Everyday
drorzel | February 16, 2015SteelyKid is spending a couple of days this week at "Nerf Camp" at the school where she does taekwondo. This basically consists of a bunch of hyped-up kids in a big room doing martial activities-- taekwondo class, board breaking, and "Nerf war" where they build an obstacle course and then shoot each other with dart guns. Which, of course, required the purchase of upgraded Nerf weaponry, as seen in the "featured image" above.
This thing fires darts at a fearsome speed-- they hit the ceiling with really loud "thwack" that was a huge hit with both kids. Of course, you know what's coming next,…
drorzel | February 3, 2015It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local schools and the snow-day day-care program we signed the kids up for were shut down, with good reason- I had to go to campus for my 10:30 am class, and that two-mile drive was pretty nerve-wracking.
Since the kids were home for the day, we did a bit of playing outside, even though the temperatures…
drorzel | January 27, 2015I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired Monday night, January 26th, and you can stream it from their archives at the link above (I think it should be episode 216, but when I looked just now, it was just "Episode 16," but the date is correct. My bit is toward the end, starting around the 35:00 mark, but you should totally watch the whole…
drorzel | January 25, 2015The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of clearing comments from moderation.
Anyway, a few things deserve more prominent responses than a comment at the end of a long post, so:
-- I was in bed during the great Bill Belichick press conference, though I saw some mockery of it come across Twitter. While it may not have played well with the…
drorzel | January 23, 2015So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular set of skills into this, and did an experiment.
[UPDATE: I've added some follow-up/concluding remarks in a separate post from Sunday 1/25. So, if you care about my reaction to Belichick's big press conference, go over there.]
You can see the basic set-up at the link-- I got a couple of footballs from…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of the cool things about working at Union is that the Communications office gets media requests looking for people to comment on current events, which sometimes get forwarded to me. Yesterday was one of those days, with a request for a scientist to comment on the bizarre sports scandal surrounding the deflated footballs used in the AFC Championship game this past weekend. Which led to me doing an experiment, and writing a short article for The Conversation:
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a Seek Thermal camera to use with my Android phone. This allows for a lot of idle physics-y fun, taking pictures of things in thermal mode.
One idea I had was to do a sort of follow-up to the test of my insulated mug that I did a couple of years ago with a PASCO thermocouple probe. That showed a really dramatic difference between my metal IQC water bottle and the insulated mug, in terms of the rate at which hot water placed in each cooled. So, how do these look in thermal imaging?
Well, I took my insulated mug (actually a different one than…
drorzel | December 26, 2014One of my Christmas gifts this year was a Seek Thermal camera, so I can continue my transformation into Rhett Allain. What's this for? Why, physics, of course. Such as this video of the operation of the Christmas pyramid my parents picked up in Germany, and had set up at the start of Christmas dinner:
Sadly, the Seek Thermal app doesn't seem to record audio with the video, so you miss out on SteelyKid's running commentary about the whole thing... But you can fairly clearly see the plumes of hot air rising up from the candle to push the vanes of the fan. There's probably a way to estimate the…
drorzel | November 6, 2014I'm teaching relativity in a course with an astronomy prefix, which means I'm obliged to talk about stars and stuff. Yesterday's lecture was about neutron stars, and how their existence was confirmed by the discovery of pulsars (with the story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell included). This requires some discussion of angular momentum to explain how something that big ends up spinning that fast (cribbing a bit from these online notes), so I needed a good demonstration of angular momentum. Which is when I remembered this 2013 post with SteelyKid on the playground, where I estimated the mass of the…
drorzel | October 14, 2014It's baseball playoff time, so sport shows are full of one of the great mysteries of the season, exemplified by this .gif (from SBNation):
Raul Ibanez hitting a game-winning home run. GIF from SBNation.
No, not "Raul Ibanez, really?" but "How can he make the ball go that far?" After all, even very good outfielders are lucky to reach home plate with a throw from the warning track. Not even the hardest-throwing pitcher could stand at home plate and throw the ball into the second deck of a baseball stadium. Yet it's not uncommon for the ball to end up there after being hit by a bat. So, how…
drorzel | July 22, 2014In which our hangout turns nineteen; we may need to look into a special guest for the 20th, or something. Or maybe save guest stars for the one after that, when it can drink.
