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Weekend Diversion: Holiday Roundup, Reviews and an out-of-this-world Giveaway!

esiegel — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 15:31:54 +0000

Weekend Diversion: Holiday Roundup, Reviews and an out-of-this-world Giveaway!

"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending." -Fred Rogers

I know it's still the middle of November, but I know that many of you are already thinking about holiday gifts for the lovers of physics, astronomy and the Universe in your life. People send me books and other educational materials throughout the year for review, and although they all have good and bad points about them, I'm happy to pick out the best ones and share them with you. Have a listen to the influential, unique sounds of Nightnoise while we go through them, performing what should be a classic,

The Sussex Carol.

In three different categories -- books, posters and calendars -- I'd like to share with you my favorite gift ideas for the physics-and-astronomy enthusiasts in your life (just like last year), with a special offer and giveaway at the end!

Image credit: Rhett Allain / National Geographic.

1a.) Book #1 (for ages 7-11): Angry Birds Furious Forces! Rhett is a professor of physics and the science blogger who runs Dot Physics, and I assume everyone knows what Angry Birds is: one of the most fun and addictive flash games of the past few years. Rhett has a great way on his blog of finding the physical simplicity behind everyday phenomena, and I've been impressed with his thorough physics analysis of Angry Birds in the past.

That said, this book was not written for me: an adult who knows some physics and enjoys a good game. Instead, it's a tour of some basic physical concepts, beautifully illustrated (as you'd expect from a National Geographic publication), with the birds serving mostly as color commentary for an introduction to examples of various concepts-in-action as maglev trains, popping popcorn, and roller coasters, among others. (Chad Orzel has more, here.) If you know a smart kid interested in the physical sciences who's in (or achieving at the level of) the upper elementary grades, this is the best book I've seen this year to get them!

Image credit: The Theoretical Minimum, via http://theoreticalminimum.com/.

1b.) Book #2 (for adults who didn't major in physics, but wish they had): The Theoretical Minimum, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky. I went into this book with low expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised. While most books that offer introductions to physics fall into one of three categories -- thorough but bland textbooks, feel-good popularizations with little substance, or historical accounts of a particular field -- this one takes a new tact that I haven't seen before: a conversational tone backed up by rigorous examples-and-problems with a very particular, strong perspective on physics. For the crowd that at one point though about majoring in physics, never did for whatever reason, and always thought, "I'd really love to get back into it someday and/or learn what I missed," this is the closest thing to that (non-existent) book you're going to find.

This book is not without its flaws: there's a huge set of discovered errors in the equations that's fast approaching triple digits, there are some basic definitions (like that of the meter) that are many decades out of date, and the examples used are often completely (and unnecessarily) detached from experiment. For the subject it covers in-depth -- classical mechanics -- that's a choice that will no doubt alienate the vast majority of physicists. Susskind and Hrabovsky's perspective has value, though, even if it's incomplete and flawed; it's the first-and-only book of its kind that I know of, and worth considering if you're an aspiring armchair physicist who'd like to develop and strengthen your foundation.

Image credit: Roger Wiens / Basic Books.

1c.) Book #3 (for adults who love space exploration): Red Rover by Roger Wiens. A tale of unmanned space exploration as told by an insider, this is a slow, meaty but rich read. Those of you who are interested in the inner workings of NASA and the technical and economic challenges faced by the scientists striving for the loftiest of goals on the tightest of budgets. This is a personal and emotional story as well -- of one scientist working on just one particular aspect of many missions -- that tells the tale of a deep and intense fascination with the Universe beyond our world.

Warning: this is an incredibly depressing tale if you read it (as I do) from the perspective of someone who thinks investment in scientific research is vital to the future success of the human endeavor. It's crushing to realize -- over and over, as the book makes clear -- how much we could know, learn and achieve with paltry additional investments, and yet they never come. One is left with the impression that even the most talented and competent instrument builders need to get lucky just to have a chance at success. At the same time, the optimism and the enthusiasm from every scientist involved shines through, and the missions are treated with unconditional love. If you'd like to know more about the robots we've got exploring the Solar System and the humans behind them, and you've got the patience and effort for a slow read, this is the book for you.

Image credit: Erik Anderson / Ashland Astronomy Studio.

