drorzel | November 15, 2015Another day when I only took a couple of pictures, on the morning dog walk. I noticed that one of the now leafless trees on the route looked interestingly creepy, so I took a couple shots of that. I didn't notice that the mode selector on the camera had gotten bumped to full manual, though, which meant the sky behind the tree got all blown out. Switching to greyscale sorta-kinda redeems this, though:
Bare tree branches are interestingly creepy.
(It was dismal and cloudy, so this isn't even an inaccurate representation of what I saw...)
So, um, let's pretend I did this deliberately, for…
drorzel | November 14, 2015This is a pure document-my-day shot, not one of my random attempts at artsy effects. One of The Pip's birthday presents was a big vinyl wall decal from Chic Walls, a gift from Aunt Erin in California. These are a little complicated to install, and SteelyKid being sick messed up the whole week, but I finally got around to putting it up Friday:
The Pip's new Gotham City wall decal.
So, our superhero-crazy Little Dude now has Gotham City on his wall. He's all fired up about this.
And that's it from Friday; I'm still fighting a cold of my own, so between this and some video shooting for a…
drorzel | November 12, 2015Another day with a staged-for-talk-prep photo:
My desk, with social media on both computers.
I needed a picture of social-media apps on computer screens for an upcoming talk, so I took one. After first tweeting a cute-kid photo:
Cute-kid photo because I want to take a picture of Twitter to use in a talk. pic.twitter.com/QIYHTda0vL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) November 12, 2015
Yeah, it's shameless. But look at them, they're adorable! And the reminder of their adorableness was really needed today, because it's been an incredibly frustrating week, kid-wise.
I should note that I do not actually…
drorzel | November 11, 2015It's a grey, dismal, rainy day here at Chateau Steelypips, and I'm a little groggy from cold medication. Which means it's not a great writing day, but it is a good day to stay inside and do a little SCIENCE! for the photo of the day. thus, this:
Some toys and the cable box in our basement, shot at every ISO setting my camera offers.
This is a small assortment of toys set on the table in our basement next to the cable box, and photographed at every one of the eight ISO settings my camera offers. Everything else is the same in these shots-- I put it on manual focus, the maximum aperture (f/1…
drorzel | November 11, 2015Spent all day yesterday with SteelyKid, who, while she was officially medically diagnosed as suffering from strep throat, was not in any conventional sense "sick." We built Lego sets, watched tv, went shopping, played with an RC helicopter, tried and failed to make a physics video, and generally wore me out. so you get another delayed photo of the day.
This one is a seasonal thing in our tree-filled neighborhood: the town has a big vacuum truck that comes around to pick up leaves, so people will rake their yards to make great big piles lining the roads:
Leaf piles lining the road near…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this "Sports Science" clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I've been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett's just working on a "misery loves company" theory, here:
It's a cool play, but as science, this leaves a lot to be desired. It's less "sports science" than "sports technobabble"-- mostly, they seem to be going for a science-y air by quoting lots of largely irrelevant numbers. I'm not sure why it matters how far most of…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Another delayed photo-of-the-day, because SteelyKid was sent home with strep throat yesterday. She complained that her throat hurt any time we asked her to eat anything other than ice cream, but other than that was basically unaffected. Which is sort of the most irritating sick-kid scenario possible, because if she were actually sick and listless, I could just put the tv on and let her doze on the couch while I worked. But instead, she was up and playing more or less as usual, skipping over to my computer regularly to interrupt me.
We had some fun-- watched Shaolin Soccer on DVD, and some of…
drorzel | November 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of physics-y posts over at Forbes:
-- Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature: My big defense of "the humanities," explaining why those subjects are worth studying even if you plan to go into a STEM field instead. I'm very happy with how this came out.
-- Baseball Physics: How Batters Beat The Best Computers: In honor of the World Series. "How" here means "look, they do this"-- I don't have a detailed explanation of the mechanics that make it all work.
-- Football Physics (With Bonus Rugby): The Physics Of Bouncing Balls: Mostly about a really cool try in the…
drorzel | November 8, 2015The day was dominated by the previously mentioned birthday party for The Pip, so it only makes sense to have the photo of the day be an action shot from said party:
The Pip shaking a parachute with balls on it at his birthday party.
This is from the games portion of the party, which included shaking a parachute loaded up with plastic balls so they flew all over the place. Which is the sort of thing that plays very well with the four-year-old crowd.
