topic says, and how we can stop more people from falling victim to this cycle before it's too late. 

I have questions.

ChatGPT is Becoming a Religion at TPT

PFAS: Forever Chemicals

Veritasium produced an eye-opening exposé of DuPont's role in the proliferation of forever chemicals (PFAS).

How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet

And I have questions.

PFAS: Forever Chemicals at TPT

AI Protein Folding

How the protein folding frontier was conquered, as told by Veritasium's Derek Muller. It's perhaps the most important story in modern biology. And science communicator, Derek Muller—as usual—dives deeper into the topic than most popular science journalists dare to venture.

But Veritasium manages to tell the tale in 24 minutes. It's a dense 24 minutes. I crafted 37 questions to accompany the video, because if I were showing this to students, I would not let them look away for a moment. There's a lot of good information in The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done.

Cowboy biochemistry, Turd of the Century, and evoformers will be discussed. Veritasium has answers, and I have questions.

THE MOST USEFUL THING AI HAS EVER DONE at TPT

You're Probably Wrong About Rainbows

Veritasium's Derek Muller did a deep dive into rainbows, and brought his YouTube content creator skills to bear in articulating an explanation. 

I thought I dove pretty deep in my Understanding Rainbows classroom lesson. Derek dialed it up to 11 in You're Probably Wrong About Rainbows.

Naturally, I had questions.

YOU'RE PROBABLY WRONG ABOUT RAINBOWS at TPT

You probably don’t understand how a rainbow really works. In this video, Veritasium’s Derek Muller dives deep into the optics of rainbows. Caustics and Brewster’s angle deep. The video is divided into chapters; see the product listing for complete details.

Great American Eclipse

 

As I post this, the "Great American Eclipse" is days away. NOVA released this video today as eclipse chasers are nervously monitoring cloud-cover forecasts and making their way toward the path of totality.

I worked a bit furiously to craft this question set for those who might find it useful.

GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE at TPT

Explore the spectacular cosmic phenomenon of a total solar eclipse. In April 2024, the Moon’s shadow is sweeping from Texas to Maine, as the U.S. witnesses its last total solar eclipse until 2044. This extraordinary astronomical event is plunging locations in the path of totality into darkness for more than four minutes–nearly twice as long as the last American eclipse in 2017. Learn how to watch an eclipse safely and follow scientists as they work to unlock secrets of our Sun–from why its atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, to what causes solar storms and how we might one day predict them.

Participants include Amir Caspi, Craig DeForest, Jon Ghahate, Kelly Korreck, Judith Nakamura, Tyler Nordgren, Hakeem Oluseyi, Mathieu Ossendrijver, Sam Parks, Anjali Piette, Jenna Samra, Grant Tremblay, Anjali Tripathi, and Michael Wong.

For additional eclipse content, see:

ECLIPSE OVER AMERICA (2017)

TOTAL ECLIPSE (pre-2017)

Crypto Decoded

By early June, 2023, regulators were coming after cryptocurrencies. And NTFs had not really caught on fire. Maybe I've come to this episode of NOVA too late. And it's not that old. But 2022 was a long, difficult year for crypto. 

NOVA traces the origins of crypto and what some hoped it might be able to do. From the blockchain to Ethereum, this episode does what it can to decode crypto.

Crypto Decoded at TPT

From Bitcoin to NFTs, crypto is making headlines. But what exactly is it, and how does it work? Experts go beyond the hype and skepticism to unravel the social and technological underpinnings of crypto – exploring how it came to be and why this new technology may change more than just money.

Honda Cog Ad

 

I always loved this two-minute ad from Honda UK. It merited an exhaustive Wikipedia entry. I showed it during our Energy units, since there were so many energy transfers and and transformations. Creating a student assignment around it was challenging, though. And doing so sat on the back-burner for some time.

Eventually I settled on a "phenomena-match" where I created a list of physics phenomena and broke the video into 33 distinct events, with titles!

Students are asked to read the list of phenomena and then watch the video. Then they're asked to watch the video again and label each event with at least one phenomenon shown. (Some events show multiple phenomena, and students are encouraged to label as many as they see.) 

But there are some restrictions. All 33 events need to tagged with at least one phenomenon, and each phenomenon must be assigned to at least one event by the end of the video. And no single phenomenon can be assigned to more than five events.

Fun, engaging, and with just a pinch of tension (as you come up on your fifth citation of "collision").

Honda Cog Ad at TPT

The Big Page of Chemistry

When The Mechanical Universe series was posted to YouTube, I constructed an HTML page to index the episodes. Then I added the High School Adaptations and links to my TPT question sets. Now I've got a comprehensive The Mechanical Universe of Phyz web page that I found to be quite useful.

Now that I've created question sets for four series concerning Chemistry, I thought a Big Page of Chemistry might be in order.

Here's the link to the page: Chemistry

The series indexed (from fewest to most episodes) are

Chemistry: A Volatile History (with Jim Al-Khalili)

This BBC mini-series has been my best-selling chemistry series.

