Daily Archives: February 7, 2010

Snowmageddapocalypse 2010

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Snowmageddon, aka the Snowpocalypse, has moved intothe recovery phase. I got about 2 feet of snow, but further north and in the hilly regions, they got more. 40″ in some areas (i.e. more than a meter)

My car. It’s not a minivan.

snowmagedapoc-10

I learned my lesson from the snowstorm in December and parked on the opposite row of the lot. The way they plow, the snow gets dumped on one side of the plow, and they don’t get as close to the cars. The people opposite me have 4 – 5 feet behind their cars, and it’s piled up, while I have no more than 2 feet. I dug out one gap between me and my neighbor yesterday, and will do a few shifts to complete the dig-out today. There’s always a little game of chicken in these situations — if you wait, your neighbor will dig out first and save you some effort. But they may also be assholes and dump snow in your cleared area, too. I was a good citizen and deposited the snow on the grassy knoll at the front of my car.

Baby it's Cold Outside

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Electric Charge Can Change Freezing Point of Water

[P]revious experiments to understand whether electric fields can influence freezing were complicated by the materials used. The best materials for holding electric charge are metals, but as anyone who has tried to open a car door after a snowstorm knows, ice forms easily on metals even without a charge.

“If you try to do it with metal, you don’t know what is from the electric field and what is from the metal itself,” Lubomirsky says. “We wanted to know whether it is the charge that does it, or something special in metal.”

Instead of metal, Lubomirsky and his colleagues used a pyroelectric material, which can form a short-lived electric field when heated or cooled. The researchers used four pyroelectric crystals, each of which was placed inside a copper cylinder. The bottom surfaces of two crystals were coated with chromium to conduct an electric charge, and the other two were coated with an aluminum oxide to keep the surface uncharged.

An obvious question, not addressed by the article, is why you couldn’t (or rather, why they didn’t) create an external field separate from the surface being used for the condensation and freezing, and see how that affected the freezing point. This doesn’t seem to differentiate between surface and bulk effects.

Graphic Images

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Arts: Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images

Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph.

A little like Matt’s Sunday Function over at Built on Facts, only with pretty pictures in addition to the graphs.