brainwagon

Long time readers of my blog may remember that I’m interested in rainbows (not unicorns, just rainbows). A while ago, I wrote a simple simulation that showed the formation of the primary and secondary rainbows by simulating the refraction of water inside a single raindrop. These two bows appear opposite the sun in the sky. […]

I got a tweet from twisst, the ISS pass prediction robot yesterday indicating that I’d have a good pass around 8:25PM. While I am fighting off a cold, the weather was beautiful and nice, and so I ran some path predictions to see what the path looked like, and also checked on ARISSat-1’s path to […]

This is awesome! MIT has created an interesting course as part of the their Open Course Ware project: it describes how radar can work, and as a final project, students were expected to build an test a simple radar system. Their description: Are you interested in building and testing your own imaging radar system? MIT […]

A couple of months ago, Collin’s Lab featured a story about making your own piezoelectric crystals from Rochelle salt. Collin stopped short of making an actual microphone though: he just demonstrated that the salt crystal would generate a series of voltage spikes when whacked with the handle of a screwdriver. Leafcutter John followed pretty much […]

While looking up some references on amateur nuclear fusion (don’t ask!) I found that Raymond Jimenez had written a cute 40 page book on his own experiments with a Farnsworth Fusor. You can apparently order a dead tree version from Lulu for $12.50, but it’s also available as a free download. Raymond Jimenez’s Storefront – […]

I subscribe to the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel which is produced by the University of Nottingham, and today, I noticed they had a new video on a subject near and dear to many a physicists heart: Guinness. If you think that beer is beneath the interest of physics, you should surf on over to Amazon.com […]

Back on June 7, there was a spectacular coronal mass ejection on the sun: Yes, I did mention this event and gave some links to VLF receivers at the time, but I’ve been thinking about this some more. As an astronomy/telescope buff, I have built simple telescopes for looking at the sun, but I haven’t […]

This morning’s massive coronal mass ejection from the Sun got me scrambling around trying to remember details of how amateurs can monitor solar flare activity during the current solar cycle. Mark Spencer, WA8SME, had some articles on building a small monitoring station that detected SIDs, or “sudden ionospheric disturbances”. The basic idea is to create […]

When I was still in grade school, I (and this will be a shock to my readers) spent a lot of time in libraries. Our library used to have a free bin, where they would toss things that they no longer wanted in their collection. One day, I came by and found a pile of […]

Doing a bit more reading, I found out that the equations that make up the Lorenz attractor (which are derived from a simplified model of 2D fluid flow with a superimposed temperature gradient) can also be thought of as governing another physical system. Imagine a water wheel, with a number of buckets spaced evenly around […]

Over sushi this evening, Tom mentioned “Chua’s circuit”, or “Chua’s oscillator”. I knew that I had seen this somewhere before, but failed to remember that Chua was also the guy who first theorized about the memrister: a circuit element whose resistance is proportional to the sum of the charges that has been passed through it. […]

I’ll just lead off with a picture: This is a graph of the so-called “Lorenz attractor”, first described by mathematician Edward Lorenz in his paper Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow back in 1962. I learned about this kind of stuff probably back in highschool by reading Scientific American. Anyway, the equations themselves are pretty simple, but describe […]

I’ve always been interested in crystals: their outer beauty hints at a certain kind of inner beauty, caused by the orderly arrangement of molecules at the atomic level. When I was a kid, I made crystals from sugar, salt, alum, and copper sulfate, but never tried Rochelle salts. Rochelle salts are interesting because they are […]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged that a group of students were planning to photograph the final launch of the shuttle Discovery from a high altitude balloon. What’s remarkable is that they succeeded. Click the link and surf on over to find what a couple of Android phones can do at 100K feet.

Interesting. A group of students are launching a high altitude balloon “some miles” from the launch site of the Shuttle Discovery at Cape Kennedy, and will be streaming the video of the event as recorded by a pair of Android phones on board. I suspect that any video so streamed will be less than stellar, […]