Forbes Recap
drorzel | January 14, 2016It's been a disgracefully long time since I did a links post covering what I've been posting over at Forbes. In my defense, December was a complete mess of a month...
Anyway, here's a great big bunch of stuff:
-- Football Physics: Can We Do Better Than Tossing Coins? In which I try to ease the sting of a bad overtime loss for my Giants by writing about the physics of generating random numbers.
-- How Big Is the Moon? Understanding Camera Lenses: Talking about angular size and resolution based on photos of my back yard.
-- Holiday Gift Physics: The Flying Turtle Scooter: SteelyKid has one of…
drorzel | December 2, 2015A longer-than-usual gap between recap posts, but thanks to some kid illnesses and the Thanksgiving holiday, not all that many new physics posts over at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Checking The Odds On Wild Bounces: A backyard experiment to see how often a bouncing football takes a big hop. Follows from this rant and prompted this post on rotation.
-- Physics Demands Many Kinds Of Literacy: Some musings about the many different ways physicists process information, prompted by graphs generated for the previous item.
-- Football Physics: How Would Changing The Laws Of Physics Change Football?:…
drorzel | November 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of physics-y posts over at Forbes:
-- Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature: My big defense of "the humanities," explaining why those subjects are worth studying even if you plan to go into a STEM field instead. I'm very happy with how this came out.
-- Baseball Physics: How Batters Beat The Best Computers: In honor of the World Series. "How" here means "look, they do this"-- I don't have a detailed explanation of the mechanics that make it all work.
-- Football Physics (With Bonus Rugby): The Physics Of Bouncing Balls: Mostly about a really cool try in the…
drorzel | October 27, 2015I was out of town last week, and doing talk prep leading up to that, so it's been a little while since my last collection of Forbes links. Here's the latest from over there:
-- Football Physics: The Forces Behind Those Big Hits: A look at force, momentum, and acceleration in tackling.
-- The Science Of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: What Is Quantum Harmonic Oscillation? A question on Twitter provides an excuse to use some video of The Pip bouncing on playground equipment to discuss the physics of the harmonic oscillator in both classical and quantum forms.
-- The Science Of Alternate Worlds: The…
drorzel | October 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.
-- The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.
-- How NASA's Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental…
drorzel | September 25, 2015Another collection of posts over at my blog for Forbes:
-- Wormholes, Monopoles, And Weyl Fermions: Making Exotic Physics Inside Ordinary Matter: A sort of deep background look at what makes condensed matter cool. Drawing heavily on Jimmy Williams's talk at the Schrodinger Sessions.
-- Why Does My Car Change Color In The Morning?: SteelyKid pointed out that my car appeared paler than normal in the morning, and explaining why suggested a quick optical physics post.
-- Football Physics: Nobody Catches The Ball At Its Highest Point: My Giants frittered away a lead against the Falcons over the…
drorzel | September 14, 2015I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I've been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it's been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
--Physics: Complicating Everything Since The 1600's: A look at the subtle and picky issues that need to be addressed before you can claim to have definitively tested something in physics.
--A Qualified Defense Of "Science Literacy": A bunch of people on blogs and Twitter were hating on the science…
drorzel | August 28, 2015I seem to be settling into a groove of doing about two posts a week at Forbes, which isn't quite enough to justify a weekly wrap-up, but works well bi-weekly. (I'm pretty sure that's the one that means "every two weeks" not "twice a week," but I always struggle with that one...) Over the last couple of weeks, I've hit a wide range of stuff:
-- Planning To Study Science In College? Here's Some Advice Pretty much what it says on the label. I saw a bunch of "advice to new students" posts, and said "Oh, I should do one of those..." so I did.
-- The Physics of Star Trek: Teleportation Versus…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
drorzel | July 10, 2015The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
-- The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology that can be used to make people see colors.
-- Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: An update of an old post here, Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics. You can see from the titles that, in the intervening five-and-a-half years, I've managed to simplify quantum mechanics by…
drorzel | July 3, 2015Another busy week of physics-y blogging over at Forbes. I'm pretty bad about remembering to post pointers to individual posts here, but I can probably just about manage to do a weekly links dump of what I've been posting.
-- What's The Point Of Science Without "Eureka!" Moments? Picking up on a conversation I had at Convergence, about whether there's any point in doing experiments whose outcome won't be a surprise.
-- Should We Have An Institute For Low-Energy Fundamental Physics Picking up a bit from one of the Convergence talks, where Savas Dimopoulos suggested forming an institute to…