Physics
drorzel | January 17, 2010The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo!
(Now I can shift to fretting that they've got too many in the local stores, and will end up returning most of them...)
Anyway, if you're in the Albany area, and want a copy, they have them in Barnes and Noble now.
Miscellaneous other items:
A nice plug from Derek Lowe
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog catches the eye of another…
drorzel | January 17, 2010A couple of nifty bits of news from the British Commonwealth:
The BBC's Magazine Monitor blog noted my Seed article.
Better yet, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog makes Smriti Daniel's list of "the best books to emerge in 2009" in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. The other books on the list: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, Drood by Dan Simmons, and Unseen Academicals by some guy named Pratchett. That's pretty awesome company to be in...
So…
rallain | January 14, 2010Here is a picture of something you have seen before.
These are two pictures of the same location in my house. The one on the left is taken when the Sun was up outside and the other one when it was dark outside. For both pictures, I had the same lights turned on inside. So, why does it do this? Why can you see stuff outside when it is bright outside, but you don't see a reflection of the stuff outside? Why when it is dark outside, does the opposite happen? You know what I am going to do next, right? Diagram. Here is a diagram for when it is dark outside.
The person can see the blue…
rallain | January 14, 2010If you know me, you know I love Tracker Video Analysis. Basically, it is a free-java program that allows you to get position-time data of a moving object from a video. In Tracker version 3.10, there is now the autotracker feature. This will automagically mark the location of an object moving in a video. How do you use it?
First, the video. This is a video I made of a plane landing at an airport. Not much exciting going on, but that never stopped me before. I put this video on vimeo instead of youtube because vimeo allows you to download the original video.
Landing Airliner from Rhett…
drorzel | January 14, 2010Even when I'm on the road, I continue to be obsessed...
A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy's role in the book:
The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has, or to deal with obvious tangents. It is a very effective tactic and it serves to lighten the prose at strategic times in the discussion. The dog' voice is skeptical, wise, incredulous and smug (and bloodthirsty. Much of the time, the dog is attempting to use physics to hunt down and, one presumes,…
pontiff | January 13, 2010Missed this over the break: a facebook note about the future of funding of the arXiv. The post points to two documents of interest, the first a statement about support:
...We intend to establish a collaborative business model that will engage the institutions that benefit most from arXiv -- academic institutions, research centers and government labs -- by asking them for voluntary contributions.
and also a handy dandy FAQ about the changes.
pontiff | January 13, 2010"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." - E. P. Wigner
Our universe, or at least our understanding of the universe, appears to allow us to see its naked underbelly only through the use of mathematical reasoning. As Wigner says about this state of affairs, we neither understand nor deserve this. On the other hand, I've come to believe, this observation can also be a huge aid in describing the world of theoretical computer science. There is no doubt in most…
rallain | January 13, 2010Check out this picture.
These camera flashes are just awesome (well, they look awesome). They are not a very useful thing for pictures in this case. Here is the problem. Well, first here is what the flash on a camera is supposed to do. Suppose there is a camera and a ball in a dark room. In order to get light to reflect off the ball and be detected by the camera, you need light. The flash is that light. You can think of it like a flashlight that is only on for a moment. It doesn't need to be on for long since it doesn't take very much time to get an image.
Notice that I drew red…
drorzel | January 13, 2010Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin:
While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it's selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay!
Relatedly, the publisher has just ordered a second printing, woo-hoo! I'm not sure what the total number of copies on paper is, but if they've asked for more, that's definitely a good sign.
I have a couple of radio interviews scheduled for next week, which ought to be an adventure. I'm taping an interview with Jim Scott of WLW in…
pontiff | January 12, 2010Richard, a long while back (yes, I'm cleaning my inbox!), sent me some cartoons that were apparently floating around in the 70s when he did his BS in Chemistry that are quite amusing:
drorzel | January 12, 2010I'm standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It's cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to walking the dog in this.
"Pretty cold, dude," she says.
"Yeah," I say. "It's cold, all right."
"You better let me outside," she says, tail wagging. "I'm gonna catch a whole bunch of bunnies!"
"A whole bunch? How do you figure?"
"Well, it's so cold that they'll all be together. You know, like one of those Bozo Condensates."
"Bozo Condensate?" It's too early in…
rallain | January 12, 2010In a MythBusters episode some time ago, Adam and Jamie jumped off a building. There was some cool stuff in this, but I want to focus on the acceleration data they collected. Before jumping into a pit of foam, they first wanted to test the set up by dropping a dummy into it and measuring the accelerations. Lucky for me, they showed a quick screen shot of their data. Note: I previously posted the calculations for jumping and stopping off of a building.
For me, I see this and think - numerical integration. Before that, let me look at the physics. Here is a diagram of someone jumping off a…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold.
The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers)
Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
milhayser | January 10, 2010
It's Friday, time to kick back and let ScienceBlogs do your homework for you. On Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger wonders how outfielders are so good at running to the right spot to catch a fly ball—are they calculating trajectories in their heads, or making optical deductions? To answer this question, researchers put virtual reality helmets on skilled ball players, then made the virtual balls break the laws of physics as the players tried to "catch" them. On Built On Facts, Matt Springer calculates the energy required to raise the mass of the world's tallest building into the sky, all so "…
drorzel | January 9, 2010One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away, we lost those awesome German names. Like, for example, zitterbewegung, a word that just demands an exclamation point: Zitterbewegung!
The phenomenon it describes, ironically, comes out of work by the great English physicist and odd duck Paul Dirac. Dirac's…
esiegel | January 8, 2010The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
-Freeman Dyson
When we look out at our Universe today, we see all sorts of beautiful things throughout space, from galaxies and clusters, distributed roughly evenly throughout space:
to the cosmic microwave background (also known as the last scattering surface), radiating at the same temperature in all directions.
We also see, when we try to measure the shape of the Universe, that there are three major possibilities: it could be flat…
drorzel | January 8, 2010Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, and praising his ability as a receiver. In particular, they heaped praise on his ability to "go up and get the ball at its highest point."
That would be a pretty neat trick, if he could manage it. A football pass spends a second or two in the air-- let's call it two…
drorzel | January 8, 2010Two new links for today's Obsessive Update:
The first is a nice article from Union's press office, with the headline "You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but what about physics?". I spent half an hour or so talking with one of the staff writers (who has a science background, which is a nice bonus) on Wednesday, so it's a fast turnaround, too.
The second is a passing mention in a possibly skeevy Russian site's article about the golden retriever physics video that went around a couple of months ago. Amazing what the vanity search turns up...
The sales rank, for those who care, continues to…
drorzel | January 7, 2010Not much news on the book front this morning-- various promotional things are in progress, including an on-campus thing tomorrow afternoon, but there's nothing new to link to.
We do, however, have the first non-mammal added to the DogPhysics Pet Gallery: a lizard, sent in by Marcella McIntyre. It's not actually a pet, per se, but it's shown reading up on the Uncertainty Principle, so at least it has a healthy curiosity.
If you've got a copy of the book, and you have pets, send a picture of your pet(s) with the book to queen_emmy@steelypips.org, and we'll add it to the Gallery. And if there's…