Calamities of Nature – The Truth About Physicists
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
Tom Lehrer, “Smut”
Category Archives: Physics
Waving at Google Earth
Google Earth’s Lessons in Wave Mechanics
Logiurato’s interest is in the wave dynamics that the images reveal. To demonstrate this, he has selected a gallery of beautiful images showing phenomena such as diffraction, refraction and interference.
Happy European Perihelion
A non-arbitrary (or less arbitrary) annual event. Th Bad Astronomer has said it was yesterday, but that’s Jan 5, 01 hours, UTC — it depends on where you are. In Europe/Africa and latitudes east, it is the 5th.
'Tain't Funny, Mogees
Mogees is an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime audio mosaicing.
In this video we show how it is possible to perform gesture recognition just with contact microphones and transform every surface into an interactive board.
Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds.
OMG, that’s awesome.
Ohno, it's the Apollo Zone
Powerful Pixels: Mapping the “Apollo Zone”
The “Apollo Zone” Digital Image Mosaic (DIM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) maps cover about 18 percent of the lunar surface at a resolution of 98 feet (30 meters) per pixel. The maps are the result of three years of work by the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at NASA Ames, and are available to view through the NASA Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal (LMMP) and Google Moon feature in Google Earth.
I couldn’t get the flash player option (LMMP site) to work, but I was able to view it in Google Earth.
What the Angels Share
The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus
Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.
If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.
And So Are the Days of Our Lives
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
[The results are] better than I expect for cheap plastic timers that sell for less than $1 each– the uncertainty in the time is about 0.3% of the time, which is pretty darn good. But it’s actually much more interesting than that, if you dig into the data a little.
(Which reminds me I have a half-written timing post that somebody needs to finish)
The Roar of the Aurora
The video was shot at Kirkenes and Pas National Park in northern Norway — yes, northern Norway, around 70° north latitude.
2011: The Top 10, in Base 14
Greatest posts/year-in-review lists seem to be all the rage, so why not?
The top traffic posts that are not simply one of my many links, i.e. there is significant commentary or it’s an original piece. Not always about physics or technology.
Blogging: You’re Doing it Wrong! (Part 1) (and others in the series)
Time for a New Article on Time
Have You Checked the Woodworking Lately?
Thou Shalt Not Dilate Thy Time
Other physicis-y post highlights for the year
The Butler’s Name is Emissivity
Photography and Physics Tutorial: Filtering and Polarized Light
You Can’t Even Hope to Contain Him
And one non-physics highlight:
Why there is Line of Sight, and not Line of Sound
Everyday Science: Why Can You Hear Around Corners But Not See?
[W]e’ll start with a question: why can I hear my cats around the corner, but not see them?