Oooh, regarding defense of IP, I believe there is a big old exemption carved out in copyright law for educational uses that could make it tough for the textbook companies.
1 week ago (edited) | 0
SPOILERS BELOW!!! Yeah, I'm actually using many standard textbook questions here, and one creeped in that was correct both in concept and in the math solution, but the actual astrometric data was incorrect for the named objects. I had noticed it years ago, and thought I'd fixed it in my notes! The thing is that there are no stars that have a parallax greater that one arcsecond. The bad question lists two real stars with incorrect parallaxes. The editors and authors of the textbook knew this, but persisted, because many students have a tough time wiht unit conversions. I guess they wanted to use real star names so that a fictitous star wouldn't be "quoted" in a standard textbook. But that's still a problem. To see the bad problem, just Google for Wolf 1061 and Ross 652. Sadly, for educators, nearly all of these multiple choice questions exist on the internet, and have since before 2010, when I started working at WPU. I never understood why McM1llan and P3arson don't defend their intellectual property at all, until I had an interesting conversation with a department chair one day. Anyway, I'll keep using these quiz questions for this purpose, because, there are wonderful audience members like you, who just want to try their luck or see what they know. That's great! Off we go!
1 week ago | 0
Hi Jason, you were very decent to respond so quickly to my comment, which, thinking back, was a bit abrupt. Kudos.
1 week ago | 0
Jason Kendall
A very important note popped in the comments, so I'm revising an older one!
The star Sigma Draconis has a parallax of 173 milli-arcseconds, while the star Ross 128 has a parallax of 300 milli-arcseconds. What can you correctly conclude?
1 week ago | [YT] | 21