Hunting the Elements and Beyond the Elements (with David Pogue)

David Pogue is always kinetic and entertaining. Hunting is a two-hour special; Beyond was the decade-later mini-series sequel.

Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions (with a variety of host researchers)

Thirteen half-hour episodes cover many major topics in chemistry. And demonstrations are woven in nicely.

The World of Chemistry (with Roald Hoffmann)

Twenty-six half-hour episodes provide comprehensive coverage of chemistry topics. First aired in 1990, and the years have not been kind to it. The Mechanical Universe has aged much more gracefully. But the academic content is solid. Series demonstrator, Don Showalter, is always great fun.

The World of Chemistry

Produced after The Mechanical Universe and before Earth Revealed, The World of Chemistry with Roald Hoffmann debuted on PBS in 1990. Chemistry Nobel laureate, Roald Hoffmann hosts and Don Showalter is the series demonstrator in this series consisting of 26 half-hour episodes.

I've bundled the question sets into four series. A megabundle combines all the series is available, as are each of the individual episodes.

This series is not as polished or timeless as The Mechanical Universe, nor has it aged as well. But you might find some gems here that fit nicely into a well-balanced Chemistry, AP Chemistry, or Chemistry of the Earth Systems curriculum. And at 26 episodes, it's fairly comprehensive.

And for something with more contemporary sensibilities, check out Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions.

The World of Chemistry at TPT 

Order and Disorder: The Forces that Drive the Universe

I was late to the Jim Al-Khalili party, so I'm working through the back catalog, scrambling to catch up. So far, I've authored question sets for Atom, Chemistry: A Volatile History, Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity, Gravity and Me, The Secrets of Quantum Physics, and Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies.

I still have a few Al-Khalili gems to mine. For now, I'm adding this volume to my library.

Order and Disorder: The Forces that Drive the Universe at Teachers Pay Teachers

In which Al-Khalili spins a thread that carries us from ancient Mesopotamia through

The Secrets of Quantum Physics

Professor of physics Jim Al-Khalili investigates the most accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever - quantum physics. The program's two episodes stream on Amazon Prime. YouTube links have also been embedded in the text below and the titles in the student documents.

1. Einstein's Nightmare

The history of and battle over quantum entanglement. Albert Einstein hated the idea that nature, at its most fundamental level, is governed by chance. Professor Jim Al-Khalili reveals how, in the 1930s, Einstein thought he'd found a fatal flaw in quantum physics because it implies that subatomic particles can communicate faster than light in defiance of the theory of relativity. Delightful bonus: "Tangled Up With You" by Eliza's Uncertainty, a perfect addition to your modern physics playlist.

A Bundle of Phyz: ROTATION

The bundle opens with a guided classroom discussion on "A New Kind of Motion": rotation. It's fundamentally different from linear motion.

"A Question of Balance" is a PhET-fueled lab activity that sets and applies the conditions for balance using the Balancing Act sim. It's a nice precursor to an in-class, hands-on balanced torques lab.

"Torque" is a guided classroom discussion that builds toward an equation for torque by examining various factors one at a time.

Take a Flying Leap [Springboard]

Once momentum is introduced in my class, I waste little time moving onto the topic of impulse. Eggs are tossed; grass omelettes are made. Slow-motion videoclips are captured and reviewed in class.

We eventually get to this guided classroom discussion, where we learn more about how impact time affects impact force. Examples are cited, and videoclips are featured. I took a flying leap from the historic Victoria Falls Bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe in the name of science. A Victoria Falls bungee mishap is also shown. As is a GoldenEye 007 bungee stunt, and a skydiver who chooses not to use a parachute.

A Bundle of Phyz: INERTIA

[Update 3/10/22: Added Newton's First Law Springboard.]

This bundle opens with an activity that was conducted as a lab but was repurposed as a demonstration during remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL). It's a station exploration of "Inertia in Action".

Next up is "Clever Dumbbell," a classic inertia demonstration that challenges intuition.

Another classic follows with "Cannonball," where a cannonball is dropped from the mast of a moving ship.

A Bundle of Phyz: MOTION

Motion may be the most overrated topic in introductory physics. It is often the first topic covered in the course, and in some courses, the pure study of kinematics can linger from August through September and deep into October. That struck me as excessive, but any physics course is largely the story as told by the instructor.

The bundle begins with perhaps the first Conceptual Physics Alive! lecture filmed, "Linear Motion". Groundwork is laid as terms are defined and examples are provided.

"Motivating the Moving Man" is a PhET-fueled sim lab that focuses on translating motion graphs into verbal descriptions and verbal descriptions into motion graphs.

A Bundle of Phyz: LIGHT AND COLOR

As fortune would have it, there are many Phyz things involving light and color.

The bundle opens with an encyclopedic "Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum," produced by NASA. Next up is a look at a 2008 viral ad campaign, "Cell Phone Popcorn". Popping corn with phones was an urban legend in the early days of smartphones. 

