How to study distraction free

More last minute advice:

How to study distraction free

Mr. Burk's Top 5 Places to Study in Atlanta

One more great suggestion from Study Hacks is how Adventure Studying is a great way to prepare to study.

What is adventure studying? It's finding a cool, beautiful and quiet place for you to go away and study (and adventure doesn't involve Starbucks).

Here are my top 5 suggestions in the Atlanta Area:

1. The High Museum of Art—admission is a bit pricy ($15), but the cafe across the courtyard is free, rarely crowded and a great place to sit and admire the physics of the alexander calder mobile in the front (ever wonder how it stays balanced?)

2. Chuck E Cheese. You know you loved it 5 years ago. Why not go there, work for 45 minutes and then play some skee ball to put your physics knowledge to the test? If you go, bring headphones and find a quiet corner away from all the dancing robots.

3. A local college—Agnes Scott, Morehouse, Spelman, Emory, Georgia Tech—all of these places have beautiful campuses and libraries. It can be great fun to go to a college library for the afternoon.

4. The Carter Center--Recently completely renovated, you can visit a full scale model of the Oval Office (and that's a place where you really need to understand physics--check out Physics for Future Preisdents--a real course at UC Berkeley).

5. Outside—yes, it's supposed to be a bit rainy and cold this weekend, but it it would be great bundle up, to throw some FARMIPS and and some blank paper in your backpack, and go hike to some quiet, isolated place and solve physics problems under a tree.

movies you will need to analyze for class

Ball drop and toss

how to create an online calendar for the upcoming week

I've created a google spreadsheet to help you plan out your success week to help you demonstrate your best understanding on the exam. To use it, go here

Study Plan for Finals Week

The spreadsheet is read-only, so you'll need to make a copy.

To do that, click on "File > Make a copy" as shown in the image below.

If you'd like me to see your study plan, simply share it with me via google docs (this is completely optional).

5 Mistakes to avoid during finals

Here is more great advice from study hacks:

5 mistakes to avoid during finals.

We'll talk about this a bit tomorrow, but here they are briefly

• Mistake #1: Not Having a Clear Schedule
  
  You should set up a plan for using the time you have to maximum benefit—giving yourself time to rest, and reflect so you achieve maximum understanding.
  
  
• Mistake #2: Not Purging Your Obligations
  
  Avoid letting the little things in your life keep you from having the
  time you need to seriously prepare for exams.
  
  
• Mistake #3: “Studying”
  
  Focus on specific action. Solve problems.
  
  
• Mistake #4: Social Working
  
  While it can be helpful to work with others, often, working in a noisy space with friends can be very unproductive.
  
  
• Mistake #5: Calculating Your Final Grade
  
  I'll let Cal speak for himself:
  
  

  
  Don’t do this! No good can possibly come from such a superficial focus on the numbers. It will add stress. This, in turn, will make it harder for you to execute a reasonable, specific, and efficient study plan. Also, it’s just plain crass. You don’t want to be that person…
  

  
  

Wednesday's Class

On Wednesday, we talked about gravity in Space. It's like constantly being in a falling elevator, because in a falling elevator, your weight is less. If you were on a scale and the elevator was accelerating downward, then you wouldn't weigh anything because you would be floating right above the scale. You would still have mass though. In deep space, there is no force at all, not even gravity whereas space as we know it has a lot of gravity coming from earth. In deep space, the free body diagram would just be a dot because you wouldn't be near any objects that could interact and put force on you.

More about the nature of gravity

Here's a very cool video that describes the true nature of gravity a bit more. It's part of the elegant universe, an awesome 3 hour PBS special on the latest discoveries in physics.