Links for 2009-10-01

"My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those sermons was, at best, difficult to apply in one's daily life during the following week."

"When someone mentions the term "thought experiment", the first person that probably comes to mind is Einstein and his daydream about trying to chase a beam of light -- an image of which even non-physicists will be familiar. This is because thought experiments tend to be very memorable and accessible because they usually involve simple math or no math at all. Despite their mathematical simplicity, however, they still manage to shed light on puzzling aspects of nature."

"What about getting the power from space to the ground? Running an extension cord is out of the question. The easiest way is to turn the energy back into light and shine it down to collection stations. Clearly just using visible light wouldn't help, you want something easier to collect. Microwaves are an easy solution. Set up a field of cheap metal antennas oriented in the appropriate direction and you can capture the beamed down radiation cheaply and easily."

"Anyway, after doing this lab for a couple of semesters, I noticed that sometimes students would not read the instructions (I know, it's shocking, but true). Instead of using the vertical distance the ball falls to get the time, they used a stop watch. So, this year I changed the lab (I think I also got a suggestion from some blog somewhere). Actually, projectile motion is now two labs. In the first lab, the goal is to measure the launch speed (with uncertainty) and then the second lab looks at projectile motion. I have the students find the launch speed several ways and compare uncertainties for the different methods."

"[T]hen I noticed the slight nod in the direction of those of us not conversant Celtically, in the form of a paragraph in English which told me that Cymraeg is spoken in the west part of Britain known as Wales, and in the Chubut Vallet in Patagonia, the site of a Welsh colonial emigration in the 1860s."