For reasons that don’t really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica: On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and… Continue reading Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
Category: Physics
Three Quarks Voting, X-Change Files
Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category: 1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it’s a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you’re looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries. Once you’re done reading them, go vote for your favorite. The… Continue reading Three Quarks Voting, X-Change Files
Nobody Expects the Vector Product
Today is the first day of the last week of class, hallelujah. Unfortunately, it’s also the first class on rotational motion and angular momentum. This is unfortunate because it’s the hardest material in the course– angular momentum doesn’t behave in as intuitive a manner as linear momentum, and the math involved is the most complicated… Continue reading Nobody Expects the Vector Product
Mysteries of the Stock Room
Why do we have two meter sticks taped together back to back? What is the dark stain obscuring the markings between 30 and 70 cm on half of the meter sticks? Where the hell are all the stopwatches? Why are the demo magnets sticky? Why do we still have six meters worth of a rusting,… Continue reading Mysteries of the Stock Room
Dorky Poll: Conservation
We’re having some technical difficulties on the ScienceBlogs back end, so this may be futile, but I’ve got a 9am lab class, so here’s a Dorky Poll in hopes that the comments will work well enough to be entertaining. Today’s lab is the “ballistic pendulum,” in which students use conservation of energy and conservation of… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Conservation
Projectile Motion, Uncertainty, and a Question of Ethics
We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We’ve switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there’s no longer room for the “target shooting” lab. It’s called that because the culmination of the lab used… Continue reading Projectile Motion, Uncertainty, and a Question of Ethics
DAMOP Day 3-3.5
Friday morning at DAMOP was probably the thinnest part of the program, at least for me. Annoyingly, this was the day that my cold (or possibly allergies– whatever it was that had my head full of goo) let go, so I was the most awake and alert I managed for the entire conference. I watched… Continue reading DAMOP Day 3-3.5
Schrödinger’s Dog: The Movie
The release date for the forthcoming How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is December 22, seven months from today, and I got a look at some sample pages yesterday, so things are moving right along. To mark the occasion, and give you something to entertain you while I’m spending another day at DAMOP, I… Continue reading Schrödinger’s Dog: The Movie
DAMOP Day Two
Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though. The early-morning session was the toughest call of… Continue reading DAMOP Day Two
DAMOP Day One
Technically, the meeting started Tuesday, but all that happened was a welcome reception, which I missed due to travel. The real beginning of the meeting was Wednesday morning, with the traditional unscheduled half-hour welcome from local dignitaries. That was followed by the Prize Session, featuring the frighteningly smart Misha Lukin, who was awarded the I.I.… Continue reading DAMOP Day One