It's cold and rainy today-- you know, like it's supposed to be in December in the Northeast-- so a good day to stay inside with the camera and be randomly artsy. My desk is currently hosting a larger than usual pile of change because SteelyKid found a coin-collecting thing she got a few years ago and decided to hunt for state quarters. So I spent a little while taking pictures of different configurations of this giant pile of rejected quarters. The two best are GIMPed together in the "featured image" up top, but here they are separately: Messy pile of quarters. Neatly stacked quarters.…

I've been a little bad about self-promoting here of late, but I should definitely plug this: I'm speaking at the TEDxAlbany event this Thursday, December 3rd; I'm scheduled first, at 9:40 am. The title is "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning": You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics…

Not an incredibly artistic or innovative bit of photography, here, but I spent a good chunk of the day taking The Pip for his annual physical, so the only pictures I took were of SteelyKid's schoolwork: SteelyKid's second-grade assignment to imagine and illustrate a conversation with a turkey. This assignment asked her to draw herself asking a question that a turkey would then answer, and then the turkey asking her one in return. Her writing is more enthusiastic than accurate as far as spelling is concerned, but she has a good imagination. In case you can't make it out (spelling corrected…

We had our usual tv time on Sunday morning at my parents', with the kids alternating picking what they watched. When it came around to SteelyKid's turn, she opted for MythBusters, which wasn't available on demand, but she has several episodes on her tablet. Of course, if SteelyKid was going to watch video on her tablet, then The Pip had to watch video on his, which led to this shot: SteelyKid and The Pip watching video on their tablets. And also blissful, blessed quiet, a gigantic improvement over the sounds of "Paw Patrol," which was The Pip's cartoon of choice on this trip. And, well,…

Saturday was still warm, but grey and rainy, so we needed indoor activities. We took the kids down to the Roberson Museum to see their annual Christmas display, with lots of trees donated and decorated by local organizations, toys and games from the 50's and 60's, and a giant model train display. And the "International Forest" of trees decorated in the style of various countries. The Polish display at the Roberson "International Forest" of Christmas trees. This is the Polish display; SteelyKid was duly impressed to learn that the word for the heraldic bird at the top of that flag is the…

So, today, we engaged in the traditional Black Friday activity of, um, going to the park and chasing birds: SteelyKid and The Pip scaring geese with their swords at the park on the day after Thanksgiving. It was an unbelievably warm day for late November-- if you look closely, you can see that SteelyKid is wearing shorts and a T-shirt-- so we couldn't very well sit inside. So we went across to the other side of Whitney Point Lake to Dorchester Park to let the kids run around. We hiked up the stream, played on the playground, and chased the big flocks of Canada geese into the lake. This did…

We're at my parents' house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY, for Thanksgiving, so of course there's only one appropriate subject for the photo of the day: Thanksgiving dinner. That's our traditional turkey dinner, from my seat at the table. We ate very, very well, as always, and the kids have been generally very good (with a few minor squabbles). SteelyKid got bored during dinner, but I made up some math problems to entertain her, so all is well. If you're celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope your day was full of awesome food and family and other stuff to be thankful for. If this isn't a holiday…

We're visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and one of the highliughts of any trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa is that they have Nerf swords for the kids: SteelyKid and The Pip in their traditional Nerf sword battle. This raged for a good while before dinner. Hopefully, they'll sleep well tonight...

I spent a good chunk of the morning across the river at the Honda dealership, because of this: The nail they pulled out of my tire this morning. That's the nail that they pulled out of my right rear tire, which had developed a slow leak late last week. It was one of those leaks that took several hours to significantly reduce the pressure, and I had stuff to do yesterday, so I've been pumping it back up with a compressor that I keep in the car. Happily, it was in an easy to patch place, so the whole thing only cost me $27. And the shape of the end is sort of interesting, so I got a photo…

I was headed outside to take a bunch of photos with which I plan to do some SCIENCE!, but that won't be the photo of the day, because this little critter was energetically banging on the side of our house when I got outside: The woodpecker that was banging on Chateau Steelypips. I think this is probably a female downy woodpecker. Though I could be wrong. Anyway, she jumped off the side of the house as soon as I opened the door, but obligingly posed on the branch of a nearby tree for a few shots before flying off to bang on something else. And, really, how could that not be the photo of the…

