This is just mean. Mwuhahahaha.
To be fair, when the boss was away and I was in Haig-mode, I did direct this person to go to Z-burger and get some onion rings. I am an excellent driver manager.
Ohno, it's the Apollo Zone
Powerful Pixels: Mapping the “Apollo Zone”
The “Apollo Zone” Digital Image Mosaic (DIM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) maps cover about 18 percent of the lunar surface at a resolution of 98 feet (30 meters) per pixel. The maps are the result of three years of work by the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at NASA Ames, and are available to view through the NASA Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal (LMMP) and Google Moon feature in Google Earth.
I couldn’t get the flash player option (LMMP site) to work, but I was able to view it in Google Earth.
What the Angels Share
The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus
Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.
If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.
And So Are the Days of Our Lives
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
[The results are] better than I expect for cheap plastic timers that sell for less than $1 each– the uncertainty in the time is about 0.3% of the time, which is pretty darn good. But it’s actually much more interesting than that, if you dig into the data a little.
(Which reminds me I have a half-written timing post that somebody needs to finish)
Interlude
Four Mile Run, from about a month ago, on a nice warm day while I was geocaching. I had climbed down to the water and upstream a ways in a vain search and stopped to admire the scenery.
I also spied this. I’m guessing metamorphic, which might be a gneiss guess, but I don’t know schist from shinola.
When I decided to leave I forgot Spengler’s advice and I crossed the stream. Turns out wet rocks are really slippery because of the slime on them (curse you, low coefficient of friction! Mu-uuuuuuuu!). I fell in (only up to mid-shin, and it was a mild day, so no big deal) but also banged my elbow, which took a week or so to un-stiffen.
Losing the Lecture
Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool
[L]ecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.
Given that it’s been the form of instruction for such a long time, it must have some effectiveness. I have nothing against improving teaching techniques, but it seems to me this piece is doing a bit of attacking a straw man. It may just be that they have not properly defined the teaching style they are criticizing.
There’s the example of students not understanding that gravitational acceleration is independent of mass of the object, but the students “get it” after seeing the professor drop two balls. To me, that implies that the professor wasn’t doing that demonstration in the lecture. Similarly,
“Students have to be active in developing their knowledge,” he says. “They can’t passively assimilate it.”
implies to me that the professor isn’t doing anything to engage the students. Which, to me, is simply a sign of bad instruction. So if they are against the Buelleresque “In… what… waaayy… does the author’s use of the prison…” where the students are drooling on their desks, I’m there. But is anyone surprised that engaging the students gives better results than one-way verbal-only communication? Because that seems kind of obvious.
The Ventures Physics. Or Biology.
Walking or running efficiently, your locomotor muscles might not agree
So we’re good walkers, or at least economic ones. But the question is, what MAKES for this efficiency? How exactly are we burning fewer calories at a specific walking pace? Ideally, this means that our muscles, like our bodies overall, are at their most efficient at a moderate walking pace. The calories burned over time are the result of the total metabolic rate of all the muscles that produce locomotion. So since your metabolism is minimized at a moderate walking pace, creating the most efficiency, it would make theoretical sense that your individual MUSCLES are also minimizing their metabolism at that moderate walking pace, and the cumulative effect is one of energy efficiency.
The Roar of the Aurora
The video was shot at Kirkenes and Pas National Park in northern Norway — yes, northern Norway, around 70° north latitude.
2011: The Top 10, in Base 14
Greatest posts/year-in-review lists seem to be all the rage, so why not?
The top traffic posts that are not simply one of my many links, i.e. there is significant commentary or it’s an original piece. Not always about physics or technology.
Blogging: You’re Doing it Wrong! (Part 1) (and others in the series)
Time for a New Article on Time
Have You Checked the Woodworking Lately?
Thou Shalt Not Dilate Thy Time
Other physicis-y post highlights for the year
The Butler’s Name is Emissivity
Photography and Physics Tutorial: Filtering and Polarized Light
You Can’t Even Hope to Contain Him
And one non-physics highlight:
Look Ma, No Calculator!
Mental Math with Tricks & Shortcuts
I don’t think I could memorize more than a few beyond what I already know.