Rhett Allain
rallain
Posts by this author
August 12, 2010
There is this commercial that has been coming on lately showing some people reading the Kindle at the beach. Why is this a selling point? It has to do with the way the Kindle works compared to something like the iPad. I would take a picture, but I have neither of these devices. Instead, I will…
August 12, 2010
This summer I taught the part II of algebra-based physics. It is odd, but I rarely teach this course. I usually end up teaching the calculus-based version (with Matter and Interactions). There is something strange. If you look at the algebra-based physics I and calculus-based physics I, they…
August 11, 2010
I am not a boy scout, but I still believe it is a good idea to be prepared. What to prepare for? Well, in Louisiana, it is the time to prepare for hurricanes and the looming budgetpocolypse.
Hurricanes
First, the hurricanes and tropical storms.
Model image from Weather Underground - best place…
August 9, 2010
Here is a quick one. One of the big news stories recently was this regarding WikiLeaks and the release of the Afghan War Diary. There could be tons of things to discuss regarding this - but I am not going to do that. The first thing that struck my mind was "over 91,000 documents". That seems…
August 7, 2010
I have seen several videos similar to this.
Real? Fake? How many tries did this take? Let the analysis begin. Before I do any analysis, let me state that I think this is not fake. I do not know that for sure, just my first guess.
How would I tell if it is real or fake? This is tricky. I can'…
August 5, 2010
This is a classic problem. You are in a car heading straight towards a wall. Should you try to stop or should you try to turn to avoid the wall? Bonus question: what if the wall is not really wide so you don't have to turn 90 degrees?
Assumption: Let me assume that I can use the normal model of…
August 4, 2010
First off, I think this is a really good post (not this self-referring post, but the post I am about to link to)
Steak Dinner by Alemi at The Virtuosi
In short, this post is about cooking steak and the measurements of the temperature of the meat. Why do I think this is a good post?
First, it is…
August 3, 2010
I am seriously late on this stuff. First, by clickers I mean student response systems. In a previous post, I stated how much I like these things. The basic idea (in case you have never heard of them) is that these are small devices that students in a class have. The instructor (learning…
August 3, 2010
You thought I was going to talk about a problem that math teachers could use, didn't you? Well, maybe math teachers can use this. (note: when I say "teachers" I really mean "learning facilitators")
It all started when I read this valedictorian speech from Erica Goldson. Here is part of it:
"I am…
August 2, 2010
Try to say that 5 times really fast. Go ahead, try it. Well, at least it is not as difficult as Fox in Socks - man that book is a killer.
This WAW is basically a means to embed Wolfram Alpha queries into a webpage. Pretty cool idea, but I am not sure how well it does the job. In fact, I have…
August 1, 2010
Chasing Mummies is kind of like a cross between the reality showness of Deadliest Catch and History's Mysteries. I like these kind of shows. My kids like these shows. It's win-win.
The basic idea of this show is to follow this dude, Zahi Hawass- he is like in charge of all the Egyptian museums…
July 30, 2010
The Lord of the Rings trilogy came on TV again recently. My wife and I can't help but to watch this even though we have it on DVD. Anyway, I was thinking about the part where Gondor sends a signal to Rohan asking them for military aid. Since this was before the invention of email, they had to do…
July 26, 2010
Here is part of a picture some of my friends posted from a recent high school reunion.
It may be hard to tell, but this is part of a picture of 7 females all wearing black. I just wanted to show you that they were indeed wearing black without giving away anymore details. If you are one of these…
July 24, 2010
WOMWorld/Noika has invited me to travel to Salzburg Austria and visit with the Felix and the Red Bull Stratos team. I am pumped up.
Why? Why oh why you might ask. Well, I guess it is for several reasons.
First, I have several posts about the physics of the Red Bull Stratos jump. (quickly, the…
July 23, 2010
Check this out - NY Times: No Motors, but Mistrust at Tour de France.
So, the short story is that some people claim that Cancellara is cheating by putting a hidden electric motor in his bike. Now they are going to do random hidden-motor checks.
