Voting in the US presidential election? Can’t make up your mind? Match-o-Matic II
Choose which quote you agree with most on several topics, and find out which candidate is your dream date ideological match.
Or take my strategy of maximizing the number of holidays I will get from presidential funerals.
The First Excited State takes on approximations with Assume a spherical physicist
Everybody who’s taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous. Everyone, that is, except for the physicist. Let’s say that N is a really huge number, like if someone dumped an entire truckload of M&M’s in your driveway. If you turned your back on me to watch the truck drive away, and I threw another M&M in the pile while you weren’t looking, would you really notice? What if I snuck one while you were looking to the sky to thank God for this miracle? No, you’d really have no idea. So in this case, for all practical purposes, N+1 = N-1 = N. We make this approximation all the time in my statistical mechanics class, where N represents some astronomically huge number, like the number of water molecules in your glass.
There’s also the trick of rounding numbers to 1, 2 or 5 in order to get an approximation when a calculator isn’t handy. You can usually get within a factor of 2 and perhaps better, depending on how crudely you round things.
In the Uncertain Principles Links Dump I find a pre-owned physics blog. (pre-owned: Not new, but new to me. It’s been refurbished, having been moved to new blogging software from an old program that didn’t work so well, so it appears newer than it actually is. So far as I know)
A lot of good physics, including several posts on basic concepts:
Basics: Vectors and Vector Addition
Significant figures what are they for and what do they have to do with uncertainty?
sig-fig-stickler
Oh, yeah. Say that three times fast.
Update: Basics: Fundamentals of Algebra, posted today
The Giant’s Shoulders: third edition is up over at Entertaining Research.
It is illegal to make false claims in a TV or radio commercial unless you are running for political office.
If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.
If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent.
Not a bad idea — forcing candidates airing political ads to substantiate their claims. We’d get rid of the “my opponent molests collies” ads. (Unless your opponent is Judge Smails and Ty Webb has some real proof)
Air Hog Zero G micro car. Think “reverse hovercraft” — a fan inside makes it hug the wall or ceiling.
The car is 6″ long and perhaps 3″ wide, and the shipping weight of the whole thing is 2 lbs, so let’s say that 1 lb is for the car. (sorry, no SI units for this. Imperial units given, and this is just a quick ‘n dirty analysis) So you need somewhere around 0.1 psi of pressure differential generated by the fan to have it “stick” to the ceiling.
So I ran across a version of the conversation that most physicists have had over on the Shores of the Dirac Sea (and it’s a new blog, so welcome to the blogohedron!)
The other thing that has happened is that I’ve had many conversations in airplanes where I have realized that people in general do not have a clue as to what physics is all about and why it is so important for humanity. The conversations go like this:
Passenger- Nice to meet you.
DB- Nice to meet you too.
Passenger-So what do you do?
DB-I’m a physicist.
And then the person who is staring at me, if he does not decide that he is too scared, gives me one of the following lines:
1. I see. So what is that good for?
2. So you’re good at sports?
3. That was my worst subject in high school.
4. I never understood physics
5. You must be a genius.
6. I wanted to be a physicist, but I became an engineer instead.
1 is at least addressable with some blurb about basic science being important. And I get to tack on how I sorta help make GPS work.
2 has never come up. Especially if I’m playing sports. (Oh, I used to play hoops and was able to set a pretty mean pick and occasionally get off the ground for a rebound, or pretend to play football or volleyball, but good? Nah.)
The combination of 3 & 4 I’ve heard (not necessarily on airplanes) is “Oh, I hated that when I took it in high school/college” which really takes the starch out of my sails, especially because they start inching (centimetering?) away from you, as if they expected you to start teaching them physics again at any second, like the Monty Python encyclopedia salesman sketch
Burgler!
If I let you in you’ll teach me physics.
No, ma’am, I just want to ransack the flat.
Alright (opens door)
Mind you, I don’t know if you’ve considered the advantages of being able to solve the ballistic pendulum problem on your own.
Anyway, what’s up with the “I hated physics” response? I generally don’t denigrate anyone else’s profession when I first meet them. Well, unless they’re a lawyer.
5 is a toughie. I don’t know how to respond to “You must be smart/a genius!”
Options:
“And handsome, too.” But they don’t know me, and might not appreciate my sense of humor.
“Why yes. Yes, I am. I am incredibly smart.” As with the previous answer, it comes off as arrogant if they miss the signs that it’s humor. But if you go the opposite direction with “No, not really” it could be even worse, because if you’re not really smart and still understand physics, where are they in the grand scheme of things? It’s a lose-lose situation. And they still have that student-in-the-headlights look of someone afraid I’ll start lecturing. No, I think you have to thank them for the compliment and quickly change the subject.
6 — I’ve never met an engineer who told me that. Several of them confided that they didn’t understand why they needed to take physics, which scares the socks off me. I have to refrain from asking that subset if they worked on the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
Interactive singles map of the US. There are sliders so you can narrow the age range, and choose your span. It does not adjust for singles in relationships. No, it doesn’t go under 18, you perverts.
[T]he only two places with a surplus of women in the 20-29 age bracket are New Orleans, LA and Springfield, MA? Lynchburg, VA pops up, too, if you lower the minimum required population.
Someone with a little time on their hands, feeds some AC/DC into their laser (OK, technically the waveform of the music), and watches the trapped atoms “dance”
The low-pass filtering means it responds more to the bass and drums.