Category Archives: admin

D B S A B-Z B

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(That’s a line from William Steig’s wonderful book, CDB!)

I’ve been busy. I’m off to a family reunion soon and have been getting things prepared for my trip. Since I wanted to have something in the queue for when I am away from the internet, I’ve been hoarding posts. A few are ready to go, and a few just need a little polishing (yes, I often polish, even if it doesn’t look like it). Things shouldn’t go completely dark, and I should have some more video to add to the pile of unprocessed files, since I think my nieces and cousins (and perhaps the older relatives, too) will want to investigate the wonderful world of slow-motion.

Vote Early, Vote Often

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I meant to link to this before, but forgot until I ran across it again — 3 Quarks Daily is going to award prizes for good posts in the blogohedron

[I]n the interest of encouraging and rewarding good writing in the blogosphere, we have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields. Here’s how it’s going to work:

Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.

You can read the announcement and rules here

Feel free to nominate any post you like — mine or anybody else’s.

Voting is now open. Here’s the list of nominees.

Interlude

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I’m off to DAMOP. I’ve got a few posts in the queue, but other than that I’m probably diving deep and going silent until next week.

In the meantime, have some Jell-o shots. (1000 fps)

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

(update: I don’t know what the interference is there at the end — it’s not on the original. I’ll upload the video again when I get back)

Update II. Done. The same problems persist in the uploaded video.

Rolling Followup

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Last week I posted Rolling, Rolling, Rolling, with the video about the moment-of-inertia problem with the liquid-filled and ice-filled soda cans. Nick submitted the post to reddit (Thanks!), and I got a spike in traffic about 25x normal, for a day or so. That makes it (by far) my most popular post to date, and also the most popular home-grown post (I had gotten a spike or two from some interesting links I had posted).

One of the questions asked at reddit was what would happen if the ice was fee to move inside the can, so I tried that experiment — and there was no noticeable change. Even though the ice was riding on a layer of water it still spun up, and to the resolution of the video, the lag between the ice can and liquid can is the same. Water has pretty strong adhesion to a surface, and the entire interior surface of the can and exterior surface of the ice are interacting, so this shouldn’t be that surprising. Liquids, on the other hand, can be thought of as a very large number of layers (laminar flow), which gives much weaker coupling.

There are one or two other experiments I could run that require a sealable container, and so aren’t convenient with soda cans. I should be able to acquire some transparent sports bottles that should do the trick. If I can think of any comparisons that give non-intuitive results, I’ll post them.

Self Deprecation

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My blog host folks have a good sense of humor.

pfn

Pseudoscience Forums. Heh.

Last year they did a word swap. IIRC, if you wrote “science” it came out as “religion” after you posted, along with a couple of others.

Forecast and Stuff

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Expect scattered posts to continue for the next two weeks. I’m off to the Great White North-of-the-Pennsylvania-Border.

My recent blogging has been light; I’m in my fantasy football league Superbowl for the first time, and these players require constant monitoring. (Two weeks ago I was way behind and implored my defense (Cardinals): rather than give up a score and increase my deficit, they should get a turnover and run it back for a TD. Which they did, just a minute later. See?)

Vay Kay

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Taking a week off, and I don’t expect to be blogging much, if at all. I have a couple of posts in the queue, though, so if I have internet access they’ll appear.

Bloghide!

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Blogrolling, rolling, rolling, keep them blogs a-rolling

Blog Roll How To (howto) at Greg Laden’s Blog.

What does a blog roll do for the blogger? Well, it allows the blogger a way to give and receive link love. Link love is not a form of on line cybersex. It is in part a replacement for one on one professional contact that occurs in Meatland. Entry on a blog roll is a nice thing to do for someone else. If a blog roll is very short, you are either looking at a new blogger or an asshole. (I’m talking about the total length of blog roll, not the displayed portion). I know of several bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time but have fewer than 40 or so sites on the blog roll, three or four of them being links to the blogger’s own sites. Independent evidence suggests in many of thes cases that the blogger is an asshole. The correlation is astoundingly strong.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course. If you are reading this, you are an exception, I assume.

[…]
Most blog ranking services can easily detect and thus devalue links in blog rolls or blog rolling posts, but the truth is that if I put a link to your blog on my site, you get an increase in techorati ratings (and other ratings) …. and visa versa …. even if the link is in a blog rolling post. The ranking sites may devalue (depending) such links, but these links are not meaningless, so I assume that as ranking sites evolve over time, this is recognized for what it is.

(By the way, many bloggers claim that ranking is not important to them at all. Those would be the bloggers with low ranks.)

Linking posts you like or blogrolling blogs you read on any kind of regular basis is win-win, if people return the favor. To quote Chekov (Pavel, not Anton) “. . . and we all move up one step in rank.”

With all this in mind, it’s time to update physics-y blogs I’ve been visiting on occasion that somehow had not been added yet.

Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
sciencegeekgirl
The Mind of Dr. Pion
Cosmic Variance
Asymptotia