One of the labs we do in the introductory E&M class I’m teaching this term involves investigating charged particles with sticky tape. If you haven’t seen it before, “invisible” tape picks up an electric charge when it’s peeled off a surface quickly, and with a little care, you can create both positively and negatively charged… Continue reading Charged Tape, Toy Models, and Dimensionless Parameters
Category: Science
Niskayuna by Fermi
The other morning, I was lying in bed and for some reason, found myself wondering what the population of Niskayuna is. While this is easily Google-able, as I said, I was in bed, and didn’t want to get up to get a device with Internet connectivity. So I tried to Fermi-problem my way to an… Continue reading Niskayuna by Fermi
Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton’s anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn’t really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in… Continue reading Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
Miscellaneous Liberal Education Stuff
The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven’t really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I’m going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post. –A few people, mostly in places that aren’t conducive… Continue reading Miscellaneous Liberal Education Stuff
What I Learned From the Liberal Arts
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a “poetry for physicists” kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of “crisis in… Continue reading What I Learned From the Liberal Arts
On the Checking of Boxes
One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren’t like I was at that age. What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn’t need to be convinced of… Continue reading On the Checking of Boxes
Physics of Snow Photo Contest
A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid’s playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays. Anyway, the next time I’m likely to have the free time to… Continue reading Physics of Snow Photo Contest
Replacing Gravity
I’m teaching introductory E&M this term, so it’s kind of fun to play around with silly applications of Coulomb’s Law. For example, let’s imagine that gravity suddenly switched off, but we wanted to keep the Earth in its orbit. How much charge would we need to move from the Earth to the Sun for the… Continue reading Replacing Gravity
Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments
Classes for the Winter term start today, and I’m totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn’t thrown anything into disarray. Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I’ve ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I’m stuck being… Continue reading Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments
Physics with the Kids at 120 Frames a Second
I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there’s anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo! To break it in, I got the kids to help out by… Continue reading Physics with the Kids at 120 Frames a Second