Science
drorzel | December 5, 2011I'm still getting back up to speed with the blog, as well as the huge backlog of stuff I've read during the past few months when I was too busy to blog. Thus, I am semi-officially proclaiming this Book Review Week. I'll post one review a day of books I was sent by publishers looking for a mention on the blog.
We'll start off with The Manga Guide to the Universe, which is from the same organization that brought us The Manga Guide to Relativity. This one is, as the title suggests, a cartoon introduction to astronomy.
As is standard for the Manga Guide series, this has a framing story involving…
drorzel | December 5, 2011Moving along in our countdown to Newton's birthday, we start to deal with equations that Sir Isaac never would've seen, because they deal with more abstract quantities than he worked with. The first and in some ways most important of these is energy:
This is the full and correct expression for the energy of a particle with mass m moving at speed v. The notion of energy traces back to Newton's contemporary and rival Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but this particular equation involves the same square-root factor as Saturday's definition of momentum. That tells you for sure that this particular…
pharyngula | December 4, 2011Urglegurgle. I'm trying to prep a lecture on synapse formation, and just discovered that Herzog's amazing film about Chauvet cave is available…so I'm trying to scribble up technical notes on molecular biology while getting constantly distracted by 32,000 year old cave paintings. It's good to live in the 21st century, but I think my brain is getting full.
(Also on FtB)
drorzel | December 4, 2011Continuing our countdown to Newton's birthday, let's acknowledge the contributions of one of his contemporaries and rivals with today's equation:
This is, of course, Hooke's Law for a spring, which he famously published in 1660:
ceiiinosssttuv
Clears everything right up, doesn't it? OK, maybe not. This one's not only in Latin, it's a cryptogram, unscrambling to "ut tensio sic vis," which translates roughly to "as the extension, so the force," giving the correct proportionality between the force exerted by a spring or other elastic material and the amount that material has been stretched.…
drorzel | December 3, 2011We kicked off the countdown to Newton's birthday with his second law of motion, which is almost but not quite everything you need to understand and predict the motion of objects. The missing piece is today's equation:
This is the full and correct definition of momentum, good for any speed all the way up to the speed of light. Newton's second law tells us how the momentum changes in response to a force, but in order to use that to predict the future, you need to know what momentum is, and that's where this equation comes in.
(Wouldn't it make more sense to do this first, and the second law…
catdynamics | December 2, 2011This is an old favourite. re-presented here to lay the ground for the great return to the phys ed education debate...
Several years ago, a major organ of our professional society raised a troubling issue: namely whether the three major subfields were being taught in the proper order at the high school level .
A furor arose in the letter pages, debating the merits endlessly. Which first, which last? (also here).
Now, I think we can all agree on the basics - there are not enough resources to teach all subfields each year of high school, and I am told scheduling is also impossible if people are…
drorzel | December 2, 2011We kicked off our countdown to Newton's birthday with his second law of motion, so the obvious next step is to go to his third law of motion:
This one was also originally in Latin, because that's how Ike liked to roll:
Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi.
In English, this comes out as:
Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.
That first…
gregladen | December 1, 2011These are books that I've reviewed here, and would like to recommend that you seriously consider picking up if you are looking for a cool present for someone and you think they should read more science.
I'm including a couple of bird books in this list, but I also recently wrote up a summary of just bird books that you may want to check out.
These are in no particular order, and I'm not paying a lot of attention to publication dates. What matters is that I've I've put the book in this stack of books I've got here that I clean out every year about this time; Some are clearly older than…
drorzel | December 1, 2011It's that time of year again, when we count down the days to Isaac Newton's birthday (according to the Julian calendar, anyway), and how better to mark this than with mathematics? Thus, I'll post an equation a day until either Christmas Eve or I run out of ideas, and talk about what it means and why it's important for physics.
Since this is, after all, a celebration of Sir Isaac, let's kick things off with arguably his most famous equation:
OK, it might not look familiar in this form, but this is, in fact, the full and correct statement of Newton's Second Law (written in modern notation),…
drorzel | November 30, 2011Yesterday's physics education post kicked off a bit of discussion in a place I can't link to about the usefulness of lectures. Something in that reminded me of an anecdote from my grad school days, that I think is useful, so I'll post it here.
