Video
grrlscientist | October 2, 2008Bill Maher discusses his film, Religulous, with Larry King. Part of this movie was filmed on location in Heaven. This film is scheduled for release on 3 October 2008 [7:58]
rallain | October 2, 2008I was recently re-watching a MythBusters episode and I found something I had wanted to explore previously (but accidentally deleted the episode). Here is a short clip from the "shooting fish in a barrel" episode:
Did you see what I found interesting? That big barrel of water left the floor from being hit by a bullet.
The question here is: Does a bullet have enough energy to increase the gravitational potential energy of the barrel to that height?
First, let me gather some data. From the episode, the Mythbusters were firing a 9mm pistol round into the barrel. I don't know much about…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2008I want to go see Religulous SO BADLY, and today, I heard an interview on "Fresh Air" on WNYC with Bill Maher [MediaPlayer: 2:51] where he discussed the making of this film. This film is scheduled for release on 3 October 2008 [2:12]
grrlscientist | September 24, 2008tags: death by parody, python trek, humor, funny, streaming video
Oh, okay, I see how this is war is being fought! The truly evil scientist from across The Pond has begun cheating by launching a second satirical attack that introduces other characters into the fray! Oh, HO! In view of this egregious war crime, I have no choice but to escalate this war from a limited Shatner Satire conflict into a no-holds-barred all-out War of the Parodies! DEATH BY PARODY! [2:12]
grrlscientist | September 24, 2008tags: x-ray crystallography, foot and mouth disease, research, viral research, streaming video
Below the fold is an utterly fascinating video that documents the current state of the research in one lab that is developing a drug that stops foot and mouth disease virus from replicating in the host cells. Even better, this beautfully executed video was created by the lab members themselves! I can hardly wait for more scientists and labs to document their research in real-people accessible videos such as these [6:03]
This lab has its own blog, so go there!
grrlscientist | September 23, 2008tags: William Shatner, Shatner-Hasselhoff, humor, funny, streaming video
A truly evil scientist from across The Pond has launched a satirical attack in response to the Shatner Satire Wars. As a gawd-feering amerikan, I could not let that pass without bombing him into yesterday with a retaliatory counter-offensive satirical attack. To view Part 2 of this ongoing war against satire, peek below the fold [0:48]
grrlscientist | September 23, 2008tags: Politics, Ralph Nader, Cardozo, humor, funny, streaming video
This is a silly video by Ralph Nader, who feels left out of the political process since the electorate finally sees him for what he is. So Ralph talks about dressing up as a panda with Cardozo the Amazon parrot, who lives with former Salt Lake City Mayor, Rocky Anderson, in a lame attempt to recapture his old glory days of spoiling elections and making life worse for the electorate [2:45]
Cardozo, here you are from the free flying Amazon jungle to a cage in Utah -- albeit an open door cage with a fine master. Do not feel sad…
sporte | September 22, 2008Wow! One of my commenters, Ms. Baker, suggested an entirely new way that scientists can help with science education. The only requirement is that a science class have their own blog.
So, if your science class has a blog, let me know, so I can share the URL and maybe recruit some scientists or at least graduate students, to take a look.
I think this idea is so great! It doesn't involve any kind of traveling and many, many different scientists can participate, thus minimizing volunteer burn out. It also gives students a way to practice writing about what they do and interacting with the…
rallain | September 14, 2008Can you believe it? Have you seen this video?
Are you thinking what I am thinking? WOW. How could these people not follow my rules for cool internet video. Once again, here they are:
1Keep the camera stationary. This way I don't have to keep moving the origin in the movie.
2Don't Zoom. Same reason, this video followed that rule.
3Include a clear and obvious calibration object. A meter stick would work, or even a Kobe Bryant (I can look up his height). Maybe it could be a Ford F-150 that has a known length. Something!
4Include the mass and height of all people involved.
5Use high…
rallain | September 14, 2008Friction in Line Rider
Is there friction in Line Rider? Does it function as physics would expect? To test this, I set up a simple track:
Basically, a slope with a flat part to start with and to end with. Let me show you something simple before further analysis:
This is the x-position vs. time for the line rider on the first horizontal portion of the track (before he or she goes down the incline). This shows the rider…
rallain | September 13, 2008There is no air resistance in line rider. Sorry to spoil the suspense.
To test for the presence of an air resistance force, a track was created that let the rider fall.
(note the markers on the side. These are used to keep track of how the origin is moving).
Below is the y position of the rider as a function of time:
In this situation, the rider falls about 100 meters. A quadratic line is fit to the data…
rallain | September 13, 2008Scale of the Line Rider
First, we assume that the line rider is on Earth and for low speeds will have a free-falling acceleration of 9.8 m/s2. Next, an arbitrary distance is selected. In this case the length of the sled is chosen to be 1 LU (Linerider Unit).
The goal will be to put the linerider in a free fall (where air resistance should be able to be ignored) and determine his (it could be a she, it is difficult to tell) acceleration in LU/s2. Then we can determine the conversion factor from LU/s2 to…
rallain | September 6, 2008Here is the video in question:
Looks too incredible to be real for me. That is when I start to question things. Is this fake or not? To answer this, I took a clip that showed a person launching a grocery item over the isle. This was a good shot to look at because it was *mostly* perpendicular to the camera view. I then used [Tracker video analysis (free) tool](http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/) to get x-y-time data for the flying projectile grocery. The scale was difficult, so I just guessed that the guy on the left was 5 foot 10 inches. Here is the vertical position data for…
omnibrain | August 26, 2008A classic Candid Camera prank using some social psychology.
I'll be posting many more of my Psych 100 videos as I run across them for the rest of the semester :)
omnibrain | August 18, 2008 Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings.
Check it out:
The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.
bleimanb | August 11, 2008Researchers at the New England Aquarium have stepped into a totally new method of studying Atlantic's threatened population of right whales - collecting and analyzing floating feces to test the population's health!
I didn't know whales ate corn!
Right whales got their name because they were the "right" whale to catch during whaling's hey day, when exterminating an entire species was jolly good form. Despite rigorous efforts to protect them against whaling interests, including Japanese "research" vessels, right whale populations have not increased noticeably in the last 65 years. In…
bleimanb | July 17, 2008Brits of all shapes and sizes have been spitting out mouth fulls of tea and shepherd's pie at the announcement that a strange unidentified insect seems to be running rampant across England, including London.
The black and red bug resembles the Arocatus roeselii, a rare central European insect, only Britain's bugs are significantly duller in color. It's not every day that an unknown species emerges in the center of one of the oldest cities in the world.
Click here to watch an informative video on the topic.
London's Natural History Museum will be analyzing specimens of the bug to determine…
zooillogix | July 7, 2008StickyBot is a robot designed by researchers at Stanford Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab as part of the Robots in Scansorial Environments project (RiSE). The robotic gecko tests their hypotheses about the "requirements for mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The main point is that we don't need more adhesion, we need controllable adhesion."
The site boils down the "key ingredients" as follows:
* hierarchical compliance for conforming at centimeter, millimeter and micrometer scales,
* anisotropic dry adhesive materials and structures so that we can…
omnibrain | June 18, 2008Check out Mother Brain from the Metroid series.
What other brains are featured in video games?
omnibrain | June 18, 2008Seriously.... wow.....I'd totally forgotten about the brain from the cartoons.
and....
Ohh... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How I used to love thee. I actually watched the most recent movie a few weeks ago. Do they really suck that much? I remember them being pretty kick ass. This is why growing up sucks - all your favorite cartoons from childhood blow now. Did you hear they are coming out with a Smurfs movie?