December 21, 2011
Molly Grades the Charts: The Top Ten of 2011 - Hollywood Prospectus Blog
A Grantlad writer's personal top ten songs out of Billboard's top 100 for the year. Notable primarily because I only recognize one of the ten songs.
Our favourite pictures of 2011 - physicsworld.com
Much as we enjoy…
December 20, 2011
Over at Backreaction, Bee is running an advent calendar of her own, with amusing anecdotes about famous physicists. Apparently, it's a good year for advent calendars.
A couple of days ago, her story was a famous one about Heisenberg nearly failing to get his Ph.D. because he disdained experiment:…
December 20, 2011
Yesterday's equation was the first real result of quantum theory, Max Planck's formula for the black-body spectrum. Planck never really liked the quantum basis of it, though, and preferred to think of it as just a calculational trick. It wasn't until 1905 that anybody took the idea really seriously…
December 20, 2011
Charles P. Pierce on the religion of Tim Tebow - Grantland
If we're going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let's have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn't get…
December 19, 2011
Moving along in our countdown to Newton's birthday, we come to 1900, and one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics, represented in today's equation:
This is Max Planck's formula for the spectrum of the "black-body" radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T. It's also…
December 19, 2011
Fun games for science-y kids. | Doing Good Science, Scientific American Blog Network
Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games, in general, tend to be brain-…
December 18, 2011
As I said yesterday, I'm going to blow through another entire subfield of physics in a single equation, as our march toward Newton's Birthday continues. Today, it's statistical mechanics, a very rich field of study that we're boiling down to a single equation:
This is Boltzmann's formula for the…
December 17, 2011
Once again, the advent calendar is delayed until late at night by a busy day with SteelyKid-- soccer in the morning, playing with a trebuchet after lunch, then Arthur Christmas at the Colonie mall. We're running low on days to honor great milestones in physics, though, so I don't want to skip a day…
December 16, 2011
To end this week, we wrap up electricity and magnetism with the fourth and final of Maxwell's equations. this one includes Maxwell's own personal contribution to these:
This is sort of the mirror image of Faraday's Law from yesterday, with the curl of the magnetic field on the left, and stuff…
December 16, 2011
Physics World has released its list of the top ten breakthroughs in physics for the year, and it doesn't include either fast neutrinos or the Higgs boson:
The two physics stories that dominated the news in 2011 were questions rather than solid scientific results, namely "Do neutrinos travel faster…
December 16, 2011
Mellowmas | Popdose
Your go-to guys for Christmas songs that DO suck...
The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists : Monkey See : NPR
7. The Self-Punisher. "I always hate your tastes, so I knew this would be a miserable and useless list before I decided to click…
December 15, 2011
We got a good group photo this week, showing everybody, with Appa for scale, even:
Here, SteelyKid is opening a bag of small presents that Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan sent, while the Pip engages in the traditional five-week-old-infant pursuit of sleeping a whole lot.
When she's not opening early…
December 15, 2011
Moving along through our countdown to Newton's birthday, we have an equation that combines two other titans of British science:
This is the third of Maxwell's equations (named after the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell), but it originates with Michael Faraday, one of the greatest…
December 15, 2011
A Muscular Empathy - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen…
December 14, 2011
A predictably stupid discussion of this xkcd cartoon in a place I can't link to reminded me that I haven't posted the list of Christmas songs that don't suck yet this year. This has expanded somewhat since last year, thanks to some recommendations from readers, so it's worth posting again to see if…
December 14, 2011
As we march on toward Newton's birthday, we come to the second of Maxwell's famous equations, which is Gauss's Law applied to magnetic fields:
For once, this is pretty much as simple as it looks. The divergence of the magnetic field is zero, full stop. As I said yesterday (albeit using the wrong…
December 14, 2011
Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize:
A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The…
December 14, 2011
How to Rescue Education Reform - NYTimes.com
We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while…
December 13, 2011
I was planning to let today's Higgs press conference pass with only a few oblique mentions in posts about other things, but apparently, I would lose my license to blog about physics if I did that. You'd think that, being married to a lawyer, and all, I'd know to read the fine print in these things…
December 13, 2011
And what happened then?
Well, in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day.
And then the true meaning
Of Christmas came through
And the Grinch found the strength
Of ten Grinches, plus two
-- Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It's nearly Christmas, so…
December 13, 2011
As the advent calendar moves into the E&M portion of the season, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. I could go with fairly specific formulae for various aspects, but that would take a while and might close out some other areas of physics. In the end, all of classical E&M…
December 12, 2011
Having covered most of what you need to know about classical physics, the traditional next step is to talk about electricity and magnetism, colloquially known as "E&M," though really, "E and B" would be more appropriate, as the fundamental quantities discussed are the electric field (symbol: E…
December 12, 2011
We kicked off our countdown to Newton's birthday with his equations of motion, so it seems fitting to close out the section on classical mechanics with another of Newton's equations, this time the Law of Universal Gravitation:
Like all the other equations to this point, I'm cribbing this from the…
December 11, 2011
Tom Stites: Taking stock of the state of web journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab
The buzz about how bloggers and citizen journalists will save the day, once almost deafening, has died down to a murmur, although the buzz about Twitter, Facebook, and cellphone video cameras saving the day has picked…
December 10, 2011
Today's advent calendar post was delayed by severe online retail issues last night and child care today, but I didn't want to let the day pass completely without physics, so here's the next equation in our countdown to Newton's birthday:
This is the final piece of the story of angular momentum,…
December 9, 2011
Three quick items relating to science in book form:
1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in…
December 9, 2011
Now that we've defined angular momentum, the next equation on our countdown to Newton's birthday tells us what to do with it:
This is the Angular Momentum Principle, and as with energy and momentum before it, this relates the time derivative of the angular momentum (that is, how quickly it's…
December 9, 2011
Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is…
December 8, 2011
The Pip turned one month old yesterday, so to celebrate, here's a picture of the whole family:
OK, it's not a photograph, but look! SteelyKid drew that all by herself! (The labels on the drawing were done by one of her preschool teachers; the printed text was added by me when I obscured the given…
December 8, 2011
Catching Up To the Future: An Appreciation of William Gibson | Tor.com
William Gibson is one of those writers whose name is in the process of becoming an adjective--consider Kafkaesque, Ballardian, Pynchonesque: words for which the meaning has become osmotically absorbed even by people who haven't…
