mspringer | February 9, 2010A while back I mentioned I was starting the project of reading Neal Stephenson's rather lengthy Baroque Cycle. I'm most of the way done with the second book, so we're coming round to the 2000-page mark. It's a brilliant work thus far, though it's very difficult to summarize. The plot is rather, well, baroque. If I had to cram it into one sentence I think it might be "The world undergoes a phase transition from medieval to modern via the development of science and finance."
The series is heavily populated by actual historical people. Among these are the transcendentally brilliant Isaac…
mspringer | February 5, 2010I'm still not happy about NASA scrapping Ares and the manned lunar/Martian plans, but I'm less unhappy than I was. As long as unmanned planetary science picks up most of the slack I'll grudgingly deal with it. The extra earth science is still stupid; if you want more of that, get NSF or NOAA to do it.
Mars exploration has been back in the news recently too, with the Spirit rover finally breaking down and getting stuck in place permanently. This is pretty impressive - it was originally designed to work for 90 days but here it is still functioning 6 years later. Even as a stationary…
mspringer | February 2, 2010Every year there's a Super Bowl, and every year the whole shebang gets started by a famous person tossing a coin into the air. The team winning the toss gets to decide whether they want to begin the game on offense or defense. Theoretically this choice might produce an advantage. If so, would be interesting to know how much. The same thing happens in physics - just how much signal is hidden in the random noise of an experimental apparatus?
Let's take a look at the numbers and try to see what kind of advantage the toss-winning team has. The data is pretty straightforward - in 43 coin…
mspringer | February 1, 2010Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Get your ticket to see the True Oddities of the Natural World! Do not be taken in by the Shameful Forgeries at Inferior Circuses, here you will see Genuine Curiosities from the Mists of Time! Beside these Archaic Functions, the Two-Headed Horse or Whatever is a Mere Bagatelle!
So, why do we bother having a sine and a cosine? They're the same thing, one just happens to be shifted. Whatever angle you plug into cosine, you'll get the same result if you plug that angle plus 90 degrees into the sine. Why not just scrap one of them entirely and just teach…
mspringer | January 29, 2010I believe we have a Super Bowl coming up. Or, if the NFL is so picky about the use of their trademarks, I believe we have a "Big Game" coming up. As a native south Louisianian, I'm for the eternally long-suffering Saints, who in all their years have never even been to a Super Bowl. That hypothetical situation was really a part of New Orleans culture - instead of "when hell freezes over" it was always "when the Saints win the Super Bowl". Maybe they'll finally do it. I'm not holding my breath, but honestly New Orleans is pretty much crazy with joy that they actually made it to the game…
mspringer | January 27, 2010Let's say you wanted to kill NASA. You couldn't just blink it out of existence I Dream Of Jeannie style, but you might be able to strangle it to death in bureaucracy. How might you do it?
For starters, you might completely scrap any attempt to return humans to the moon. You might completely scrap any attempt to put men on Mars. Having gotten rid of most of the inspiration that keeps the agency in the public eye, you could make sure there was no chance of reversing course on any reasonable timetable by scrapping the agency's previous research and cancelling development on the rockets and…
mspringer | January 26, 2010I'm a bit bogged down in Mathematica code at the moment and have already choked the memory to death on a relatively high-performance machine doing what I thought would be a straightforward electric field calculation. Rechecking everything is taking some time, which distracts from writing here.
In the meantime I'd like to point out a few good links to read about my favorite subfield of physics - laser physics. This year represents the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser, and it would indeed be pretty hard to come up with a more important piece of physics for the modern world.…
mspringer | January 24, 2010And now, two quick notes before we get to business:
1. God help me, but I've joined the Twitter bandwagon. Here I am, @BuiltOnFacts. Though it goes under this blog's name, it is more of a "personal" account. So you'll be reading some incomprehensible personal minutiae, random observations, wild assertions, and somewhat more politics that I typically introduce here. But you may enjoy it nonetheless, and if you ever have physics questions that can be answered in 140 characters feel free to fire away.
2. Speaking of politics, this paragraph is political and I dislike it when people…
mspringer | January 22, 2010If you were to find the URL to the ScienceBlogs back end, you'd be presented with a logon prompt. Assuming you knew my username, and it wouldn't be hard to guess, all that stands in between you and a free ScienceBlogs platform to promote your favorite cause is a password. As such a good password is pretty important, and people correspondingly use good ones. Right?
Well, as you probably guessed the answer is no. Razib points out an article determining that the most common password is "123456". Many systems won't even let you pick out a password that terrible, but very often the passwords…
mspringer | January 21, 2010This is a little off the beaten path, but it's a silly little diversion with some classic "the press lacks numeracy skills" complaints as a bonus. Thomas Frank writing in the Wall Street Journal has written a rather wild piece - One Cross of Gold, Coming Up: How the government could get even with right-wing cranks.