When we were working on the spin-polarized collision experiment, we expected that a certain effect ought to be pretty big, but when we did the experiment, it didn't show up at all. We mentioned this in a talk or poster, and a theorist said "Oh, that's not that surprising."
We had been pretty surprised, so I was sent off to talk to Paul Julienne, one of…
drorzel | November 29, 2011As I said last week, I recently wrapped up a term experimenting with "active learning" techniques in the two intro courses I was teaching. The diagnostic test results were a mixed bag-- one section showed really good improvement in their scores, the other was no better than the same class with traditional methods-- and the exam scores weren't really any different. There was probably some slight improvement in the multiple choice-- fewer students got trapped by the Newton's First Law questions than usual-- but in the free-response problems, they did about the same as usual.
So, having turned…
pharyngula | November 29, 2011These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology!
Have no fear. They're mostly benign.
(Also on FtB)
drorzel | November 28, 2011One of the many things I wish I had had time to blog about during the just-completed term was the big New York Times article on attrition in science majors. This generated enough commentary at the time that people are probably sick of it, but I haven't seen anything that exactly matches my take, so I'll belatedly throw this out there.
The big point of the article is that lots of students who enter college planning to major in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (the "STEM" fields, in an awkward but now inescapable acronym) end up graduating with degrees in something else:
But, it turns…
catdynamics | November 27, 2011I've been a naughty blogger, I went off to the Mars Surveyor launch, and didn't blog about it, yet.
In no small part because I forgot to bring a USB cable.
But, honestly, mpostly because I wanted to just revel in the moment.
(Ok, I tweeted and fb'd a bit).
I'll get back to MSL, in the meantime I need to core dump some random links I've been meaning to ponder:
...does blogging have a wider role to play in the scientific discourse? - Yes.
Can the quantum state be interpreted statistically? - No.
Is The Reason Why Science Majors Change Their Minds That It Is Just So Darn Hard? - Yes and No.
Hm.…
pharyngula | November 23, 2011Sad news: Lynn Margulis, advocate of the endosymbiosis theory of eukaryotic origins, has died. She was smart, creative, and promoter of a lot of wild ideas…and to her credit, some of them were even right. I think her greatest strength was her eagerness to step right out to the edge of science and push, push, push — sometimes futilely, but sometimes she really did succeed in pushing back the frontier a bit.
(Also on FtB)
catdynamics | November 22, 2011Matthew Bailes has another excellent entry in the "State of Science" series of public conversations on science:
Selling Science: The Lure of the Dark Side
pharyngula | November 22, 2011I've heard of the Scoville scale, which measures the potency of spicy peppers. Those boring green bell peppers get a 0; habaneros get a score of 350,000.
The stuff those UC Davis police officers so casually hosed into the faces of peacefully demonstrating students? between 2,000,000 and 5,300,000 Scoville units.
But we've taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally…
drorzel | November 22, 2011A few months back, I did a post about estimating the time required for the different routes I take to work, looking at the question of whether it's better to take a shorter route with a small number of slow traffic lights, or a longer route with a bunch of stop signs. This was primarily conceived as a way to frame a kinematics problem, but I got a bunch of comments of the form "Aren't you an experimentalist? Where's the data?"
Well, here it is:
This is a histogram plot showing the number of times my morning commute fell into a given ten-second bin over the last couple of months. The blue…
drorzel | November 18, 2011One of the more reasonable criticisms of the OPERA result showing neutrinos apparently moving faster than light was that they were claiming 20-nanosecond resolution on the timing of a neutrino pulse that was 10000 nanoseconds long. They got their timing by doing fits to the shape of the whole pulse, as described in that link, and there's always a little bit of alchemy in that sort of process, but they had big long pulses because that's what the accelerator at CERN that served as the source of the neutrino beam provided.
After the original annoucnement, they got the neutrino beam reconfigured…
drorzel | November 17, 2011The water heater for Chateau Steelypips is significantly older than the usual useful life for such devices, and it's really started to show. I'm getting pretty sick of lukewarm showers, so we probably need to replace it.
As a good squishy liberal type, I of course want to replace it with something more efficient, and there are claims out there that the best way to go for efficiency is with the "tankless" models (a gas one, in our case, so we can still have hot water when/if winter weather takes out our electricity). Of course, there's a lot of contradictory information out there. The usually…