Anyway, Rhett and I chat about grading, lab reports, why Excel sucks, and an online experiment that we really ought to do if we only had the time.
Some links:
-- Why Does Excel Suck So Much?, and "Line Plot" is Never the Right Choice. Perennial favorites on the blog.
-- How Do I Kill the Squirrels Who Are Eating My Car?, another constant source of a small amount of traffic.
-- Rhett's elevator video post.
-- My soccer…
drorzel | July 18, 2014As noted last week, I went to SteelyKid's day camp on Tuesday to talk about being a college professor. This was a little awkward, because I was scheduled to talk to kids ranging from not-quite-three to six-and-a-bit, and really, what do they care about the daily routine of physics faculty?
So, I did a simple demo. While I got a lot of really interesting suggestions in the comments to last week's post, most of them required more props than I wanted to drag with me. And for that age, simple is often enough. So, I just did the tennis-ball-on-a-soccer-ball trick. For the benefit of readers who…
drorzel | July 11, 2014We got an email from the people running SteelyKid's summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said "Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author." They said "Great, you'll be talking to several groups, ranging from second-graders down to 3-4 year olds."
That's... not quite the audience I was expecting (the camp runs up through 5th grade or so). I don't think they're going to care all that much about physics research, so instead, I'll probably say "My job is to teach people about science" and…
drorzel | June 24, 2014A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them," and then basically forgot about it until last week, when I said "Oh, crap, I have to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for 60 seven-year-olds on Monday!"
Fortunately, our students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are awesome, and I was able to round up a handful of helpers from the summer…
drorzel | June 2, 2014I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post.
Kate's a big listener of audiobooks and podcasts, including The Naked Scientists podcast, and she mentioned something they said in responding to a question about charging phones and the cost of electricity:
I think my favourite one is a microwave oven. So, the clock on a microwave oven uses more electricity over the…
drorzel | May 28, 2014A little while back, I was put in touch with a Wall Street Journal writer who was looking into a new-ish health fad called "earthing," which involves people sleeping on special grounded mats and that sort of thing. The basis of this particular bit of quackery is the notion that spending time indoors, out of contact with the ground, allows us to pick up a net positive charge relative to the Earth, and this has negative health consequences. Walking barefoot on the ground, or sleeping on a pad that is electrically connected to ground via your house's wiring, allows you to replace your lost…
drorzel | May 9, 2014Last weekend, the circus came to town, and Grandma and Grandpa came up to help us take the kids. We took SteelyKid a couple of years ago, and figured The Pip was old enough to go this time, too. Having bought tickets a couple of years ago, I got sent a pre-sale offer link, and followed that to get tickets in the front center section.
What I didn't realize was that these put us in the "Circus Celebrity" section-- when the show started, they came and gave us these ribbon things to wear, and a bit before the intermission some of the performers came over to our section, and led us out to the…
drorzel | April 29, 2014Before going to the playground Saturday to investigate non-intertial frames, SteelyKid and I went over to campus to do some experiments in relativity. Galileian relativity, that is:
What you see here is SteelyKid sitting on a rolling lab cart with a camera bolted to it. She throws a ball up in the air a couple of times with the cart at rest, then I start pushing it across the room, and she tosses the ball a few more times. You can see from the video that, other than the motion of the background, the two cases look very similar.
This is a demonstration of the principle of relativity, which…
drorzel | April 28, 2014The Schenectady JCC, where SteelyKid and The Pip go to day care, has a playground with a merry-go-round on it. How this hasn't been sued out of existence, I have no idea, but it's a great boon to a physics professor. I've used it before to talk about angular momentum, but this weekend I enlisted SteelyKid's help to make a video illustrating a different sort of physics with the merry-go-round, a camera, and a tennis ball:
As you can see in the video, when the merry-go-round isn't moving, the ball rolls straight, but when it's spinning, the ball follows a curved path. This is a striking…
drorzel | April 17, 2014As I've mentioned here before, I do a lot of work these days in my local Starbucks. This is slightly ironic, as I don't like coffee-- instead, I order tea, which I put in an insulated travel mug. I tend to get the tea, carry the mug back to the table, and let it steep while I boot up the laptop, then pull the teabags out. I get a hot water refill after I finish the first mug, and take it over to campus if I'm going in that day, and those generally carries me through the morning.
At some point, I noticed that when I had the cap on, I tended to end up with a small puddle of liquid next to the…