Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remarks at Senate Commerce hearing on the future of our space program
Mathigami
Origami exhibit at Cowell College opens April 8 with public talks
A physicist and engineer, Lang is a pioneer of the cross-disciplinary marriage of origami with mathematics. Demaine, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done seminal work in the field of computational origami, working with his father, artist and sculptor Martin Demaine, to create abstract origami sculptures representing complex mathematical algorithms.
Not Necessary on Hoth
Me Tarzan
This cheetah
This video shows a demonstration of the “Cheetah” robot galloping at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour (mph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set in 1989.
The robot’s movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.
Plumbing the Plums, and Beyond
1901 — the year the nuclear atom was “invented”!
[The] planetary model is an important one historically, and was accurate enough in its time (and still today) to forgive its faults. It arose naturally in the early 1900s, in a period of great confusion and uncertainty about atomic structure. With tantalizing and rather bewildering experimental hints, scientists speculated wildly about the nature of the atom. The strongest contender was the “plum pudding” model of J.J. Thomson, in which atoms were visualized to be a “pudding” of positively-charged fluid within which were embedded negatively-charged electron “plums”. In Thomson’s original paper, these plums were arranged equidistantly around a circle within the pudding and orbiting within it
The Boy with the Electrical Dragon Tattoo
Meet Winston Kemp, Lightning Strike Survivor and Lichtenberg Figure Owner
We’ve all heard stories about people getting struck by lightning — usually as some sort of cautionary tale, but how many of us have ever seen the effects of lightning on a human? Winston Kemp, a 24 year old electrician, has had first-hand experience, and now he also has a unique and possibly permanent bit of body art to go along with it.
I have a Lichtenberg figure, which did not require me getting personally zapped.
The Wolf had Asthma
Wake up and smell the bacon.
Beyond Death and Taxes
One more thing is certain: some beginners will trip up on physics concepts. It’s a new way of thinking, and it takes getting used to.
Dot Physics: Constant Force and Constant Motion
It seems that every semester when this discussion comes up, someone says this:
“Well, I think that a constant force will make the thing go at a constant speed. It just makes sense. Look at your car. You push on the gas pedal with a constant force and the car goes at a constant speed.”
For some reason, the students think of pushing the gas pedal with a constant force as the same as pushing the CAR with a constant force. Perhaps this is because the gas pedal is part of the car. Maybe they are just trying to bring one of their own experiences into the discussion.
I don’t think that this is unreasonable — a constant amount of gas to the engine should mean a constant force. But it’s not the only force, since there is air resistance and rolling friction balancing the effect of the engine. I think that the problem is more the difficulty in conceptualizing a single force without any other forces on the object — we don’t have much experience driving in a vacuum.
Thinking About Thinking
Here's the Antidote
All too often the peripheral sports stories we hear or read — the ones that aren’t game summaries — are about people (or organizations) behaving badly. This is one of the exceptions: When There’s More To Winning Than Winning
When last we left the NCAA, it was February madness, colleges were jumping conferences, suing each other, coaches were claiming rivals had cheated in recruiting — the usual nobility of college sports.
And then, in the midst of all this, the men’s basketball team at Washington College of Chestertown, Md., journeyed to Pennsylvania to play Gettysburg College in a Division III Centennial Conference game.
Another story from a few years back, cut from the same cloth.