It's mainly in a Modest Proposal sort of vein; I don't expect he's even a little serious. Still, fun to take a look at. His proposal runs more or less as follows:
1. All those right wing cranks are hoarding stashes of gold.
2. The federal government has lots of gold in Fort…
mspringer | January 20, 2010First day of the semester yesterday. Wide-eyed undergrads were flocking to their physics classes in our brand new and completely beautiful building. I'm not so sure they were thrilled about it; doing physics is not something that naturally appeals to most denizens of the university. I admit I'm feeling a few pangs myself for entirely different reasons - though in a lot of ways teaching (and grading!) is a massive time sink, as a research assistant I do miss being in front of a blackboard and helping teach the next generation their physics. Maybe I'll volunteer to do some tutoring now and…
mspringer | January 18, 2010...you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?
- Dirty Harry
The laws of probability, like most of the mathematical rules that govern the world, are a relatively recent discovery. Ancient people like the Romans loved to gamble as much as we do, and they had at least some idea of how certain kinds of odds worked, but they'd probably have been flummoxed by many of the mathematical tools we use today to study chance. But then again, how many people at your average casino understand how to calculate the probabilities that govern the flow of their money? Well…
mspringer | January 14, 2010Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics.
The pendulum is a Foucault pendulum, meaning its support allows it to swing freely in any direction. If you put one of them at the north pole, the plane in which is swings would appear…
mspringer | January 13, 2010This post is background for another post I'm doing tomorrow or possibly later this week. It involves that old standby of freshman physics, the pendulum. We want to find out the period of a pendulum, the length of time the pendulum spends making one complete back-and-forth cycle. It's literally one of the oldest calculations in the book, but personally I'd rather have a background that's more complete than needed instead of possibly leaving important things out. And just for the fun of it we'll use a very slightly atypical method.
This, straight from Wikipedia, is a classic pendulum…
mspringer | January 12, 2010Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a quick look at a funny exchange in the oral arguments of Briscoe v. Virginia:
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented…
mspringer | January 11, 2010Rhett over at Dot Physics is not quite happy about the way magnets are being taught to his young niece:
The other question came from my niece - who is an extremely bright girl (not sure exactly what grade - maybe 5th). She was at home and didn't have her science textbook, so she asked me the following:
"What happens to the electrons in a metal when it becomes a magnet"
I always worry about magnet questions because magnets are not that simple to understand at a fundamental level. Sure, there are some things you can do with magnets - especially if you want to do some experiments. However,…
mspringer | January 10, 2010There's an interesting contrast between the laws of nature and the laws which constitute our legal system. The laws of nature are compact and precise; written in standard notation without accompanying explanation, the fundamental laws fit on a few pages. The laws of the legal system span thousands of volumes and are frequently ambiguous and ever-changing. On the other hand, we know what the laws of the land actually are. The laws of nature are not completely explored; there's large regions of the parameter space where we just don't know the laws at all. Still, in that sense physicists…
mspringer | January 7, 2010I've got to admit, this is a beautiful skyscraper:
I was never very enamored of the Petronias Towers or the Taipei 101, both of which lacked the architectural panache that supertall structures ought to have. The Burj Khalifa has it. Burj Dubai is a more elegant name, but long story short Dubai really got nuked by the worldwide financial crisis and this Khalifa fellow helped keep Dubai out of bankruptcy. So now he has the world's tallest building named after him. The Burj Khalifa cost around a billion and a half dollars to construct, and I expect that figure would have been enormously…
mspringer | January 5, 2010I'd like to make myself believe
That planet Earth turns slowly...
- Owl City, Fireflies
If you're had any exposure to pop radio over the last few months, you've heard this plaintive rumination about the earth's rotation. The first time I heard it I thought it must be the Postal Service getting back together, but alas it was not so. Oh well, at least we can get some physics out of it.
Does planet Earth turns slowly? It depends on how you look at it. At the equator it's roaring along at more than 1000 miles per hour. This is pretty fast by terrestrial standards, and perhaps what Owl City…
mspringer | January 3, 2010We've spent more than a few Sunday Function features discussing the properties of the prime numbers. They're just so important and interesting in number theory that they're an irresistible target. Let's set some scenery before getting to the actual function this week.
There are an infinite number of prime numbers. Whatever gargantuan prime number you find, there's always an infinite number of larger ones waiting to be found. However, their relative commonness does decrease as the numbers get larger and larger. For instance, while the ten ousand numbers 1-10,000 contain 1,229 primes, the…