And now, having celebrated in style and substantially increased the supply of superhero-themed toys in Chateau Steelypips, it's time for bed.
drorzel | November 8, 2015The Pip's birthday was yesterday, but we're having his birthday party today, because that's when the indoor playground was available. He had two requests for his birthday: that we have a party at Tumbling Tykes, and that one friend in particular be invited. So, well, we're having his party at Tumbling Tykes, and his buddy D. will be there. along with 9-10 other friends from day care.
This post is mostly an excuse to post this graphic of the invitation, because I'm proud of my rudimentary design skillz:
The Pip's having a birthday party.
And also to say that this is about all you're getting…
drorzel | November 7, 2015Four years ago today, The Pip was born. That's hard to believe, in both directions at different times. There are days when it seems like just yesterday that he was a tiny helpless thing, and other days when he seems to have been a hyper Little Dude for aeons.
I took a bunch of pictures of him today, but it's sort of hard to choose one for the photo of the day. I went with this one as the "featured image" above:
The Pip with his big new book of superhero stories.
because it's a good clear picture of him, and a fairly characteristic facial expression. Also, he's holding a big collection of…
drorzel | November 7, 2015I spent most of Friday in a bit of a fog, thanks to a cold bug I picked up from The Pip. As a result, the only thing I took photos of yesterday was this:
A piece of bread in the toaster at Chateau Steelypips.
This wasn't some weird pseudoephedrine-fueled delusion-- I actually had a professional need for a photo of bread in a toaster oven. But, um, yeah, that's all I've got.
drorzel | November 6, 2015I've known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I'll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on "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 are essential for everything around us. The mundane process of getting up and getting…
drorzel | November 6, 2015I love a lot of things about our neighborhood, which is all pleasant tree-lined streets and stuff, but it's not a great place for taking pictures of sunset-- I pretty much need to get in the car to get to a place with a clear view of the western horizon. This knocks out a big category of imitation-Scalzi photos, but every now and then there's a cool sunset-related effect, like these clouds last night:
Red patches of cloud at sunset.
This is kind of similar to the sunrise squirrel from a few days ago, but the lit-up clouds are a little more sparse, which makes it more dramatic.
And, of…
drorzel | November 5, 2015Two positions of possible interest to academic job seekers:
-- First, we're hiring again in the Union college Department of Physics and Astronomy:
We invite applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position starting in September 2016, with a preference for an experimental physicist working in either biophysics or soft condensed matter. We encourage applications from interdisciplinary scientists and those who could make use of the College’s shared instrumentation resources (including AFM, SEM, micro- Raman and micro-FTIR instruments and IBM cluster computer; see http://www.union.…
drorzel | November 5, 2015A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid's toy Newton's cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video:
I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn't have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, though, so here's some physics making use of the normal-speed part of that video (I have another purpose in mind for the high-speed stuff; you'll need to wait for that).
The obvious thing to do with this is to plug it into Tracker and measure the position as a function of time. Here's a graph tracking the position of the two end…
drorzel | November 4, 2015SteelyKid's Elite Team taekwondo practice on Tuesday night was a "game night" because they had a belt test last week. The kids opted to play capture-the-flag against the parents, which ended up a tie (the adults won the first two games, the kids the second two), but the adult victories came at a price:
My capture-the-flag injury.
This actually looks worse than it is. I mean, it does hurt, but the pain from my toe is minor compared to the aggravation of my plantar fasciitis from running around on thin foam mats with no shoes.
(Of course, neither of these kept me from playing basketball…
drorzel | November 4, 2015Another delayed photo-of-the-day, another photobombing:
Evil squirrel against a colorful sunrise.
I think this pretty much speaks for itself: I was getting a photo of the colorful sunrise, and an evil squirrel ran across the power line. Which was a clear and obvious photo of the day.
drorzel | November 4, 2015ScienceBlogs had some back-end Issues for a few days, which delayed the photo-a-day project. This one's from two days ago, when I was taking a picture of the bare branches of a tree next door because I liked the way they looked against the sky. I ended up with a high-altitude photobomb, though:
Airplane and bare tree in the early morning.
I ended up liking the contrast of the tiny lit plane and the great big black branches, so this was the photo of the day. Not much else to say about that.
drorzel | November 1, 2015Another busy day, so you get another kind of lazy shot. But, hey, everybody wants to know how the kids did trick-or-treating, right? So here's The Pip's share of the Halloween haul:
The Pip's Halloween candy.
I weighed both his plastic pumpkin full of candy and the Tupperware container that SteelyKid's stuff is in, and they each came out between 1.1 and 1.2 kg. So, a bit over 1kg each (after taking out the weight of the containers)-- not bad for an hour's work.
The funny part is that The Pip has turned into an exceptionally picky eater, and won't eat... any of this, really. He was super…