February 9, 2010
A while back I mentioned I was starting the project of reading Neal Stephenson's rather lengthy Baroque Cycle. I'm most of the way done with the second book, so we're coming round to the 2000-page mark. It's a brilliant work thus far, though it's very difficult to summarize. The plot is rather,…
February 5, 2010
I'm still not happy about NASA scrapping Ares and the manned lunar/Martian plans, but I'm less unhappy than I was. As long as unmanned planetary science picks up most of the slack I'll grudgingly deal with it. The extra earth science is still stupid; if you want more of that, get NSF or NOAA to…
February 2, 2010
Every year there's a Super Bowl, and every year the whole shebang gets started by a famous person tossing a coin into the air. The team winning the toss gets to decide whether they want to begin the game on offense or defense. Theoretically this choice might produce an advantage. If so, would be…
February 1, 2010
Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Get your ticket to see the True Oddities of the Natural World! Do not be taken in by the Shameful Forgeries at Inferior Circuses, here you will see Genuine Curiosities from the Mists of Time! Beside these Archaic Functions, the Two-Headed Horse or Whatever is…
January 29, 2010
I believe we have a Super Bowl coming up. Or, if the NFL is so picky about the use of their trademarks, I believe we have a "Big Game" coming up. As a native south Louisianian, I'm for the eternally long-suffering Saints, who in all their years have never even been to a Super Bowl. That…
January 27, 2010
Let's say you wanted to kill NASA. You couldn't just blink it out of existence I Dream Of Jeannie style, but you might be able to strangle it to death in bureaucracy. How might you do it?
For starters, you might completely scrap any attempt to return humans to the moon. You might completely…
January 26, 2010
I'm a bit bogged down in Mathematica code at the moment and have already choked the memory to death on a relatively high-performance machine doing what I thought would be a straightforward electric field calculation. Rechecking everything is taking some time, which distracts from writing here.…
January 24, 2010
And now, two quick notes before we get to business:
1. God help me, but I've joined the Twitter bandwagon. Here I am, @BuiltOnFacts. Though it goes under this blog's name, it is more of a "personal" account. So you'll be reading some incomprehensible personal minutiae, random observations, wild…
January 22, 2010
If you were to find the URL to the ScienceBlogs back end, you'd be presented with a logon prompt. Assuming you knew my username, and it wouldn't be hard to guess, all that stands in between you and a free ScienceBlogs platform to promote your favorite cause is a password. As such a good password…
January 21, 2010
This is a little off the beaten path, but it's a silly little diversion with some classic "the press lacks numeracy skills" complaints as a bonus. Thomas Frank writing in the Wall Street Journal has written a rather wild piece - One Cross of Gold, Coming Up: How the government could get even with…
January 20, 2010
First day of the semester yesterday. Wide-eyed undergrads were flocking to their physics classes in our brand new and completely beautiful building. I'm not so sure they were thrilled about it; doing physics is not something that naturally appeals to most denizens of the university. I admit I'm…
January 18, 2010
...you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?
- Dirty Harry
The laws of probability, like most of the mathematical rules that govern the world, are a relatively recent discovery. Ancient people like the Romans loved to gamble as much as we do, and they had at…
January 14, 2010
Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of…
January 13, 2010
This post is background for another post I'm doing tomorrow or possibly later this week. It involves that old standby of freshman physics, the pendulum. We want to find out the period of a pendulum, the length of time the pendulum spends making one complete back-and-forth cycle. It's literally…
January 12, 2010
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a quick look at a funny exchange in the oral arguments of Briscoe v. Virginia:
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN:…
January 11, 2010
Rhett over at Dot Physics is not quite happy about the way magnets are being taught to his young niece:
The other question came from my niece - who is an extremely bright girl (not sure exactly what grade - maybe 5th). She was at home and didn't have her science textbook, so she asked me the…
January 10, 2010
There's an interesting contrast between the laws of nature and the laws which constitute our legal system. The laws of nature are compact and precise; written in standard notation without accompanying explanation, the fundamental laws fit on a few pages. The laws of the legal system span…
January 7, 2010
I've got to admit, this is a beautiful skyscraper:
I was never very enamored of the Petronias Towers or the Taipei 101, both of which lacked the architectural panache that supertall structures ought to have. The Burj Khalifa has it. Burj Dubai is a more elegant name, but long story short Dubai…
January 5, 2010
I'd like to make myself believe
That planet Earth turns slowly...
- Owl City, Fireflies
If you're had any exposure to pop radio over the last few months, you've heard this plaintive rumination about the earth's rotation. The first time I heard it I thought it must be the Postal Service getting…
January 3, 2010
We've spent more than a few Sunday Function features discussing the properties of the prime numbers. They're just so important and interesting in number theory that they're an irresistible target. Let's set some scenery before getting to the actual function this week.
There are an infinite number…
January 2, 2010
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?
This nattily dressed gentleman is Johannes Kepler, who worked out three basic mathematical laws of planetary motion around the year 1605. He did so…
December 31, 2009
Around ScienceBlogs recently there's been some discussion about the following eyebrow-raising Toys-R-Us advertisement:
The ad has caused rumblings of discontent because it's pretty obvious the pink microscope and telescope are supposed to be "girl" editions, and in both cases the pink one is the…
December 30, 2009
Still working my way through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I'm now about half way through it (and thus about 1/6 of the way through the whole Baroque Cycle). The book is about the intrigues and adventures of Daniel Waterhouse and Jack Shaftoe, but it's actually about the birth of the modern…
December 29, 2009
Ok, back from Christmas hiatus which I, uh, forgot to announce. But I am pleased that I survived a full 96+ hours with exactly zero internet access. Didn't even miss it. Much.
Over that break, I happened to be in a bookstore in exurban Atlanta. Gravitating as I tend to do toward the science…
December 23, 2009
In the study of probability there's a concept called expected value. If you're measuring some random process, the expected value is the average over a very large number of trials. For instance, if you roll one dice you can expect to come up with a value of 3.5. Now obviously no individual roll…
December 21, 2009
Before her career took an unfortunate wrong turn, a young and talented Lindsay Lohan gave us a charming and popular comedy called Mean Girls. Time has been good to the careers of some of the others involved, Tiny Fey and Rachel McAdams perhaps most notably. But the film did something that very…
December 18, 2009
Some of you may have heard in the news recently about a possible detection of the particles that may make up dark matter:
Detectors in the mine, part of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, were tripped recently by what might be weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. WIMPs are…
December 17, 2009
I've finally buckled down and started reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Though the author is probably my favorite living fiction writer, the three-volume, ~3000 page monstrosity is just something that's hard for a busy grad student to tackle. I'm only maybe 1/5th through the first volume,…
December 16, 2009
This is a painting called The Supper at Emmaus. Its subject is the story in the 24th chapter of Luke's gospel, and the story of the painting is itself quite a tale.
It was discovered from obscurity in 1937 by the Dutch painter Hans van Meegeren, and it was acclaimed by experts as a heretofore…
December 9, 2009
You probably haven't been able to avoid seeing the televised bombs AT&T and Verizon have been throwing at each other over the maps of their coverage. Both sets of commercials (to differing degrees) fail to make it especially clear just what their maps mean to the consumer. For instance:…
