silliness
drorzel | January 13, 2011I am in Florida for a meeting this week, having flown from Albany to Ft. Lauderdale. Due to the vagaries of the air travel system, though, this required a change of planes in Orlando. The Orlando-Ft. Lauderdale flight is sufficiently short that I like to think of it as a ballistic route-- you're not cruising at altitude for any significant time, but start going down practically as soon as you're finished going up.
Let's imagine that we have a commercial enterprise-- let's call it Angry Birds Airlines-- that wants to fling objects from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale. What would that require? That…
drorzel | January 3, 2011The clock in my classroom for this term appears to be set five minutes slow. Which is an improvement over the one in the hall that's ten minutes slow, but kind of plays hell with starting and ending class on time. It is, however, a great excuse for a poll:
Clocks in academic buildings should be set:survey software
Combine the odd clock settings with our daft class schedule (to make our ten-week terms nominally equivalent to standard semester classes, we teach in 65-minute blocks instead of the more typical 50-minute blocks. This means that classes start and end at odd times, which I've never…
drorzel | January 3, 2011It's the first day of the new term, and the projector bulb that was working on Friday decided to stop working by Sunday. After that bit of excitement this morning, plus my lecture, I'm beat. I always forget how much talking is involved in intro physics lectures.
My class for the term is the first term of introductory physics, which seems like a good idea for a poll:
What is your favorite part of Newtonian physics?online survey
Given the book we use, "The Momentum Principle," "The Energy Principle," and "The Angular Momentum Principle" would be better names for what I've got in mind, but it's…
drorzel | December 16, 2010I'm very pleased to announce that the Uncertain Principles Person of the Year for 2010 is... SteelyKid:
Why do I say this? Well...
First, as lots of people will tell you, we're all citizen journalists now. Which means that I'm every bit as entitled to declare a person of the year as Time magazine is.
Second, everything in Chateau Steelypips revolves around her, so she is clearly the most important and influential person here.
Third, she's way cuter than Mark Zuckerberg. Granted, I don't have a picture of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a napkin as a hat for direct comparison, but I like my odds on…
drorzel | December 11, 2010It's time now to talk about two of the greatest mentor figures in the literature of the fantastic. You know their stories well, I'm sure, but the parallels between them are eerie:
Both are gruff but kindly mentor figures who provide crucial guidance for the young and naive protagonist of the story as he moves out into a scary world to complete an important quest.
Both fall into a chasm while battling a fearsome monster to allow the protagonist time to flee.
Both return from their apparent death when least expected, just in time to save the day.
Both have awesomely impressive beards.
I am…
drorzel | November 25, 2010It's Thanksgiving here in the US, so blogging will be light to nonexistent. For the sake of those looking for a quick escape from the chaos of a family gathering, or, you know, those poor benighted souls in other countries for whom this is just another Thursday, here's a thematically appropriate poll about science:
What are you most thankful for?online surveys
Have a great holiday/ Thursday.
drorzel | November 22, 2010I don't think this one requires any explanation:
Hello:customer surveys
Staying up watching the Giants game last night was not conducive to getting anything useful done this morning.
drorzel | November 16, 2010(With apologies to Georg Cantor)
Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park.
Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space.
Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding the space. Consider a point P on L. There are an infinite number of lines passing diagonally through P at an angle greater than the smallest angle θ at which a car pulled into the space will intersect each of the bounding lines once. Any car parked parallel to one of these…
drorzel | November 10, 2010Having posted not one but two snarky political entries in recent days, I feel like I owe the Internet a couple of ResearchBlogging posts to make up for it. It's the last week of classes here, though, which means I have a lot of frantic work to do. Thus, a frivolous poll inspired by the cinnamon rolls I had with breakfast:
The sugary white stuff on top of baked goods is:survey software
While this will almost certainly get more votes for "I will explain in a comment" than comments-- that seems to be an Internet tradition-- it's still a classical poll, and thus you must choose one and only one…
drorzel | November 9, 2010I'm taking a bit of flak in comments to my silly Bob Dylan post from Sunday, with various right-wingers spontaneously popping in to tell me that JFK cut taxes. My initial reaction to this is to think that supposing a perfect equivalence between JFK cutting the top rate from 90% to 70% during a time of relative peace and prosperity and our current economic scenario is yet another demonstration of the fine grasp of historical and mathematical reasoning that makes the Tea Party crowd such a treat.
