brainwagon

0.3 seconds of real time, stretched out to 90 seconds of video. Very cool.

While mucking around this morning, I bumped across the Sixty Symbols website, something I hadn’t seen before. It describes itself thusly:

Ever been confused by all the letters and squiggles used by scientists?

Hopefully this site will unravel some of those mysteries.

Sixty Symbols is a collection of videos about physics and astronomy presented by experts from The University of Nottingham.

They aren’t lessons or lectures – and this site has never tried to be an online reference book.

The films are just fun chats with men and women who love their subject and know a lot about it!

It’s worth noting many symbols have multiple uses across scientific disciplines and we somtimes tackle them from an unexpected viewpoint.

Click on “gamma” and you’ll find a professor of physics talking about cricket balls… Click on “rho” and we’re stuffing paperclips into coffee cups.

And sometimes when there’s no symbol to tell a story (like Schrödinger’s cat), well we just make one up!

However whatever symbol you click on, we hope you’ll see something interesting and maybe learn something new.

As example, check out their explanation of the drinking duck:

Great stuff,

Sixty Symbols – Physics and Astronomy videos.

Addendum: The original patent didn’t include the most important part of the drinking bird: his ubiquitous top hat!

Last night’s reading reminded me that I have never really been satisfied with my understanding of how siphons work. Apparently I’m not the only one, since there was this interesting exchange on Straight Dope which pointed out some of the disconcerting issues that surround explanations of their actions. I’m still not convinced I have a good understanding of their action. For example, in the cartoon above, it implies that air pressure pushes down on the tank above, but surely it also applies to the water below in the bucket, yes? I’m guess I’m skeptical about this “air pressure” idea. Tom suggested briefly in lunch that as long as the fluid’s vapor pressure was such that the weight of the downward column was insufficient to introduce cavitation, that the siphon action would continue. That sounds more like the truth to me, since it doesn’t rely on any notion of “atmospheric pressure” pushing on things. But I’m still not 100% satisfied with my understanding.

via The Straight Dope: How does a siphon work?.

Addendum: Wikipedia has a nice article, including some helpful math.

I’ve been interested in hydroponics for quite some time. It’s part of a growing interest that I have in sustainable and decentralized production of food and energy. At the Maker’s Faire, there was a display of a system which integrated both hydroponics and aquaculture: fish were grown in a tank, whose water circulated back to water some plants. This is called “aquaponics”. Digging around on the Internet this evening (hey, I was bored) yielded this excellent manual on a beginning system that uses a series of barrels. It seems very practical, and answers many interesting questions. The total amount of food produced is quite small, but the overall system is quite interesting. I’ll have to print it out and read up.

Faith and Sustainable Technology -- The Barrel-Ponics Manual.

Addendum: Here’s a little Youtube video detailing a system built by an amateur. It uses goldfish and carp fingerlings, and he is growing tomatoes and other vegetables and flowers.

Okay, before I get too excited, I’ll disclose that Cake was set to a time limit of around 1 second, which limited it to just a few ply (maybe 9 typically) and I was letting MIlhouse think a little harder (still taking less than 10 seconds typically). Still, it’s good: it means that sparring matches between milhouse and cake can be tuned to make them challenging. I need to figure out how I can build milhouse as an engine for CheckerBoard so this can be automated.

Perhaps I could use mingw to build an appropriate dll.

[Event "Morning Match"]
[Date "2009-05-04"]
[Black "Cake, 1sec per move"]
[White "Milhouse, 19 ply search"]
[Result "0-1"]
1. 9-13 23-19 2. 6-9 27-23 3. 11-15 23-18 4. 8-11 26-23 5. 4-8 30-26 6. 9-14 18x9 7. 5x14
22-18 8. 15x22 25x9 9. 11-16 9-6 10. 2x9 24-20 11. 8-11 26-22 12. 10-15 19x10 13. 7x14
29-25 14. 16-19 23x7 15. 3x10 28-24 16. 10-15 32-28 17. 14-18 24-19 18. 15x24 22x15 19.
9-14 28x19 20. 14-18 15-10 21. 12-16 19x12 22. 13-17 21x14 23. 18-22 25x18 24. 1-5 31-27
25. 5-9 14x5 0-1

Wow…. this is the 3000th post that I’ve made to my blog since it’s inception. Huzzah.

I really need to get a hobby.

In any case, Bill Meara over at the Soldersmoke blog mentioned this video about constructing solar cells from donuts and tea.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. It turns out that powdered donuts aren’t just white because they have powdered sugar on them, but because they also contain titanium dioxide. Who knew? You can read about them on Wikipedia.

Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 fragments resulting from the collision. I was curious what the resulting pattern would look like, so I wrote a bit of code to suck them all in and plot them on a map. Here’s what I got for a particular moment around noon local time.

The labeled points are the tracked location of the main body of the satellite. There are orbital elements for 48 additional fragments of Iridium, and 84 additional fragments of COSMOS. The main body of Iridium 33 was at 785km altitude, while Cosmos is down around 771km. Debris is scattered over quite a wide variety of altitudes, from a low of 284km to a high of 1158km.

You can find some occasionally surprising stuff on youtube. I’d seen a number of videos illustrating rapid crystallization of supersaturated mixtures of sodium acetate, but this is something a little different that I hadn’t seen before. Does anyone know what’s really going on here?

P.S. It’s “iodized” salt, not “ionized”.

Courtesy of hack-a-day, check out the following video illustrating an analog computer that implements the dynamics of a bouncing ball, not using a microprocessor, but just a circuit involving analog operational amplifiers.

Bouncing ball analog computer -- Hack a Day.

Thanks to Joanne, K9JKM for pointing out that Space Weather Radio is piping audio of Ursid Meteors crossing the radar fence which guards our country from the Ruskies. If you tune in, occasionally you’ll hear a rapid descending tone, caused by the radar bouncing off the ionized trails of meteors. Pretty cool.

This is the craziest bit of science that I’ve seen in quite a while.

Sticky Tape X-rays

Via hack-a-day, here is a link on creating your own ferrofluids. My first exposure to these was as part of the SIGGRAPH art show a few years back, check them out on Google video.

[tags]Ferrofluid,Science[/tags]

Most often when I link to someone else’s blog, it is because a particular article has tweaked some small bit of my interest.  These blog entries are often isolated, and the blogs that I link to often have a high noise to signal ratio.  It is therefore with some pleasure that I recommend Red State Rabble for your consumption.  It is the work of Pat Hayes, a writer who lives in Kansas and directly addresses some of the silliness surrounding the current “debate” over Intelligent Design.   In addition to being something of continuing interest to me, he’s a good writer with many good insights.  It joins The Panda’s Thumb on my blogroll under daily reads.

[tags]Science,Evolution,Creationism,Intelligent Design[/tags]

This is just too cool! Need to make a few million nanoscale smiley faces?

Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, figure out the right folding pattern, and then tell you what DNA staples you need to make that shape.”It’s really easy and fun, actually, to make whatever you want at the nano-scale. You design it in the computer, you order the DNA sequences, they come in the mail, you add a little bit of salt water, you heat it up and cool it down, and then an hour and a half later, it’s ready to look at under the microscope.”

[tags]DNA,Science,NPR[/tags]

Carmen noticed that the Google home page had a logo that included a telescope looking at Mars.   A moment’s digging revealed that there is a new version of Google Maps called  Google Mars. Now everyone can view VallesMarineris and Olympus Mons.  Cool stuff.
[tags]Mars,Google Maps[/tags]