2.) Poster: The Ashland Astronomy Studio Moon Calendar by Erik Anderson. I've seen plenty of Moon calendars over the years, and this is the first one I'm happy to rave about! Pretty much every calendar out there shows you the daily Moon phase/illumination, but very few of them show you all the details you'd care about if you were a night-sky enthusiast, including:

the actual angular size of the Moon on that day,
the monthly perigee (closest approach to Earth) and apogee (farthest distance from Earth),
the exact illuminated shape/face of the Moon, including lunar libration,
the timing of planetary and bright-star conjunctions,
the timing of ascending and descending nodes (when the Moon crosses the Earth-Sun orbital plane), and
which constellation the Moon can be found in on any given night.

But this 2014 lunar calendar includes all that and more!

Image credit: Erik Anderson / Ashland Astronomy Studio.

Even supermoons -- when full Moons coincide with perigee -- are denoted here, as are lunar eclipses and the one Solar Eclipse (a partial) visible from the Northern Hemisphere. There's also a very handy Moon Calendar User's Guide that will help you get the most out of yours, filled with fun facts.

Image credit: Erik Anderson / Ashland Astronomy Studio.

It's also a very good size and great quality for the price, at 36" x 18" (or about 91 x 46 cm) for just $15. You can follow the link to the studio directly or to Amazon, where it's eligible for free shipping.

And finally...

Image credit: The Planetary Society / Steve Cariddi.

3.) Calendar: The Year In Space 2014 Calendar, by The Planetary Society and Steve Cariddi. To me, a wall calendar is only as valuable as how often you look at it, and how rewarding it is to you when you look. I've been using the 2013 calendar all year, and I love it. I'm used to calendars being small-ish and having one main picture on them, with maybe the day's Moon phase on it. This calendar, on the other hand:

is huge, taking up 16" x 22" (41 x 56 cm) when it's open,
full of facts, astronaut/scientist bios, and NASA mission photos and science,
a monthly sky summary of where to find naked-eye planets,
astronomical conjunctions and occultations, with quantitative angular distance information,
and my favorite part of it that keeps me looking daily: interesting anniversaries of discoveries, births and historical phenomena!

Each month has its own unique theme and layout, which you can preview here; this is June, as an example.

Image credit: The Planetary Society / Steve Cariddi.

Best of all, they're not only extremely inexpensive, but you can get a discount (free US shipping / greatly reduced international shipping) on your order by clicking the "Internet" button and leaving a note that Ethan of Starts With A Bang sent you!

But there's even more! We did a giveaway last year and these calendars were so beloved by you that Steve Cariddi has offered to do one again, so here's the deal as of right now:

Submit your next Ask Ethan question here, and leave an email address for how to get in touch with you. Whoever's questions are chosen for the next five Ask Ethan columns will get a free calendar shipped to their address, courtesy of Steve and the Planetary Society at no charge!

The calendar was MSNBC's Science Geek Gift of the Year for 2013, and I wouldn't dare recommend any other calendar as long as this one is out there!

Hope you enjoyed this early holiday roundup, and looking forward to your best questions for the upcoming giveaway!

esiegel Sat, 11/16/2013 - 10:31

Tags

the theoretical minimum

year in space

Calendrical Innovation

drorzel — Fri, 27 May 2011 09:51:54 +0000

Calendrical Innovation

Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June.

As you can imagine, this is a topic of intense discussion among the faculty, with both systems having their strong partisans. And as often happens, there has been an attempt to revive the debate in email this week, when everybody is cranky and exhausted at the end of the Spring term.

I find myself somewhat distressed by the constrained nature of the discussion, though. By considering only the trimester and semester options, we are missing out on a major opportunity to differentiate Union from other colleges, as called for in the strategic plan. Thus, I think we need to think more "outside the box," and consider some more innovative and distinctive calendrical changes.

