energy
revere | January 1, 2009One tradition of News Years Day in the US is the college football bowl game. When I was young I always watched the Rose Bowl (my state university was in the Big Ten league), but I have gotten away from it and don't expect to be glued to the TV today. But there will still be something glued to the football field, at least metaphorically: the dirty leavings of "Clean Coal." An American college football field is 120 yards long and 53.34 yards wide. That's 6400 square yards. Last week a retention pond containing coal ash from a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal fired power plant let loose 5.4…
revere | December 29, 2008The fact that EPA has just approved a safer and more environmentally sound refrigerant is amazing news in itself. But the story behind this new product is even more amazing. The material, called HCR-188c, is a hydrocarbon blend of common materials (among them ethane, propane, isobutene, normal butane) that have no ozone depleting potential and very little in the way of greenhouse gas type of heat trapping. Even better, appliances require only a quarter the amount as current refrigerants (hydrochlorofluorocarbons, HCFCs, and hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs), costs 20 cents per charge compared to 62…
rallain | December 23, 2008Clearly, I am not a professional blogger. I am an amateur. This is because I was under the impression that only amateur bloggers could compete in the blogging olympics. When did they change these rules? Anyway, Adam Weiner did a physics-based analysis of the latest Star Trek movie trailer. Here is the trailer:
In the trailer (oh, spoiler alert) a young Kirk jumps out of a car before it goes over a cliff. It does look odd, and that is why I had intended to analyze it. In Adam's analysis, at PopSci.com the basic approach was:
Take the initial velocity of the car (from the clip)
Assume…
rallain | December 19, 2008I am sure I have mentioned the Discovery show Time Warp before. The basic idea of the show is to find how many cool things they can look at with an ultra slow motion video camera (btw - this is on my christmas list).
So, I have seen this Samurai guy on the show twice. Yes, he has a big sword. Yes, he could utterly destroy me if he wished. However, I can not handle him talking about physics. Mr. Samurai guy, please stop using the words "kinetic energy" until you know what they mean (I said please). Here is my first problem. Samurai guy is showing how to chop people down. He plans to…
cmooney | December 16, 2008Here's the full video of the president elect's naming of his energy and environment team. Steven Chu's remarks are the most interesting, and to my mind sound like they were probably written by the man himself, at least initially, rather than by some PR manager.
Man, times have changed...
illconsidered | December 15, 2008...interviews who??
Fatih Birol is the Chief Economist for the International Energy Authority, the agency that the whole world (or at least the "official" part of that world) relies on for forecasts about energy production and demand. This is the organization that governments around the world like to cite when dismissing as crackpots people warning about peak oil and the coming "oil shock".
This makes him a remarkably important person in terms of influence on world affairs. What is more central to our modern civilization than energy sources and consumption?
Well, now this man and his agency…
rallain | December 12, 2008Pre Reqs: momentum principle, forces,energy, vectors
Really, there is not much new here. This is an introduction to objects that interact. To describe this, I will need to pull several different ideas together (that you have probably already looked at). Let me start with a simple case. Suppose I have two objects, maybe they are two asteroids in space. I will call them asteroid A and B:
In this situation, the two objects have different momentums but one interaction between them. Notice that the gravitational force on asteroid A is the same magnitude but opposite direction as the force…
cmooney | December 10, 2008Apparently it's going to be Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Steve Chu. I heartily applaud the pick. It's especially noteworthy that Chu has been a big proponent of action on global warming and clean energy.
Here's Chu endorsing ScienceDebate2008:
rallain | December 10, 2008A commenter (Joe) suggested I look at vehicles powered by the wind that can move faster than the wind. This also came up on Swans on Tea. One of Joe's points was that I should do this BEFORE MythBuster's gets to it. And so I shall. I know this is one of those topics that can never really be won - like "the moon landings were fake" or "you can run your car on water". I will try anyway. If you are not sure what this "faster than wind" thing is all about, check the Swans on Tea link or this boing boing link.
There has been a ton of stuff posted about DWFTTW vehicles. Literally a ton. If…
sheril | December 9, 2008We recently penned an article together in the current issue of Mother Jones:
As the rhetoric from the campaign trail demonstrates (remember the ad with John McCain at the wind-turbine factory?), nobody is against renewable energy. But no amount of green talk can change the fact that our economy is dangerously fossil-fuel based and foreign-energy dependent. The reasons are numerous, and in some cases notorious. Congress is hamstrung by pork-barrel politics and regional interests (e.g. West Virginia coal). We still don't have a federal equivalent to the laws in more than half the states…
rallain | December 6, 2008This comes from Buzz Out Loud Episode 865 which got the story from Slashdot regarding a possible new technology that would use piezoelectric devices to charge cell phones while you talk. The original article the slashdot story pointed to talked mostly about the advances in piezoelectric devices, but I want to look at the possibility that sound could charge a phone.
