January 6, 2010
Today's lecture in intro mechanics is a whirlwind survey of vectors. While I struggle to clear my head enough to be able to teach this stuff, here's a Dorky Poll to pass the time:
What's your favorite three-dimensional coordinate system?(survey)
This is a strictly classical subject, so please…
January 6, 2010
Not a whole lot new, but it's been a few days. Also, it's a challenge to remain ambulatory at the moment, thanks to this cursed cold, so I'm not really prepared to turn out Significant Blogging.
-- This morning's vanity search (why yes, I am searching for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" on a…
January 6, 2010
Owl City and the Slow Earth : Built on Facts
"Does planet Earth turns slowly? It depends on how you look at it. At the equator it's roaring along at more than 1000 miles per hour. This is pretty fast by terrestrial standards, and perhaps what Owl City had in mind. But on the other hand its…
January 5, 2010
"Slow light" is in the news again. The popular descriptions of the process usually leave a lot to be desired, so let's see if we can't do a slightly better job of explaining what's going on. The key idea is using one light beam to control the transmission of another.
Let's say you have a bunch of…
January 5, 2010
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean's been taking a beating over his negative comments on an atheist anti-Christmas sign. There's no small irony in this, given that Sean is a vocal atheist. His sentiments, which basically boil down to "it's good to promote atheism, but there's no need to be a dick about…
January 5, 2010
America: Too Stupid To Cook | Ruhlman.com
"That one sentence crystallized the issue for me, turned my frustration from a wall into a lens. Americans are being taught that we're too stupid to cook. That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. The messages are everywhere.…
January 4, 2010
I spent most of Saturday in the lab, swapping out a turbopump that was starting to die. How could I tell? Well, for one thing, it made an awful noise, even more than usual for a noisy pump. But after it was stopped and unmounted from the chamber, there was a simple test: comparing the rotation to a…
January 4, 2010
Let's say you have some liquid that you want to contain without leaks, say, milk for a baby. What do you do?
Well, you put it in something like a baby bottle, the components of which are shown here:
You have a hard plastic bottle, a soft silicone nipple, and a hard plastic ring that screws onto…
January 4, 2010
Today is the first day of classes, and to celebrate, I've come down with the Martian death virus that Kate and SteelyKid have had the last few weeks. Joy.
This calls for a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog update, to distract myself from the cotton balls and vacuum pump oil that have apparently been…
January 4, 2010
Remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine. - By Paul Collins - Slate Magazine
"The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science…
January 3, 2010
OK, they're not that tiny. Here's your cute baby video for the weekend: Kate blowing bubbles for SteelyKid and Emmy:
I really don't need to say any more than that, do I?
January 3, 2010
Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post:
A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the…
January 3, 2010
It's a new year, so that means it's time to take a look back at the previous year. In graphical form, it looks like this:
Clears it all up, doesn't it? That's the past year in blog traffic, showing pageviews per day. Integrate it all up, and it comes to 717,254 pageviews. That's kind of mind-…
January 3, 2010
Ringing in Kepler's Year : Built on Facts
"Happy new year! While we're thinking about years, why don't we think about one of the first guys to explore the physical reason behind the year?"
(tags: science astronomy planets education math blogs built-on-facts)
The Universe within 12.5 Light Years…
January 2, 2010
In talking to a reporter about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on Wednesday, I learned of a mistake in the text of the book-- a footnote on page 71 says that Scientific American published an article on how to make your own "quantum eraser" in April 2007, when in fact it was May 2007.
If that's the…
January 2, 2010
Most of my fiction reading at the moment is done while rocking SteelyKid to sleep at night, using a Palm as an e-book reader. This does not really lend itself to the reading of weighty Literary Novels, but rather lightweight genre trash. Which means I've been reading a bunch of "urban fantasy,"…
January 2, 2010
Interstellar Cyclers -- KarlSchroeder.com
"To me, the idea that you should expend billions or trillions of dollars to accelerate a starship, only to decelerate it again, is pure lunacy. 90% of the ship's mass is support structures--either power or life support systems. The key to viable…
January 1, 2010
There isn't all that much news for a real obsessive update, so I'll lump in a few writing-related items of possible interest to people who read books other than mine.
A real obsessive update item: BradDeLong doubts my book can help his dog.
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog gets four out of five…
January 1, 2010
Giro.org » Grace, Internets. Internets, Grace.
"Grace is snoozing away in Anne's arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we've had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake…
December 31, 2009
SteelyKid says "You know what? Forget Appa-- take a picture of me next to Mommy:"
"I'm half Mommy's height already!"
And, if you think about it, that's a pretty good accomplishment for 2009. Happy New Year, everybody.
December 31, 2009
A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though:
Currently the plan is to ask the "heaviest user institutions" (other university library systems) to voluntarily…
December 31, 2009
Everybody with an opinion seems to be doing a decadal wrap-up of one sort or another, but I'm too tired to do anything serious. So, I'll let you do it for me: here's a list of ten songs that are, in my mind, inextricably bound up with the events of the decade. Which of them do you like the best?…
December 31, 2009
Sketches and Paintings by Richard Feynman | Amusing Planet
"Richard Feynman started taking art lessons at the age of 44, and continued drawing for the rest of his life. These include portraits of his close friends, wife and daughter and professional models that posed for him at his friend's…
December 30, 2009
Today is Question Day when it comes to post topics, I guess. Over at Fine Structure, Nick asks about the effect of spotlighting brilliant scientists:
I can't help but think about the repercussions of looking at his clearly above average career as something that's normal in physics. It's a deterrent…
December 30, 2009
Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish is thinking about gender color codes:
I know I may be in the minority here, but let's look at it this way: if someone might consider getting a microscope or telescope for a girl because it's pink rather than a traditional "girl toy" (read: BARBIE) in the absence of a…
December 30, 2009
I should probably start date-tagging these updates about miscellaneous How to Teach Physics to Your Dog news. I don't really mean this to become a second daily links dump, but it's kind of looking that way...
-- As a general matter, it's dangerous for authors to acknowledge the existence of Amazon…
December 30, 2009
YouTube - Tom Waits ã Heigh Ho ã ( The Dwarfs marching song ) from Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs
Creepiest. Disney song cover. EVER!
(tags: music movies video youtube)
Gallagher | DVD | Interview | The A.V. Club
Kind of a surreal extended get-offa-my-lawn rant, only vaguely related to the…
December 29, 2009
If you're still not sure whether you should be teaching physics to your dog, here's another good reason: Superconductors.
The "super" in "superconductor" refers to the fact that these materials conduct electric current with absolutely zero resistance, better than the best ordinary metals. This has…
December 29, 2009
Today's miscellaneous information about How to Teach Physics to your Dog:
-- Following on yesterday's discussion about Barnes & Noble, which seems to have numerous in-store copies everywhere but New England, where I am, it's not some system-wide issue-- B&N stores have a healthy number of…
December 29, 2009
Why your boss is incompetent - life - 17 December 2009 - New Scientist
"The "Peter principle" undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the…
