Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
I followed up my ranty-y post about “Sports Science” with an experimental investigation over at Forbes, tossing a football around on the deck out back and then doing video analysis of the bounces. This provided a wealth of data, much of it not really appropriate for over there, but good for a physics post or […]
Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this “Sports Science” clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I’ve been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett’s just working on a “misery loves company” theory, here: […]
I’ve known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I’ll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on “The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning”: You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run […]
A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid’s toy Newton’s cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video: I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn’t have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, […]
I’ve been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people: — I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about “radionics” and “wishing boxes,” a […]
I got off on a bit of a rant the other day about bad defenses of “the humanities,” but there’s a bright side. It finally got me to write my own, over at Forbes, which is basically the last piece of a tetralogy of advice for students: — Why small colleges are a great place […]
Somebody in my social media feeds passed along a link to this interview with Berkeley professor Daniel Boyarin about “the humanities,” at NPR’s science-y blog. This is, of course, relevant to my interests, but sadly, but while it’s a short piece, it contains a lot to hate. For one thing, after the dismissive one-two of […]
A few years back, I did a couple of posts on the physics of a sad balloon (that is, a helium balloon that can no longer lift itself up to the ceiling), the first on simple buoyancy, the second on how long it takes for the helium to leak out. These were based on only […]
For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here’s a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something: OK, this needs some explanation… So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either […]
Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went […]