April 15, 2010
A neighbor pointed out to me yesterday that there's a big hole in our clapboard siding that was made by some sort of bird. This morning, I got a picture of the culprit:
I'm not quite certain why the animal kingdom has decided to trash my stuff this year-- insane jealousy of Emmy?-- but I would…
April 15, 2010
The Virtuosi: Would a laser gun recoil?
"Let's motivate our question a little bit. I've wondered about this question since I saw star wars. Though I'm no firearms expert, the recoil in guns must come from conservation of momentum principles. Momentum is conserved in a system. The gun starts…
April 14, 2010
What's the application? Telecommunications, namely, the sending of messages over very long distances by encoding them in light pulses which are sent over optical fibers.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can we send large numbers of messages from one place to another more efficiently than…
April 14, 2010
I won't attempt to explain the chain of reasoning that led to this topic this morning. The poll itself doesn't need much explanation, though: As any geek knows, the tv show(s) CSI: Descriptive Subtitle rely heavily on fake technologies. which of these would you most like to be real?
Which…
April 14, 2010
slacktivist: L'affaire Waltke
"This is a story about control. It is about, in the unintentionally candid terms of one of the main actors, "absolute authority" and the desire to wield that authority over a text so that the text, in turn, may be used to wield absolute authority over others.
It is a…
April 13, 2010
I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills…
April 13, 2010
I'm teaching a junior/senior level elective this term on quantum mechanics. We're using Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, which starts with spin-1/2 and develops the whole theory in terms of state vectors and matrices. This is kind of an uneasy fit for me, as I'm very much a…
April 13, 2010
Michelson and the President (1869) « Skulls in the Stars
"I'm currently working my way through the book The Master of Light: a Biography of Albert A. Michelson (1973), written by one of his daughters, Dorothy Michelson Livingston. I typically find the beginnings of biographies to be rather slow…
April 12, 2010
What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as…
April 12, 2010
Several weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. Personal issues interrupted this, but I want to finish it out in honor of LaserFest Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC…
April 12, 2010
No blogging this weekend, and not even a Links Dump for Monday morning, because I was busy with non-blog stuff all weekend. Such as fencing in Lake Steelypips:
OK, maybe that's too grandiose a name for the little decorative pond in our back yard. It's not all that large, but it is big enough to…
April 11, 2010
Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » The Accidental Trilogy: Logan's Run, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man
"The problem is, Lucas made [Star Wars] so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now…
April 10, 2010
Neil Fraser: Hardware: Lava Lamp Centrifuge
"Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out."
(tags: physics…
April 9, 2010
The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy.
I wasn't surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the…
April 9, 2010
There's no rest for the wicked, as last weekend's hectic running around is followed by another busy weekend, with some on-campus stuff on Sunday as part of our annual Accepted Students Days. More importantly, though, I will be on a panel at the Empire State book Festival on Saturday from 12:45-1:30…
April 9, 2010
Physics Buzz: 490 billion nanometers tall
"There are seven SI base units: meter (m), kilogram (kg), second (s), ampere (A), kelvin (K), mole (mol), and candela (cd). The other SI units are derived from these seven: acceleration is m/s^2, density is kg/m^3, magnetic field strength is A/m, etc.…
April 8, 2010
"What's SteelyKid doing for amusement now that the weather is all nice and stuff?," you ask. Well, here's your answer: she's giving her sky-bison rides on the swing in the back yard:
"Wait a minute," you say, "isn't it, like, 80 degrees there? Why's she wearing a coat?"
Look, man, when the Empress…
April 8, 2010
Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I'm turning it into a blog post.
The reason for the request is that he's going to be…
April 8, 2010
Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and…
April 8, 2010
Wave interference: where does the energy go? « Skulls in the Stars
The two waves cancel each other out, leaving a completely unmoving string due to destructive interference. My student asked me: what happens to the energy? As posed, it seems that we started with two waves carrying energy, but…
April 7, 2010
I'm still getting things squared away after my blogging break, but as a step on the way back toward normal programming, here's a Dorky Poll: What kind of numbers do you most like to work with?
What kind of numbers do you like best?online surveys
You can only choose a single answer, which I'm sure…
April 7, 2010
So, this was my weekend:
Saturday: Drive to my parents' with Kate and SteelyKid for Easter.
Sunday: Drive back to Niskayuna with Kate, leaving SteelyKid with Grandma and Grandpa
Monday: Teach my 9:15 class, then drive to Ithaca to give a physics colloquium at Cornell, then drive back to my parents…
April 5, 2010
Not a full Obsessive Update (because not much happened over the weekend, when we took SteelyKid to my parents' place for Easter), but a quick reminder to folks in the Ithaca, NY area: I'll be giving the physics colloquium at Cornell this afternoon at 4pm. If you're in the area, and want to hear me…
April 2, 2010
I forgot to schedule a blog post to remind people to tune in to my appearance on WAMC's "The Roundtable" yesterday morning, talking about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you missed it, and have fourteen minutes to kill, they have the segment on their audio archive now.
It went well, and I had…
April 2, 2010
As I was headed upstairs to bed last night, I stopped in the library, and said "There's something I ought to be doing..." but couldn't remember what. This morning, while walking Emmy, it hit me: Baby Blogging!
It's weird that I forgot, because I went to the trouble of taking pictures and everything…
March 31, 2010
If you scroll way down the list of this year's Goldwater Scholarship winners, you'll find:
Peter John Bonventre
Institution: Union College
Major(s): Physics/Mathematics
Career Goal: Ph.D. in Mathematics or Physics. Conduct research and teach at the university level.
Pete's one of our junior…
March 31, 2010
Physics Central is having a contest:
Do you love lasers? Ever wanted to unravel the mystery of the stimulated emission? Then the LaserFest video contest is for you. Take any laser you want and use it to somehow express a physics concept. Shine, lase, bounce and wave your way into physics history.…
March 30, 2010
SteelyKid is a fan of a web game called BumperStars, which my parents introduced her to. If I'm at the computer doing something, she'll march over, demand to be picked up, then point at the screen and say "Buh-Pah" until I open it up.
Of course, she's a toddler, and thus has an extremely short…
March 29, 2010
A flurry of things to kick off the new academic term. Reviews and news:
A nice write-up on Wired's GeekDad blog by Kathy Ceceri, about last week's homeschool event. Includes a picture of me giving a tour of my lab.
ZapperZ says that I'm not teaching physics, I'm teaching about physics. Which is…
March 29, 2010
It's grey and dreary here, with an expected high temperature around 50F. That can only mean one thing: Spring has arrived in New England!
(You can distinguish spring from winter by the daytime high temperatures-- they're both grey and dreary, but winter is grey, dreary, and cold...)
Spring means…
