Now on ScienceBlogs: Book Review: Don't be SUCH a Scientist
An exploration of physics and the quest to understand our world.
Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
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August 31, 2009
Category: Intro Physics
This guy is Allo Diavolo: He was a circus daredevil. At the dawn of the 20th century he worked on a number of stunts dressed in his ominous horned outfit. These days a lot of people, including me, have heard...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 30, 2009
Category: Sunday Function
I think we've developed a nice theme over the last few weeks, gradually working our way through a less well-behaved function - the triangle wave - and trying to find various series expansions for it. "Well-behaved" is kind of a...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 28, 2009
We've seen that it's pretty easy to determine your latitude using the sun as a reference point. All you need is a shadow and chart that was easily available to sailors of previous centuries and you're set. Finding your longitude...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:21 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 27, 2009
Holy moly, if you want to see a great post you should read Ethan's post on the solar analemma. If you photograph the sun in the sky at the same time each day, it won't be in the same spot....
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 26, 2009
Not much meat here at the Built on Facts table today. Our research group is embarking on a new project with the Office of Naval Research, and today was the official all-day meeting with the officer in charge of coordinating...
Posted by Matt Springer at 4:23 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 25, 2009
Category: Sunday Function
Sorry for the two-day delay. The personal business to which I alluded kept me out until yesterday morning, delaying this post until today. I hope it's decent for all that! This week, the same function as last week. There's nothing...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2009
In the last post I made an offhand mention of wave dispersion, which is the phenomena of different wavelengths propagating a different speed. In general this does exactly what it sounds like it should. It disperses the light. If you...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 19, 2009
All right, the answer to yesterday's question about the maximum speed of a stadium wave, as many commenters rightly said, is "as fast as you want." The comments went into some depth on this, and I like the way Zifnab...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 17, 2009
The wave. We've talked about it before. It's where people in a stadium stand up and sit down in sequence so that a wave of standing people travels around the circumference of the stands. They have a typical speed of...
Posted by Matt Springer at 11:29 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Let's say there's an interesting but somewhat obscure book I'm interested in. Say, Electromagnetic Pulse Propagation in Causal Dielectrics. It's a very technical work about a very specific subject, so the total print run was probably very small. Maybe a...
Posted by Matt Springer at 11:55 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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