Next up is a colorful sequence. "Pixel Peeping" and "Fun With Colors" were originally written for in-person instruction, but modified into Virtual Labs for remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL). Conceptual Physics Alive's "Light and Color" follows nicely. Then a pair of color mixing YouTube Physics lessons explore cephalopod camouflage and the mystery of magenta. How much do you know about chromatophores?

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTROMAGNETISM

Upon posting the RT;DL Virtual Lab Experiments related to electromagnetism, I realized I had a bunch of resources on that topic. So I created a bundle to gather and discount them.

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTROMAGNETISM at Teachers Pay Teachers

The bundle includes the Virtuals: "Seeing Magnetic Fields," "Ørsted's Discovery," "Electric Magnetism," and "Magnetic Electricity," YouTube Skepticism: "Magnet Boys," The Mechanical Universe: "Magnetism," "Magnetic Fields," and "Electromagnetic Induction," Conceptual Physics Alive: "Magnetism and Electromagnetic Induction," NOVA's "Magnetic Storm," and BBC's Shock and Awe: Part 2. "The Age of Invention." All the resources in the bundle are available separately. And they're all print-friendly Google Docs files to accommodate whatever kind of teaching you're doing at the moment.

There's also a link to the activity I wrote for PhET's Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab. It's free on PhET's activities list for the sim as a PDF file.

This is a big bundle. As was the case in the electrostatics bundle, there were some resources that struck me as related to, but not central to introductory electromagnetism. I listed them in the product description for anyone keen to even dive deeper into this topic. 

Brainiac Electric Fence [Virtual Demonstration]

This was a video demo to begin with. So it was half-way virtual already. To maximize its utility, I needed to chop this Brainiac: Science Abuse segment up and intersperse questions. The physics is nice in that it ranges from fundamental up to “beyond the scope of this introductory course”. From conductors and insulators, through series circuits, to R-2R resistor ladders. This is a nice lesson to put near the end of a circuits unit. 

Since I remixed the segment (really just chopped it up), I'm posting this as a Fair Use freebie. 

Brainiac Electric Fence [Virtual Demonstration] free at Teachers Pay Teachers

Includes:

Student document (print-friendly Google Docs file)

Observation Presentation (HTML link embedded in and URL printed in student document)

Answer key (Google docs file)

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTRIC CIRCUITS

The bundle begins with The Mechanical Universe's "The Battery," since batteries often power the simple DC circuits we like in Physics.

Next it's the PhET-fueled "Batteries and Bulbs". Originally written as a hands-on lab activity, this version was redesigned for use in remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL).

Conceptual Physics Alive's "Electric Circuits" is Paul Hewitt's take on the matter; The Mechanical Universe's "Electric Circuits" is David Goodstein's. Both are excellent.

Britain's Brainiac: Science Abuse serves up an engaging and offbeat take on electric circuits with humans acting as the resistors in "Electric Fence". Some will recognize host Richard Hammond from Top Gear, etc.

We return to the battery and update its story with David Pogue's PBS/NOVA episode, "Search for the Super Battery".

Then we have "Logic Gates," in which Boolean algebra is played out in circuit form as students design simple circuits with switches that will turn a bulb on under specific conditions. To prepare students for Boole and truth tables, a gentle pre-lab worksheet has them drawing up gate configurations that allow a cow access to a pasture under specific conditions.

Once students master the single pole single throw (STSP) switches of "Logic Gates," they might want to have a go at designing a three-way switch, which involves SPDT (single pole double throw) switches.

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTRIC CIRCUITS at Teachers Pay Teachers

All resources are available separately. All are print-friendly Google Docs files on Google Drive. All include answer keys.

If the shorter High School Adaptations of The Mechanical Universe are more your style, then check out Set 6: Circuits and Magnetism.

If you didn't work Shock and Awe - Part 1: Spark into your electrostatics lessons, that episode still works well with electric circuits.

Skepticism

Science teachers have an obligation to instill critical thinking and skepticism in their students. If my students can calculate kinetic energy as (1/2)mv^2 but also buy a Power Balance bracelet or accept media reports of paranormal activity, I feel I have failed them.

So I insert explicit lessons in skepticism and critical thinking into the curriculum throughout the school year. My hope is that such lessons strengthen students' thinking skills I'm the classroom and (more importantly) beyond. I developed these activities for use with my own students.

Skepticism Bundle on Teachers Pay Teachers

P R O G R A M S

1. SECRETS OF THE PSYCHICS

Can psychics predict the future? Many people seem to think so. Others argue that, in most cases, so-called psychic experiences are really misinterpretations of events. In this episode of NOVA, magician and confirmed skeptic James Randi challenges viewers to weigh the evidence for and against the existence of psychic phenomena.

2. MERCHANTS OF DOUBT 

A documentary that looks at pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities as they speak about topics like toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and climate change.