I have analyzed this motor-in-a-bike already:
Energy…
July 21, 2010
Frank Noschese is a physics teacher and a blogger (and frequent commenter on Dot Physics). And I nominate Frank as the new librarian of videos that can be analyzed for realness or fakeness. Or, as Frank calls them Win-Fail Physics. Note that I sort of changed his theme a little - sorry Frank.…
July 20, 2010
I don't hate math, that is just the title of the post - notice that I put it in quotes.
As you may know, I teach this physics course for elementary education majors (using Physics and Everyday Thinking - which is awesome). The curriculum has very little math in it. That is not necessarily a good…
July 19, 2010
(alternate title: how to make pretty graphs in vpython)
I am happy. Finally, I can use the visual module in python (vPython.org) and plotting with Matplotlib. Maybe this isn't such a big deal for many of you, but for me, it never worked until now.
In the past, I blogged about plotting in vpython…
July 16, 2010
I have been thinking about grades lately and I am pretty sure they are dumb. The main problem is that it seems that many many many people (politicians, parents, students, administrators, some other faculty, and zombies) think that the grade is the THE THING to worry about. Really, it is just a…
July 15, 2010
Just a quick note. Some of the images on posts before Jan 2010 might not be loading. I am working on this, but it might take some time. If there is some old post that you need or link to, let me know and I will fix those first.
July 13, 2010
Here is a commercial for some Mercedes car. The first part is quite boring, but check out the stunt at around 2:00 minutes into the video.
I haven't bothered to check if this is officially fake or not. Instead, I will do what I do - see if this is even feasible.
The common question people ask…
July 13, 2010
The other day I found myself faced with six equations that needed to be solved algebraically. Just so you know, I am a big fan of paper for most of these cases - but this was out of control. I was making silly mistakes and causing all sorts of problems. What to do? My first though was to use…
July 11, 2010
My car had a flat tire. When you get a flat tire, you might as well make something useful of it - right? As I was jacking the car up, I had a great idea. Use this for one of my "Spoof Science" videos. The only problem is that this takes a ton of work to put together a short video. So, I am…
July 9, 2010
In regards to the recent PepsiCo blog situation (you know the one I mean), I wasn't going to say much. First, because Chad did a good job at expressing my views (without me even telling him ). Second, I am just happy to be at ScienceBlogs - I had been kicked off two servers and had to hitch a…
July 8, 2010
In my last zombie post, I looked at a human moving in a circle to avoid a zombie (if they are stuck in a room). What if I build a zombie evading robot that always moves perpendicular to the path of the zombie? Would this work?
This shouldn't be too difficult to model. I can use my existing model…
July 6, 2010
It is that part of the semester where the Right Hand Rule (RHR) comes out. Really, the best part is the students taking the tests. They make all these funny motions with their hands. That makes tests more entertaining (for me) than they usually are.
What is the RHR?
Suppose I have two numbers.…
July 1, 2010
Title: Chased by zombies
When I heard word about the ScienceBlogs Zombie Day, I knew I wanted to participate with a post - but I had no idea what to do. My first thought was to somehow talk about living off the electric grid in the case of a zombipocolypse - you know, like how big of a solar panel…
June 30, 2010
This is so awesome - an arduino controlled fan cart.
If you are not familiar with the arduino, basically it is just a very simple and cheap programmable chip. I have been meaning to play around with one of these, but really I am afraid. Afraid I will like it just a little too much.
In this fan…
June 27, 2010
Sometimes I get asked to do some demos for kids. I like this, it is fun. This week, I was asked to do just such a demo. Kind of as a historical record, I am going to document what I did.
The audience
It is always important to think about who you are talking to. Is this a group of high school…
June 25, 2010
The oil spill is still in the news (sadly). One thing that keeps coming up is the speed that the oil bubbles rise to the surface. This is important in different oil-capture methods. The common statement is that smaller bubbles of oil can take quite a long time to reach the surface and larger…