For example, there's the Julian Calendar, used successfully for centuries, but tragically abandoned starting in 1582. Not only would this reform fit with the best traditions of the liberal arts, it would provide a great opportunity: when Tsarist Russia finally abandoned the Julian calendar in 1918, they needed to "skip" 13 days to synch up with the Gregorian calendar. Moving back to the Julian calendar now would require us to add two full weeks, not part of any existing month or academic term. Think what a boon that would be for faculty productivity!
Adopting the Maya calendar would not only show respect to non-Western traditions, its current trendiness would give us a hip and edgy sort of senibility that would be attractive to bright and creative students. The disadvantage of such a switch would be that the system of three interlocking calendars used by the Maya is very complex, but if we move quickly, we could take advantage of the fact that all three cycles start over from zero next December. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Moving even further out of that pesky box, we could consider a rationalization of the whole calendrical system. For example, while there are 365 days in the year, we mark the passage of time in 7-day weeks, leading to all sorts of mathematical inconveniences. If we switched to a system of five-day weeks, all the problems of incommensurate numbering would be avoided. This would also likely be a big hit with students, especially if we kept the two-day weekend, which would give them at least 40% weekend time, which is what many of them are really after.
Going even more rational, we could adopt the second-based system used by the spacefaring Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, where time is marked off in "kiloseconds," (16 minutes and 40 seconds) and "megaseconds" (about 11.6 days). This would provide great advantages for those of us in the physical sciences, who would no longer need to worry about confusion induced when converting between archaic units like "miles per hour" and the clean and sensible "meters per second." The down side of this system is that it doesn't match very well with natural day-night and seasonal cycles, but then, we are academics, and nobody expects us to know what time it is, anyway.
The most extreme rationalization would be to move to the "natural units" of theoretical physics, marking the passage of time in Planck times. If coupled with a switch to a natural length standard, this would eliminate the need to remember the speed of light (which is 1 in these units). As a bonus, having classes lasting 7.2x10⁴⁶ time units would force students to become more comfortable with scientific notation.

I am sure there are countless other historical, fictional, or physical systems we could use as inspiration. Feel free to suggest your favorite in the comments. We shouldn't miss this great opportunity to set ourselves apart from the pack, and boldly lead the academy forward into the Century of the Anchovy.

drorzel Fri, 05/27/2011 - 05:51

Tags

century of the anchovy

How about the French Revolutionary Calendar? It would show a healthy contempt for royalty which many of us would appreciate after the transatlantic fawning over the royal wedding.

Even more fun, every day of the year has a unique name, which could lead to no end of amusement. "Our meeting to address underage drinking problems will meet on absinthe."

I do so like the Mayan system. And you really don't need to mess with the Long Count over the average academic's career -- the Calendar Round gives a unique name for every day over about 52 years. Plus, 5 day new year!

The calendar in Steve Brust's Dragaera has a 289-day year, with 17 months of 17 days, each named after one of the 17 Houses of the Dragaeran Empire (all named after animals). We might have to rename some things to make it more comforting to Earth-based students -- they might remember 'panther' more than 'dzur' for example, though I think 'dragon' and 'phoenix' would pass, and 'hawk' and 'orca' need no change.

I propose a new unit of cumulative academic time: the mester. A typical lecture would last 10 centimesters, a course lasts one mester, and you'd need to accumulate at least a kilomester to graduate. I call it "the mestric system."

(The Standard Reference Mester, consisting of pure, unalloyed navel-gazing, to be housed under a bell jar in the basement of the Sorbonne.)

If years are important, you could measure everything in years or fractions thereof. A milli-year is approximately a workday, which is convenient.

If you want a rational calendar try the ancient Egyptian one. 12 months of thirty days, divided into three 10 day weeks, plus five non-days! Is approximately one quarter of a day too short and so slides backwards against the natural year, which didn't bother the old Egyptians who retained it for four thousand years!

Of course the best is the Shire Reckoning of the Hobbits.
http://shire-reckoning.com/calendar.html

You can use the same calendar every year, because the weekdays don't creep around.

Come on, nobody's mentioned the Discordian Calendar yet? As a bonus, the ddate utility already exists on unixlike systems.

Calendars? Just get rid of them! Let anarchy rule!

I second the revolutionary calendar! You can amend it to have two days off in each ten-day week, instead of just the one. I'm sure you can find a good use for the extra work days.

Although the moment of the Revolution is rather arbitrary, of course. I suggest you start your counting of years at the moment of Creation, like the Jewish calendar does.

You could call it the Rankine calendar ;)

Just to point out that Caltech is also on a quarter system, and has been for at least 40 years.

We're on quarters at OSU as well. We're switching over to semesters beginning in the 2012-13 academic year. The administration promises a smooth transition, but much of the student population, myself included, suspect that it's going to be a mess in which a lot of people get screwed in various ways. Gargantuan institutions like OSU rarely move gracefully. Personally I'm graduating Spring 2012, and couldn't be happier to be getting out in time.

@ Anna. Good point about the second day off. We might also want to put a third somewhere in the middle of the workdays, thus providing a half-time break.

I thought the calendar described @5 was of Babylonian origin and, like many other things in our timekeeping system, reflected a base 60 number system. The 5 (or 6, in a leap year) extra days were basically an extended New Year or Saturnalia festival.

That would mean five or six days of bowl games, in our system.

