Today’s lecture in intro mechanics is a whirlwind survey of vectors. While I struggle to clear my head enough to be able to teach this stuff, here’s a Dorky Poll to pass the time: What’s your favorite three-dimensional coordinate system?(survey) This is a strictly classical subject, so please choose only one.
Category: Physics
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
Not a whole lot new, but it’s been a few days. Also, it’s a challenge to remain ambulatory at the moment, thanks to this cursed cold, so I’m not really prepared to turn out Significant Blogging. — This morning’s vanity search (why yes, I am searching for “How to Teach Physics to Your Dog” on… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
Controlling Light With Light
“Slow light” is in the news again. The popular descriptions of the process usually leave a lot to be desired, so let’s see if we can’t do a slightly better job of explaining what’s going on. The key idea is using one light beam to control the transmission of another. Let’s say you have a… Continue reading Controlling Light With Light
A Tale of Two Turbos
I spent most of Saturday in the lab, swapping out a turbopump that was starting to die. How could I tell? Well, for one thing, it made an awful noise, even more than usual for a noisy pump. But after it was stopped and unmounted from the chamber, there was a simple test: comparing the… Continue reading A Tale of Two Turbos
A Stainless Steel Baby Bottle
Let’s say you have some liquid that you want to contain without leaks, say, milk for a baby. What do you do? Well, you put it in something like a baby bottle, the components of which are shown here: You have a hard plastic bottle, a soft silicone nipple, and a hard plastic ring that… Continue reading A Stainless Steel Baby Bottle
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
Today is the first day of classes, and to celebrate, I’ve come down with the Martian death virus that Kate and SteelyKid have had the last few weeks. Joy. This calls for a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog update, to distract myself from the cotton balls and vacuum pump oil that have apparently… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series
Over at Faraday’s Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post: A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the frequencies of… Continue reading Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series
How to Teach Psychics Physics to Your Dog
In talking to a reporter about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on Wednesday, I learned of a mistake in the text of the book– a footnote on page 71 says that Scientific American published an article on how to make your own “quantum eraser” in April 2007, when in fact it was May… Continue reading How to Teach Psychics Physics to Your Dog
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update and Miscellany
There isn’t all that much news for a real obsessive update, so I’ll lump in a few writing-related items of possible interest to people who read books other than mine. A real obsessive update item: BradDeLong doubts my book can help his dog. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog gets four out of five… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update and Miscellany
Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?
A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though: Currently the plan is to ask the “heaviest user institutions” (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ… Continue reading Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?