Following the suggestion and subsequent reminder (nothing like a deadline to get the creative juices flowing) from gg at Skulls in the Stars, I’ve got two “old” papers that I’m going to summarize.
I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a [...]
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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
Story of Richard Feynman working at Thinking Machines.
Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always [...]
The surprisingly rich physics of peeling paper
[T]he physics of peeling paper almost exactly mimics the stick-slip movement of tectonic plates, right down to the statistics of the time between “quakes” and the correlations between released energy and aftershock activity.
From the preprint, “Line creep in paper peeling:”
For paper, we use perfectly standard copy paper, with an [...]
An electric fly-swatter, over at Built on Facts
Press the button on the side and swing it at the fly in the air; there’s a spark and a pop, and the fly falls out of the sky like a little brick. No mess, and dementedly entertaining (I’ll admit it). Yeah it’s a little redneck, but effectiveness [...]
As if a physicist fence could keep us out or in.
He informs me that it is actually a “physicist fence” which is used to keep the physicists on campus and prevent them from roaming free in the community and administering random physics lessons to unsuspecting citizens.
Don’t forget: we know how to tunnel. We [...]
McNugget numbers
10 optical illusions in 2 minutes
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via Neurophilosophy
Outsider Science
To merit their attention, professionals say, an outsider would have to show that he’s done his homework. Serious contenders have to understand the language of physics and get their math right. Most importantly, any new theory must agree with past experiments.
[...]
Frustrated amateurs can be aggressive, clamoring to have their ideas heard. Not surprisingly, physicists [...]
Pat Metheny on Kenny G
I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like [...]
NASA preps for ‘7 minutes of terror’ on Mars
[T]hey have to get the lander on the ground, and that’s where the worry comes in. In fact, they have a name for it in the Mars exploration community: “seven minutes of terror.”
Seven minutes is all it takes for a spacecraft travelling neary 13,000 miles per hour [...]
Top . . . men.
No, not the Ark. It’s Indiana Jones and the Conservation of Momentum at what looks to be a new physics-y blog, Built on Facts
Haven’t seen the new movie, so I’ll just take their word for it.
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