But, then, it occurred to me that maybe their claim is that it's the act of cutting taxes that…
drorzel | November 7, 2010I bought the Witmark Demos a week or so ago, because I could always use another 50 Bob Dylan songs, and listening to them on shuffle play has managed to earworm me with one song in particular, "I Shall Be Free", which it occurs to me has great current relevance:
Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren"
You might think Dylan's plan for prosperity through importing attractive foreign women is a little fanciful, but it's…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I'm spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I'm avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don't want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here's a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid's continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon:
How does a cow jump over the moon?
The father of one of SteelyKid's classmates, who is not originally from the US, asked why there's a cow jumping over the moon in that (or, as SteelyKid puts it: "Cow jumping MOON!!"), and I don't have a good answer. I'm aware of the nursery rhyme and the Tolkien joke, but why…
drorzel | October 27, 2010It's late October, which means that the thoughts of small children and adults who have never quite grown up turn to selecting appropriate costumes for Halloween. In the spirit of these literary suggestions and these abstract concept suggestions, I thought it would be useful to offer some suggestions for physics-themed costumes, for those who want to dress as something from the greatest science.
Of course, there are some really obvious choices for physics-themed costumes (Einstein: rumpled clothes, white hair, distracted manner, German accent; Feynman: black pants, white shirt, brushed-back…
drorzel | October 25, 2010I almost forgot something that I need to do today, so no lengthy and detailed blogging this morning. Instead, a quick poll regarding Neil Gaiman's suggestion of giving kids scary books for Halloween:
Neil Gaiman suggests giving kids scary books for Halloween. What do you think?online surveys
Halloween is a classic holiday, which means you're bound by classical rules, and can only choose one item, not a quantum superposition of multiple options.
(I think he means giving scary books to kids you know or are related to, not handing them out to Trick-or-Treaters, but it's more amusing to picture…
drorzel | October 20, 2010As a sort of follow-up to yesterday's post asking about incompetent teachers, a poll on what you might call the "Peter Threshold," after the Peter Principle. Exactly how many incompetent members can an organization tolerate?
The acceptable level of incompetence in any organization (that is, the fraction of employees who can't do their jobs) is:Market Research
This was prompted by one commenter's estimate that 30% of business managers are incompetent, which seems awfully high to be acceptable, particularly in the business world where, we're told, incompetents are regularly fired without…
drorzel | October 15, 2010A big and important argument about religion and science has flared up again on Twittter. It occurs to me, though, that nobody has taken the obvious step of polling people about their actual beliefs, so let's see if we can't settle this question with (social) SCIENCE!:
I would prefer to be a member of:Market Research
What? It's not like this is any more pointless than the actual science-and-religion argument that's going on in blogdom.
drorzel | October 15, 2010Standing around in the cold for a few hours yesterday, then driving for almost five hours has given the cold SteelyKid had a week or so ago the opening it needed to infect me, so I'm all hoarse and achy this morning. Which means you get silly blogging, such as this poll inspired by some edits I had to make to this week's lab in the intro E&M class I'm teaching:
The code for those little colored bars on electrical resistors is:online survey
I know you'd like to be able to click more than one answer. Life's tough. Get a helmet.
sastyk | October 13, 2010Great article from "The Annals of Improbable Research" on "Artificae Plantae: The Taxonomy, Ecology and Ethnobotany of Simulacra." It is about time someone did this research:
A previously unacknowledged plant family of significant economic importance plants has been flourishing around us for many years. The fact that this immense and diverse family has been heretofore ignored by most botanists is astonishing--its members are found worldwide in nearly every society. This family is more than a botanical curiosity. It is a scientific conundrum, as the taxa:
1.lack genetic material,
2.appear…
drorzel | October 12, 2010SteelyKid is a big fan of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon, which, if you haven't spent the last sixty-odd years in a cave, you probably know features a bunny saying goodnight to a variety of objects in a great, green room. The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?"
Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the…
drorzel | October 11, 2010SteelyKid, like most toddlers, knows a few songs, and likes to sing them over and over. Her repertoire is limited to "ABCDEFG" (the alphabet song, but that's how she requests it), "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Some man" ("This Old Man," which I only figured out this weekend), and "Round and Round" ("The Wheels on the Bus"). I get a little bored with the repetition, and so tend to make up my own verses, which get sideways looks from her, followed by telling Kate "Daddy's silly!"
I've been posting a lot of these on Twitter over the past several days (@orzelc), but for posterity, a few physics-related…