Built on Facts
Less Than Absolute Zero
Posted by Matt Springer on January 8, 2013 I’m sitting in a hotel in Utah at the PQE 2013 conference. As I write this, the temperature is a rather brisk 19F. (For everyone else in the world, -7.2C) That’s not cold at all to some of you, but some of you didn’t grow up in south Louisiana. Either way, on the Kelvin scale…
The Thermodynamic Argument For Fad Diets
Posted by Matt Springer on January 3, 2013 Why calories can be complicated.
The Shadow Knows
Posted by Matt Springer on December 18, 2012 On shadows, when they work, and when they don’t.
Against the gun control that won’t work
Posted by Matt Springer on December 17, 2012 The shootings in Connecticut are a monstrous act of incomprehensible horror. For all the atrocities visited upon the world in the last hundred years, this is still without doubt among the most appallingly evil acts ever performed by a single person. And he is dead, and beyond the reach of human justice. Normally I’d wait…
Interference – on the moon!
Posted by Matt Springer on December 12, 2012 Wow, lots of moon posts these days. This one is going to talk about a question left by commenter ppnl a couple posts back: ppnl: So could you use a pair of one meter telescopes a kilometer apart to create a point of constructive interference on the moon as small as what would have been…
Cobra Commander & Blowing Up the Moon!
Posted by Matt Springer on December 3, 2012 This wonderful headline showed up in my Facebook feed: U.S. ‘planned to blow up Moon’ with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might. This was a bit eyebrow-raising. Dr. Strangelove was a slightly unfair caricature, but the Cold War really did have a better-than-average share of nuttiness. Still – blowing up the moon?…
How to keep a laser beam small.
Posted by Matt Springer on November 26, 2012 My post about seeing a laser from the moon mentioned the fact that the beam from a laser spreads as it propagates. We’re used to seeing this from a flashlight – the beam from a flashlight across a room is much smaller than the beam from a flashlight across an open field. Lasers spread too,…
Whatever Nate Silver Does, Isn’t Science
Posted by Matt Springer on November 7, 2012 If you’re one of the probably four people who haven’t heard about Nate Silver, you’ve missed out. He’s a statistics guy who runs the always interesting 538 Blog at the New York Times. He made his name in baseball statistics, Moneyball style, and moved into politics where he made state-by-state statistical forecasts of the last…
Seeing a laser from the moon
Posted by Matt Springer on October 30, 2012 There was an xkcd feature a while back which asked the question “If everyone in the world shined a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would we be able to see it?” The answer was no. A laser pointer doesn’t put out much light, and even seven billion of them doesn’t represent…
Why didn’t Baumgartner burn up on re-entry?
Posted by Matt Springer on October 16, 2012 By now everyone’s heard of Felix Baumgartner and his record-breaking leap out of a balloon some 24 miles over the New Mexico desert. While the “official” definition of outer space is generally considered to start at either 60 miles or 100 kilometers, Felix’s leap of some 39,045 meters is in many respect a drop from…