December 2, 2008
If you go to Capital One's website and type in the appropriate login information, you'll see a "Welcome Matthew Springer" message and two accounts. One's a checking account and one's a money market account where I'm endeavoring to accumulate some savings. (I need to get that moved to a CD or…
December 1, 2008
Well, my Thanksgiving posting break lasted longer than I thought. Real life is a more fun place than the internet though, and I hope you were having lots of fun and food and were not on the internet to notice my absence.
Among the things I did this Thanksgiving was watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along…
November 26, 2008
Ok, ok, I admit there's post-1900 classical that I really like. Copland and Gershwin in particular were mentioned by a number of people, and both are great. I made my first acquaintance with Copland when I was a little kid watching a NASA documentary, and in the background of some dramatic launch…
November 25, 2008
I'm on the road today and so can't write up an extensive post. So for today, I leave you with a picture from physics history: the 1927 Solvay conference. It proved that there's no critical mass for genius. If there were, this gathering would have exploded. A large fraction of my "Greatest…
November 24, 2008
Classical is how you look at it. To most people, classical music is whatever happens to be written before about 1900 that you hear played in orchestra halls and NPR. To classical fans, there's more nuance involved. More ambiguity, too.
"Classical music" is generally divided into about four eras…
November 23, 2008
This function is a two-dimensional one. It's radially symmetric however, so we can specify it with only one coordinate - the distance from the origin r. It's the two-dimensional Gaussian function, and it looks like this:
As r increases, -r^2 very quickly becomes a large negative number. The…
November 22, 2008
Take a look at the opening paragraph of this great AFP article:
It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
I'm sorry, did I say great? I meant awful.…
November 21, 2008
Another former astronaut, one of the few in the extremely exclusive club of men who've walked the lunar surface, is advocating a human return.
There's not many people who'd like to see such a thing more than me. Officially it's NASA policy to get us back to the moon by... lessee, 2020 I believe is…
November 20, 2008
One of the last things we cover in Physics 201 is heat. You all know what heat is: the atoms in a substance jiggle around or fly around freely if the substance happens to be a gas. Like all moving massive objects, these atoms have a certain kinetic energy. Now the problem is that they're all…
November 19, 2008
#3 - James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell is my favorite physicist. This site takes its name from a wise thing he once said: "In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data." For all the…
November 18, 2008
A question before the physics: I hear Hillary Clinton is being considered for a position as Secretary of State. Let's say this is true. Why would a senator want to take that job? It's a temporary position. Eight years max, not much longer than a single term in the senate. Four years if the…
November 17, 2008
Here, straight from the Wikipedia article, is a lovely picture of a basketball in a free-flight trajectory.
You probably expect a parabolic trajectory, and we do get pretty close. There are some deviations. The resistance of the atmosphere is the largest, and the rotation of the ball will…
November 16, 2008
Here's sin(x).
What, you don't believe me? Ok, ok, I'm leaving something out. Let's do some background before I tell you what it is.
The first thing we need is the incredibly interesting and important Euler's formula. It's the key that relates the exponential and trigonometric functions. We…
November 15, 2008
So what would the elementary quantum of solace be? The soliton? I haven't actually seen Quantum of Solace yet, but I'm going to make a point to go at some time this week. The last Bond flick was great, and I have high hopes for this one. Most sequels don't quite live up to their predecessors,…
November 14, 2008
I thought about linking this Forbes article on the economic situation simply because it's interesting. What actually made me link it was the sentence at the end:
And reality tells us that we barely avoided, only a week ago, a total systemic financial meltdown; that the policy actions are now…
November 13, 2008
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
- S. Holmes
Built on Facts is going on a brief (2 day) semi-hiatus as I've got a classical mechanics exam this Friday. It's not a total break though. The posts will be there, but they'll just be short.…
November 12, 2008
Today in my recitation we discussed several problems in acoustics. One of them involved beats. This happens when two tones which are very close in pitch are played at the same time. There's a demonstration on the Wikipedia article. I'll solve the problem here since if it confused people in…
November 11, 2008
Let's say you have a table. This table is better than your average table. It's perfectly level, absolutely flat to within the thickness of an atom over its entire surface. In fact, this table isn't even made of atoms. You called up Plato and ordered the platonic ideal of a flat table.
Now you…
November 10, 2008
There's been an article in the Guardian that's been circulating around various science blogs recently. There's a proposal to make what small autonomous nuclear reactors, install them underground, and let them power local areas.
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20…
November 9, 2008
Math-averse readers! Do not be scared off! You can enjoy this entry even if as far as you're concerned the equations are pretty pictures of Cypriot syllabary.
Not long ago we looked at adding up lots of consecutive integers. Multiplying consecutive integers is also interesting, and not only that…
November 8, 2008
Another grad student potluck today! Not sure what I'm going to make, as I'm writing this yesterday (relative to you reading it on Saturday). Last time I posted my recipe for praline bacon, so continuing the tradition today I'm going to post a cocktail of my own invention:
The Pearl Harbor
1 part…
November 7, 2008
William Gibson revolutionized the world of science fiction with his dark and gritty but somehow impossibly cool cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Dystopias have always been a staple of science fiction, but in this case the dystopia didn't seem too horribly dystopic. Sure some computer might try to…
November 6, 2008
I promise this is not a politics post. It just uses some vote totals for some fun math!
The Minnesota senate race has so far a total of 2,422,811 votes between the two leading candidates. The margin separating them is 477. It's about as close to a 50:50 split as we've seen this cycle. Probably…
November 5, 2008
The following is reprinted verbatim from my old Livejournal. The entry was written January 26, 2007.
In 2000, the news media called the presidential vote in the state of Florida for Gore before the voting had ended. This caused enormous controversy, because both sides claimed that this discouraged…
November 4, 2008
This election day post is going to be continuously updated until the winner becomes more-or-less official. Tomorrow we'll have one more politics post as something of a benediction, and then mercifully back to the physics. Updates will appear at the top of the post, so feel free to refresh…
November 3, 2008
As you might have heard, the presidential election is tomorrow. As I've said, I believe I'm alone on ScienceBlogs as supporting anyone but Obama. But this is Built on Facts, not Built on Wishful Thinking, and so let's have our official quadrennial Election Prediction Contest!
Here's the plan. We…
November 2, 2008
You know about the tangent function, tan(x). If you draw a right triangle, the tangent is the ratio of the two sides which comprise the right angle. If the angle between the long sides and each of the short sides is 45 degrees, then clearly the two short sides have the same length. That means…
November 1, 2008
I wasn't sure I was doing anything for Halloween this year, so I didn't have any costume plans. But then today it turned that in fact I was going to a party, and so I needed a costume with only a few hours notice. The costume stores were completely picked-over. What to do? I put on a suit,…
October 31, 2008
See these guys? They're racewalking. It's like running in that you do it as fast as possible, but you're not allowed to have both feet off the ground at any time. One foot has to be planted on the track at all times. The guy to the far right is slightly cheating - both his feet are off the…
October 30, 2008
So Seed magazine has endorsed Obama. Quelle surprise! I suppose I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me, but of course I'm on record as supporting the "anyone else" ticket. I am under no illusion that it will be anything but a lost cause.
One of the things that leads me to believe this is poll…