Obsessive numerology note:
The beauty of base 60 is that it is 5x4x3 and thus divisible in many ways. The flaw is that it is not divisible by 7, the day that the Hebrew God rested.

The OSU or one of the others? (Ah, Google tells me it is THE OSU.) I am sure they are being driven by the Football Calendar, a calendar that somehow escaped Chad's notice.

Chad, part of your discussion might include a comparison of your current calendar, the current OSU calendar (a full 10 weeks, that is 50 class days, plus finals week in the fall) to their proposed one (which looks identical to ours) with a total of 141 days (plus two weeks for finals) in a year.

You can do a lot of physics in those 9 days. Think about what two weeks of physics you will omit from your first-year course. I'll tell you from experience that it is not a small effect.

I'll also add that you only think your faculty are burned out right now. Semesters, even with a spring break, are a long haul for students and faculty alike.

Side comment: The OSU Fall 2012 calendar (Wed start to Tue finish with a weekend in the middle of final exams) is both innovative and potentially problematical. Students with Thurs and Friday finals will party all weekend and into the next week while the poor kids with Monday finals try to study.

You can do a lot of physics in those 9 days. Think about what two weeks of physics you will omit from your first-year course. I'll tell you from experience that it is not a small effect.

We've already done that. The local practice is to claim that our ten-week trimester courses are actually equivalent to semester courses at other institutions; as a result, our engineering students only take two terms of physics, not a full year. As a result, we're already trying to cram two semesters of physics into only 80 class meetings (3 lectures/week plus lab). As a result, we skip a lot of stuff that would be in a one-year intro program at a semester school.

The issue of quarters for Caltech or THE Ohio State University is a very different one as far as student opportunities go. It's very difficult for even our best students to do REU programs at other institutions, because most of the summer programs start before our classes end. This puts our students at a disadvantage when it comes to graduate school admissions-- they can do lots of REU-type stuff here, but it's not the same thing. If a student at Caltech or tOSU gets excluded from off-campus REU because of schedule conflicts, well, they're not losing that much by doing REU stuff at Caltech or tOSU. Certainly not as much as our students lose by staying here (though it's good for our faculty, I suppose...).

What you are doing makes me wonder how your engineering school stays accredited. They must have some extra classes to make up for what you leave out, unless you are very careful to teach to exactly what ABET requires. But then you mess up what physics majors see, and fix that with an extra class. (Actually, that might be a better way in general.)

The REU problem is caused by the pressure of R1 football programs to have students on campus in August to fill the stands. (I know that is what drove two universities to make the change, even though they would deny it.) Your students could, for example, participate in the ones at tOSU.

I wonder if anyone has studied success rates in the two systems. You can actually see students burn out in those last 5 weeks, especially in the spring.

How about getting rid of the year and just using days? You can divide the days into centidays, millidays, and microdays, and for bigger units you can have dekadays, hectodays, and kilodays.

P.S., restoring the Julian calendar would require adding *13* days, not two full weeks.

Calendar laser-etched onto fingernails

sciencepunk — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:49:40 +0000

Calendar laser-etched onto fingernails

I love to see new and inventive ways of measuring the passing of time, and especially I love this fabulous "Digital Calendar" (haha) that Bre Pettis laser-etched onto his fingernails.

sciencepunk Thu, 05/14/2009 - 04:49

Tags

If by "fabulous" you mean "a insipid waste of time", and by "calendar" you mean "an uneven yellowing list of the names of the month without any actual dates", then yes, I agree.

Sorry for the double-post. The system hung on me.

"calendar" schmalendar: I wanna iPodNail!

How accurate would that be? Do fingernails grow at a regular pace? I'm pretty sure that differing nutritional conditions, and some diseases, can lead to slower nail growth.

And if he gets one of them caught in a car door or something equally unfortunate it will all have been a bit of a waste.

What if he gets a hangnail? Does he time travel?

Kunjarra Ceremonial Grounds

grrlscientist — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:59:59 +0000

Kunjarra Ceremonial Grounds

tags: Kunjarra Ceremonial Grounds, environment, NewScientist, Image of the Day

Kunjarra Ceremonial Grounds.

This picture shows laminar flow amongst the clouds, as air currents of different density -- generated from distant thunderstorm cells -- collide over the granite boulders.

Image: Barry Slade, 2007 (NewScientist calendar 2008). [Much larger view]

grrlscientist Wed, 12/26/2007 - 08:59

Tags

Kunjarra Ceremonial Grounds