First for the basic physics. How do you make sound and what is it? Sound is a compression wave in the air. To make a sound you need something to push the air (yes, I simplified this quite a bit). When that something pushes the…
rallain | November 23, 2008One of my favorite podcasts to listen to while driving or mowing the lawn is [Buzz Out Loud](http://bol.cnet.com). Buzz Out Loud (BOL) is basically just a tech-based podcast, but very entertaining. Anyway, as part of my attention seeking disorder, I try to get mentioned on the show. I succeeded once when I posted my [Optimal Commuting Speed Calculator](http://www.dotphys.net/page1/page10/efficiency/calculator.html). When I heard Tom and Rafe talking about orbital speeds, I realized this was my chance. Find any tiny flaw in their reasoning and I could perhaps come up with a comment worthy…
cmooney | November 21, 2008Over at DeSmogBlog, I take a look at the events of this week and how they point to strong and dramatic action on global warming and energy early next year. In particular, it now appears that Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, and Henry Waxman will be our triumvirate of policymakers who finally cap greenhouse gas emissions.
You can read the rest here.
revere | November 21, 2008John Dingell (D-MI), longtime Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has done some good things in his time, but overall he's been a net minus. When Henry Waxman (D-CA) toppled him from his perch today my feeling was an uncharitable, Good Riddance. The vote in the Democratic Party caucus was close but not very close: 137 - 122. Dingell has not been representing the people of his District as much as he has been representing the US Automakers. He he got the sobriquet Dirty Air Dingell the old fashioned way: he earned it:
The Energy and Commerce panel is one of the most important House…
rallain | November 14, 2008Here is a video of a guy jumping 35 feet into a pool of water only 1 foot deep.
UPDATE: Apparently, that video went away. Here is another version.
How does this work?
I don't think I even need to do a video analysis of this motion, all the important info is given. I will assume that air resistance did not play a signficant role (and that is a good assumption - or good enough - see this for example: motion of a falling tennis ball). So, here is the situation.
Part 1: guy falls 35 feet 5 inches (10.8 meters).
, I struggled to show that a particle in an infinite well can only exist at certain energies. If you try to put a particle with more than one energy, the probability oscillates at a frequency (E2 - E1)/h. So, what is next? Well I think I am ready to attack the photon.
According to the ultimate source of truthiness (wikipedia), [the photon is the elementary particle responsible for the electromagnetic interaction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon). In general, the photon is view as the…
rallain | November 11, 2008One of the fundamental aspects of physics is the study of light and how that interacts with matter. I have been putting off this post - mainly because I am not a quantum mechanic (I am a classical mechanic). There are lots of things that could be done in this post, but I am going to try and keep it limited (and maybe come back to the interesting points later). Also, most of my posts are aimed at the intro-college level or advanced high school level. This will be a little higher. If you are in high school, there is still a lot of stuff for you here.
Let me summarize where I am going to…
rallain | November 7, 2008On MythBusters this week, Adam and Jamie tested the bullet-proofness of various objects. The one that sticks in my mind is the ipod. The said there was a report of a solider being shot by an AK-47, but he was saved because the bullet hit his ipod. To test this, Adam shot an AK-47 at an ipod and it went through. Their conclusion was that he was also wearing body armor. I am not sure I like that conclusion. Why would someone report that the ipod saved him if he was also wearing body armor? Maybe they would, but not sure.
I was thinking, maybe the bullet went through the ipod because they…
revere | November 5, 2008The US election is over. Now comes the battle over what it means. The right wing of the Democratic Party aside, it seems pretty clear this was one of the periodic "realignment" elections that are of historic significance. Obama's base, overwhelmingly the progressive heart of the Democratic Party, is a powerful coalition of the younger generation, racial and ethnic "minorities" (each probably constituting larger voting blocks than the right wing linchpin of white evangelicals), GLBT groups, women, young professionals, those deeply concerned about the environment, traditional Democratic…
rallain | November 5, 2008[Here is a LiveScience article on cars that run "mostly" on air](http://www.livescience.com/technology/081103-air-car.html). I also hear students talking about this - how the world will change when cars run on air. This is misleading. These cars do not really run on air. It is not like you put them outside and BOOM - instant energy.
A better way to say this is that these cars run on energy STORED in compressed air. How do you store energy in compressed air? You need a compressor that typically runs on electricity. Where does that energy come from? Probably coal or natural gas.
It…