Video
drorzel | February 25, 2014This week's episode of Uncertain Dots is, if anything, even more free-form than previous weeks, including a brief cameo from one of Rhett's kids:
Topic covered include the arrangement of faculty offices, the relative lack of demos for E&M (compared to mechanics, where there are endless videos to analyze, etc.) a little bit about science journalism and sports journalism, how we deal with (or don't) the problem of including background information in our blogs, the need to sometimes bring your kids to campus or cancel classes, teaching while sick, tracking the flu, precision measurement and…
drorzel | February 12, 2014I didn't advertise it heavily this time, but Rhett and I did another G+ hangout yesterday, and the video is online now:
We talked for a while about the wonders and importance of VPython coding (including some "Oh, I should totally do that..." moments), where we get post ideas (including a discussion of luge physics), briefly about how we put stuff together for posts, and a bit more about physics education research and why it's really difficult.
I had hoped to throw together a quick post about the luge thing for today, but that's probably not going to happen, so you'll have to settle for the…
drorzel | February 11, 2014Last week, Rhett did a post on animating a bouncing ball in VPython. This was mostly making a point about the distinction between real simulation and animation, along the lines of yesterday's post on social construction of videogame reality. But, of course, my immediate reaction was, "That's not how a bouncing ball looks..." This is how a bouncing ball looks:
(As you can see from the watermark, I'm trying out a new video editor...)
This is footage of four different types of balls bouncing on a lab cart in our stockroom, shot in gratuitous slow motion (240 fps) because I'm still playing…
drorzel | February 5, 2014Both SteelyKid's kindergarten and the snow-day day-care program that the kids go to were closed today, which kind of threw a wrench in things. But it's also kind of fun, as I got to spend some time playing outside with SteelyKid on her play set in the snow. The "featured image" above is a cell-phone snap from this, and I got three short video clips of her going down the slide.
Of course, it's kind of stupid for these to be three separate YouTube clips, but when I went to stick them together using Windows Movie Maker (which is what I've used for this sort of thing in the past), it turns out…
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
drorzel | January 21, 2014What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term:
The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that.
Anyway,…
drorzel | January 18, 2014Kate is off at Arisia this weekend, so I took the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's. Where we've had good fun sledding and playing with a variety of toys. I'll be driving home Sunday afternoon, and my parents will be bringing the kids back on Monday, which is the MLK holiday in the US, so a day off for people who aren't college faculty.
In honor of all this, I give you the unique musical stylings of SteelyKid and The Pip, performing their hit song "Oh My Gosh" live in Grandma and Grandpa's basement:
Hope your weekend was a tenth as much fun as theirs.
drorzel | January 15, 2014One of the labs we do in the introductory E&M class I'm teaching this term involves investigating charged particles with sticky tape. If you haven't seen it before, "invisible" tape picks up an electric charge when it's peeled off a surface quickly, and with a little care, you can create both positively and negatively charged tapes and investigate their interactions.
For Monday's class, I wanted to do a demonstration of one of the questions we were discussing, which involved the attraction between two objects with opposite charges and how that changes when you insert something between…
drorzel | January 11, 2014Friday night was a home game for Union's basketball teams, so I picked SteelyKid and the Pip up a little earlier than usual, and took them to the women's game (which starts right around the time day care ends and ends right around their usual bedtime). You might wonder what it's like taking the pair of them to a sporting event. Well, wonder no more:
It's pretty much that, for an hour and a half. There was also a stretch were they were throwing dice behind the elevator (the thing they run around in the video) like a couple of junior degenerates.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle…
esiegel | January 10, 2014“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” -Douglas Adams
Even though our main blog has moved, I'm so glad that the questions and suggestions have still been pouring in, because it's time for another entry in our Ask Ethan series! Today's question comes from professional physicist Marty Olsson, who asks:
I have been bothered for a long time why the Milky Way looks curved, sort of like…
drorzel | January 3, 2014I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there's anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo!
To break it in, I got the kids to help out by re-creating a classic slow-mo physics trick: the slinky drop:
Note that when SteelyKid lets it go, the bottom doesn't really move until after the entire length of the spring has relaxed. You can clearly see this in the still frame that's the "featured image" at the top of the post.
