Swans on Tea

Explosions, Fireballs in Virginia Skies May Have Been Russian Rocket
The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.
For the [...]

Pick me! Pick me! Adopt-a-physicist is running again this spring. Registration/sign-up is open as of today, with the forums open April 13 – May 1.
Help high school students explore what it’s really like to be a physicist – consider participating in Adopt-a-Physicist! In this program, people with physics degrees (at any [...]

A correction from an LA Times story editorial
Solar power: A Friday editorial said that according to the U.S. Energy Department, enough sunlight hits a “100-square-mile” portion of the Nevada desert to power the entire country. It should have said “100-miles-square.”
The commentary: On square miles
I’d argue that “square miles” and “square kilometers” really have [...]

YouTube has banned the James Randi Educational Foundation!?!?

I was waylaid by dust bunnies yesterday. It started in the lab; I was exposing the fresh layer of sticky mats as I usually do, and noticed that the air disturbance (quite a flourish if you want to get the sheet up in one motion) had sent some dust bunnies scurrying. I tracked [...]

Time-Lapse Video: Retreating Glacier
This remarkable image sequence captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about half a mile (1.6 kilometers), a volume loss of some 0.4 cubic miles (1.67 cubic kilometers) [...]

The issue that helped instigate the issue in the previous post was How long would you have to yell to heat a cup of coffee?, which Zz had linked to.
The analysis is fine up until this point
The average human yells at about 80 decibels, which carries along with it about .001 watts of energy
The 0 [...]

How Physics Can Solve Crime And Help To Cure Cancer
Zapperz has a nice little rant, after linking to a story that presents an order-of-magnitude solution to some trivial situation.
I also received a rather nasty and profanity-laced “comment” to the blog, which basically asked why us “MF’s” are wasting out time and not using our brains [...]

Optics basics: Young’s double slit experiment at Skulls in the Stars

Iron: 7.87 g/cm^3 Mercury: 13.5 g/cm^3
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

No bitterness rule
Advice on deciding on whether or not one should go to grad school. Striving to be realistic, without flavoring it too much in either direction.
[Y]ou should know the basic facts of grad school experience: most experiments do NOT produce useful results, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. You are [...]

Reuben Margolin’s techno-kinetic wave sculptures.
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video