xkcd: Physics for Entertainment
Physics for Entertainment was written by Yakov Perelman in the 1920’s (in Russian) and updated periodically through the 1930’s. There are actually two parts to it, but Volume 1 is long out-of-print (though findable online — more on that later). The book I have is a 1975 translation of Volume 2. The book is a series of a few hundred examples, no more than one or two pages each, asking a question that illustrates some idea in basic physics.
Elizabeth Kolbert has some not very flattering things to say about Levitt and Dubner’s new book. (along with RealClimate and several other blogs)
According to Levitt and Dubner, the story’s message is a simple one: if, at any particular moment, things look bleak, it’s because people are seeing them the wrong way. “When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists,” they write. “But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.”
Solutions do exist. But there’s money to be made in proposing easy solutions to difficult situations, and there’s a supply of credulous customers for quick fixes, assuming they haven’t spent all their money on diet- or male-enhancement pills.
AT Europe: London Close-up – The Amazing Staircase
Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Persistence, Jury-Rigging, and Ingenuity Against All Odds
A Malawian youth, whose family could not afford his school tuition, learns some physics and builds a windmill to generate electricity for his village.
William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his disposal, and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected things that most people would consider garbage-slime-clogged plastic pipes, a broken bicycle, a discarded tractor fan-and assembled them into a wind-powered dynamo. For a soldering iron, he used a stiff piece of wire heated in a fire. A bent bicycle spoke served as a size adapter for his wrenches.
We said that it’s simple, and it is: it’s a brick wrapped in a piece of paper.
If you don’t have a couple of bricks (and we didn’t), they turn out to be cheap at hardware and home improvement stores. These are “cement bricks” — red dyed cement– and cost about $0.25 each. Wrapping them up keeps them from scratching up your shelves and books, but also from depositing cement debris everywhere.
The geek part is on the outside.
The xkcd book is now officially available in the store!
Explained with cartoons. Amusing ourselves to death
Oh, crap.
Related — paraphrase of a quote I heard: For years we’ve been worried about the government spooks (FBI, CIA, NSA et. al) monitoring us against our will. Little did we know that all it would require to blissfully go down that path was to make cell phones widely available.
(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.
In the recent foray into the physics of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there was a comment on Chad’s post which mentioned Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear. I had read the first book in the series, so I picked this one up a few weeks ago, and since this is the Jell-0 of reading material — always room for it — I finished it while atomic physics was still leaking out of my ears.
It’s good. Detective Inspector Jack Spratt is in charge of the Nursery Crimes Division, responsible for investigating any crimes involving anthropomorphized animals or persons of dubious reality from works of fiction, especially nursery rhymes. Vaguely reminiscent of Douglas Adams in terms of zanyness, but it all makes some weird sort of sense. As promised, the thermodynamics of the three bowls of porridge (a quasi-controlled substance, permissible only in rationed amounts) gives Jack a major clue to solve the intertwined mysteries in the book. There is another physics nit, though. It’s a spoiler, though, so stop reading if you plan on reading the book. Continued below the fold.
Continue reading
The Science of a Really Bad Day
Interview with Peter J. Bentley, PhD, the author of The Science of Why Sh*t Happens