And since The Pip has…
esiegel | November 10, 2013"My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die." -David Mamet
As a theorist in physics, most of my research time is spent looking for errors in painstaking calculations, writing and running simulation code, and trying desperately to connect some very abstract concepts to potential observables in either experiments or the Universe.
But for experimentalists, the key difficulty is always some variation on one unifying theme: getting good data. That's why this weekend, I'm proud to bring you a fantastic takeoff of Daft Punk's Get Lucky by the…
drorzel | September 10, 2013A couple of months back, TED put out a call for auditions for a chance to speak at one of their events. They asked for a one-minute video, and I said "What the hell, I can do that. I need an 'elevator pitch' version of the book-in-progress anyway." This is the result:
So, if you've got a couple of minutes to spare (one minute for the video, plus the better part of a minute for miscellaneous buffering/ network nonsense), check it out. That's as compact a statement of the core argument as I have.
And it was apparently pretty good, because now I get to put together a six-minute version to do…
esiegel | July 6, 2013"If I see a spider in my house, I put it in a cup, and then I take it outside. I save it. What is wrong with me?" -Jacqueline Emerson
There's something not only incredibly useful but also beautiful about the intricate structure of a spider web. It's such a universally admired phenomenon that it's become a metaphor for many other things, as Welbilt sings you in their song,
Spiderweb.
Dependent on the type of spider and various environmental factors, the web can take on any number of beautiful shapes.
Image credit: Darlyne Murawski, via National Geographic Society, 2007.
Image credit:…
esiegel | June 26, 2013“...the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” -Carl Sagan
As many of you know, I'm fortunate enough to live in a city that values science and scientific knowledge so highly that the our local news station, KGW, routinely brings on scientists to talk about the lastest developments in our endeavors to understand the Universe around us. Just last week, I was invited to share five wonderful minutes of airtime with the viewers of not just Portland, OR, but (thanks to the web)…
esiegel | June 9, 2013"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction." -Oscar Wilde
It's an intense world out there, and life can leave you weary in many ways. And sometimes, making your way through each day makes it feel like the whole world is watching, and there's no hiding. Have a listen, this weekend, to The Basement's song,
I Just Caught A Face.
Sometimes, no matter how hard we try to put our best face forward, we come off as stand-offish (or worse) to the world.
Image credit: ©2009-2013 ~lalalietta of deviantART.
Well, what if that person with the confrontational look on their…
drorzel | May 12, 2013SteelyKid has a new prize possession: a training-wheel bike!
You can't quite hear what she says at the end of this, when she stops the bike, but it's "That should be a full video!" She knows her fan base.
On the way back, she wiped out (the first bad crash on the new bike) and has been much more cautious since. But she's practicing a lot (around the neighborhood, in the Field House, around the neighborhood again...), and will hopefully gain confidence.
Here's hoping your weekend brought you something a tenth as much fun...
drorzel | May 8, 2013An astute observation from SteelyKid, as part of her jumping game:
With bonus photobombing by The Pip toward the end.
drorzel | April 24, 2013The playground outside SteedlyKid's day care, amazingly in this litigious age, has a merry-go-round, a rotating disc with a really good bearing. The kids can really get the thing flying, which is kind of terrifying at times. But on the bright side, it's an excellent venue for the physics of angular momentum:
In the embedded video, SteelyKid runs in and starts the merry-go-round spinning, then jumps aboard and goes around one full rotation before moving to the center for a few rotations, and then starting to move back out.
This isn't exactly what I was hoping for-- amazingly, a four-and-two-…
jtoney | April 23, 2013It was an unexpected journey, from the George W. Bush Shake, the Barack Obama Hug to the Harlem Shake.
Appreciation from the President of the United States is one of the highest honors any American can receive. No, it wasn't me, but the best part is that it was one of our students.
I have been very fortunate in my own education having learned from two mentors awarded the National Medal of Science (Prof. Tobin J. Marks and Prof. Stephen J. Lippard.) Each received a hearty handshake from President George W. Bush. Perhaps some of my work in their labs helped get them there, along with a…