This morning my YouTube subscriptions included a notification of a new TED-Ed lesson that caught my attention. That lesson is titled How the Water You Flush Becomes the Water You Drink. As the titled implies, the lesson is all about how wastewater gets cleaned and put back into the water cycle where we'll eventually drink it once more.
The lesson introduces viewers to three types of wastewater and how wastewater is treated. The two key terms from the video are direct potable reuse and indirect potable reuse and the differences between the two. You can watch the lesson on YouTube or as embedded below. The full lesson with questions and additional resources can be found here on the TED-Ed website.
By watching How to Spot a Misleading Graph students can learn about three ways in which graphs can be misleading. Those ways are distorting the scale of the graph, manipulating the X or Y axis of a graph, and cherry-picking or not providing context for data in a graph. The whole lesson can be found here and the video is embedded below.
This week TED-Ed published a new lesson that addresses a topic that just about everyone who owns a cell phone has wondered about at one time or another. That question is "why do phone batteries get worse over time?"
Why Your Phone Battery Gets Worse Over Time explains how lithium ion batteries work, why they hold less energy over time, and how batteries are recycled. The end of the video dives into the topic of lithium supply and why not all batteries are recycled. Watch the lesson on the TED-Ed YouTube channel or as embedded below.
In a world in which there is no shortage of digital distractions it can be hard to get into the flow of working a project, studying, or simply sitting and thinking for a while. That's why I like what Engageable is trying to do, why I appreciate the work of Cal Newport, and why I was happy to see a new TED-Ed video about entering a state of flow.
TED-Ed's new lesson, How to Enter Flow State, explains why it can be difficult to enter a flow state, why sometimes it's easier than others to enter a flow state, and the mental effects of getting into a flow state. Interestingly, the video is actually fairly light on tips for how to to actually enter a flow state of mind. It provides the same tips that you've probably heard before. Those are things like setting small, achievable goals for a work session and work in a quiet, distraction-free environment.
The video from the lesson is embedded below.