The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject: The Pip's collection of superhero toys. Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population. The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…

I try not to have this be the cute-kid-photo-of-the-day, but really, how could I not use this shot: SteelyKid and The Pip discussing the finer points of Lego superhero stickers. The Pip was not a huge fan of the antibiotics that came with his strep-throat diagnosis, so we bought a sticker book as a bribe reward for taking his medicine. Yesterday afternoon, in one of the brief quiet periods of a busy day, SteelyKid sat down with him and they had an intense conversation about the identities and powers of the various heroes and villains represented in the sticker pages. Which is too cute not…

For a brief, glorious moment the time change meant that I didn't need a flashlight for my weekday morning walks with Emmy. Sadly, the inexorable motion of the Earth in its orbit means that we are once again into the zone where the sun isn't above the horizon when we take our morning stroll: Niskayuna High School a bit before sunup. That's the high school a few blocks from here. It's not on our usual route, but I detoured over there in hopes of getting a decent sunrise photo, as that's the clearest view we have of the eastern horizon, and there was about the right amount of cloud cover for…

A little while back, I did a comparison of the different ISO settings on my camera, and a bunch of people commented that it would be interesting to try to match two photos at different levels. So, here's that: Trying to match two photos at the extremes of the ISO settings on my camera. These aren't quite perfectly matched, because the time settings give me a limited range of options, but it's pretty close. The higher ISO setting ought to be 128 times more light-sensitive than then lower, and it's 1/125th of the exposure time. And... those look pretty similar. I'm honestly not sure how one…

the Pip officially has strep throat, and thus had to stay home today, but the antibiotics he started yesterday (over his very strenuous objections) have worked wonders, so his energy level was pretty much back to normal. Which means that we spent a while out in the back yard raking up a big pile of leaves, whereupon: The Pip mid-leap into the leaf pile in the back yard of Chateau Steelypips. This is a small fraction of the leaf pile we used to be able to get, before we had the big maples that used to be on the south side of the yard taken out. It's not even everything we can get now, as…

As threatened yesterday, another staged shot for a "quantum is difficult" image for an upcoming talk. Some notes and caffeine. This is a piece of a homework solution that was on a pad I had lying around-- those are infinite square well wavefunctions. It's about as trivial as you can get from quantum, but looks math-y enough to make the point I want to make. The Pip is home sick again today, so that's about it for me.

I followed up my ranty-y post about "Sports Science" with an experimental investigation over at Forbes, tossing a football around on the deck out back and then doing video analysis of the bounces. This provided a wealth of data, much of it not really appropriate for over there, but good for a physics post or two here. One of the trajectories I looked at was this "forward bounce": Here's the trajectory reconstructed in Tracker: Trajectory of a football bouncing forward. This is notable because not only does it bounce forward, it includes one of those big pop-up bounces that take people off…

Another talk-prep photo, because I wanted a shot to suggest the academic side of quantum physics. Of course, my actual textbooks are all in my office on campus, but then, they mostly have boring covers and titles, so they're not a great visual. So I stacked up some pop-physics books: A selection of quantum physics books. I meant to write out a couple of pages of equations, too, but I had to break off to cook dinner, and then I fell asleep at 9pm, so that never happened. Maybe today. Anyway, I liked all these books, so, you know, check them out. Or read this post about good pop-quantum…

So, a funny story about this. I posted a snippet of a fantasy story back in August, and enough people said nice things about it that I actually got off my ass and did some playing around to format the full story as an epub. This was, of course, complicated by the fact that computers are awful, but I think I finally got a version that doesn't have gibberish characters all over. At least, as long as you're not using the worthless free epub reader I initially downloaded, which makes a hash of even actual purchased professional ebook files. I was all set to post that-- had the post all typed in,…

It was a cool clear morning when I took Emmy out for our morning walk, with a band of high clouds running eat-west across the sky to our north. After watching a bit, I realized that these were probably entirely seeded by jet contrails, as I saw at least four planes flying along that band during the walk. This shot catches one of them (the big band crosses the frame diagonally at lower right), plus a second running parallel to it but a bit farther south, and a third crossing them: Contrails crossing in the northern sky. I'm guessing this must be a route from Boston to points west, possibly…