And what happened then? Well, in Who-ville they say That the Grinch’s small heart Grew three sizes that day. And then the true meaning Of Christmas came through And the Grinch found the strength Of ten Grinches, plus two — Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas It’s nearly Christmas, so SteelyKid keeps demanding to […]
Month: December 2011
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
As the advent calendar moves into the E&M portion of the season, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. I could go with fairly specific formulae for various aspects, but that would take a while and might close out some other areas of physics. In the end, all of classical E&M comes […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: E and B
Having covered most of what you need to know about classical physics, the traditional next step is to talk about electricity and magnetism, colloquially known as “E&M,” though really, “E and B” would be more appropriate, as the fundamental quantities discussed are the electric field (symbol: E) and the magnetic field (symbol: B), whose effect […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton’s Gravity
We kicked off our countdown to Newton’s birthday with his equations of motion, so it seems fitting to close out the section on classical mechanics with another of Newton’s equations, this time the Law of Universal Gravitation: Like all the other equations to this point, I’m cribbing this from the formula sheet for my just-completed […]
Links for 2011-12-11
Tom Stites: Taking stock of the state of web journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab The buzz about how bloggers and citizen journalists will save the day, once almost deafening, has died down to a murmur, although the buzz about Twitter, Facebook, and cellphone video cameras saving the day has picked up thanks to their powerful […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Torque
Today’s advent calendar post was delayed by severe online retail issues last night and child care today, but I didn’t want to let the day pass completely without physics, so here’s the next equation in our countdown to Newton’s birthday: This is the final piece of the story of angular momentum, the undefined symbol from […]
Superlative Science Books
Three quick items relating to science in book form: 1) It’s that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a “Year’s Best {Noun}” list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don’t have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Angular Momentum
Now that we’ve defined angular momentum, the next equation on our countdown to Newton’s birthday tells us what to do with it: This is the Angular Momentum Principle, and as with energy and momentum before it, this relates the time derivative of the angular momentum (that is, how quickly it’s changing its value) to a […]
Links for 2011-12-09
Print – What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 – Popular Mechanics Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit […]
Thursday Family Picture Blogging
The Pip turned one month old yesterday, so to celebrate, here’s a picture of the whole family: OK, it’s not a photograph, but look! SteelyKid drew that all by herself! (The labels on the drawing were done by one of her preschool teachers; the printed text was added by me when I obscured the given […]