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If cuteness were a fundamental force, the plushies from ParticleZoo would be the strongest attractors in the universe.
Check out the plushies from the particlezoo, you can get just one, starting at $9.75 or get a whole universe in a box. Handmade wholesomeness, with a dose of particle physics and a sprinkle of whimsy!
Visit them at http://www.particlezoo.net
Around the World in 80 Telescopes: I am eagerly awaiting the start of the webcast of around the world in 80 telescope. It starts on 4/3/09 at 9.00 UT; so about an hour from now for me.
The 24-hour long webcast is organized by the European Southern Observatory for the International Year of Astronomy cornerstone project 100 Hours of Astronomy.
The webcast event follows night and day around the globe to visit some of the most advanced observatories on Earth and in space, exploring the universe in visible light and beyond.
The Gemini North Telescope (Hawaii, USA) and the large observatories at the summit of volcanic Mauna Kea are scheduled for the first stops in the program beginning April 3 at 1 Am PST.
Others on the schedule include the Swift Satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (Hanle, India), and the 10-meter South Pole Telescope and IceCube Neutrino Telescope (South Pole, Antarctica).
‘Live from Mars’ layer to view the latest images from NASA’s THEMIS camera on board the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, sometimes just hours after NASA receives them. You can also see live satellite orbital tracks, or check out where the HiRISE camera plans to image next.
Another interesting feature added to Google Earth is the ‘Guided Tours’ feature. If you’re not sure where to go on Mars, Google lets Bill Nye and Public Radio’s Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday show you around. You can go to the Mars Gallery layer, and double-click either of their tours for a narrated trip around the Martian surface. Google claims that this is a great way to introduce oneself to some of the most interesting spots on the planet - just sit back, and enjoy the ride. If something catches your eye, you can pause these tours at any time and explore on your own, then hit play to resume your journey.
Apart from these features, there’s a browseable layer of Google’s favorite satellite images, visible and infrared global views, geo-located excerpts from A Traveler’s Guide to Mars, and others. Google has also included 3D models of NASA rovers. Also, you can use the search box to locate famous sites like the ‘face on Mars’, just like surfing Earth.
Some of the hi-res images are absolutely stunning.
The 11th Annual Physics Fun Day at Knott’s Theme Park was on March 5th. Local students use Knott’s rollercoasters as a giant science lab with local educators joining together with Knott’s educational staff to create a variety of learning contests and games centered on the park’s thrill rides.
Almost all major theme parks have a physics day. Take a budding physicists to one of the theme parks on physics day - they will have a blast.
Here is a report that was filed on the recent Physics day at the Knotts Berry Farm.
BUENA PARK – Most classrooms don’t come equipped with hurtling roller coasters or flume rides to demonstrate scientific principles such as gravity or friction.
Instead, 8,000 middle and high school students from as far away as Las Vegas arrived at Knott’s Berry Farm on Thursday, packing accelerometers, protractors and stopwatches along with their cameras and sunglasses.
They spent the day calculating the height of steel towers and the angles of roller coaster loops, all while keeping their brains going with ample supplies of funnel cakes and French fries.
“It’s the best field trip so far,” said Karrissa Duncan, 12, a sixth-grader at St. Angela Merici School in Brea.
Senior Catherine Nguyen, 17, and three of her Westminster High School classmates scribbled numbers furiously underneath the Boomerang roller coaster.
“What we’re learning is we can apply actual physics to rides. They’re not just made-up numbers,” she said, adding some of the challenges handed them by their teacher required them to board rides to take speed and other measurements. “So it’s fun, too.”
That’s exactly what former Westminster High School science teacher Jim Pacelli had in mind when he approached Knott’s 11 years ago about holding a physics day. He didn’t come up with the idea, but wanted a location close to Orange County students.
His motivation was simple.
“No matter how many (physics) experiments we do in the classroom, some students are convinced it’s smoke and mirrors,” Pacelli said. So, he gathered a few other teachers together.
“We went through every ride they had in the park at the time, and thought, ‘How does physics apply?’” he said. Each year since, every corner of Knott’s Berry Farm has become a science workbook.
In addition, students competed to make the tallest towers from sheets of paper or tried to craft paper airplanes to fly through a hoop and onto a target.
Fountain Valley High School Senior Paula Nguyen, 17, took part in the competition to get extra credit from her teacher. Her plane came up short of the hoop, but did make a finely executed – though unintended – loop before it crashed.
“It did better than what I expected,” Nguyen said as she shrugged, acknowledging aeronautic skills were not her forté. “I thought it would just fall. But it made a loop, and that was pretty.”
Students work with their inclinometer to measure the height of Supreme Scream at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Physics Day.
A beautiful poster design from American Physical Society.
The poster was also sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and by the Society of Physics Students.
A train that describes how one might travel through spacetime was discovered in the Bolivian desert by a physics teacher.
The old locomotive itself must have pushed the boundaries of space and time due to its mysterious location in the desert and its signs of old age. The unique feature of the train is the expression painted on the engine and signed by A. Einstein.
This equation not only answers the question of how gravity works, but it also describes black holes, gravity waves, bending of light, planetary motion, and the shape of the universe.
The observer on this particular day was Monica Witt, a physics teacher at Friends Seminary in New York City, who discovered this fascinating artifact while hiking through the Bolivian desert.
Source: Physics Central
My physics class were feeling unmotivated to revise for their upcoming Intermediate2 exam. So I gave them all a banana and challenged them to write as many physics equations on them as possible. I think we got 23 on one.
Brilliant - physics revision, combined a good source of magnesium, potassium, calcium and fiber too.
Infinity - Breaking The Rules.
It could have been bolder in which infinity symbol didn’t need to break a metal mesh to get through; but I do agree with the sentiments.
Source and Credit: M-War’s Deviant art.
Neutrinos they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed: you call It wonderful; I call it crass.
John Updike (1932-2009)
via Cosmic Variance
Scene: It’s a fine sunny day in the forest, and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his laptop.
Along comes a fox, out for a walk.
Fox “What are you working on?”
Rabbit “My thesis.”
Fox “Hmmm. What’s it about?”
Rabbit “Oh, I’m writing about how rabbits eat foxes.” (incredulous pause)
Fox “That’s ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don’t eat foxes.”
Rabbit “Sure they do, and I can prove it. Come with me.”
They both disappear into the rabbit’s burrow. After a few minutes, the rabbit returns, alone, to his laptop and resumes typing.
Soon, a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hardworking rabbit.
Wolf “What’s that you’re writing?”
Rabbit “I’m doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves.” (loud guffaws)
Wolf “You don’t expect to get such rubbish published, do you?”
Rabbit “No problem. Do you want to see why?”
The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself, after a few minutes, and goes back to typing.
Scene: inside the rabbit’s burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner, a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room, a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.
Moral: It doesn’t matter what you choose for a thesis subject. It doesn’t matter what you use for data. What does matter is who you have for a thesis advisor.
Lion’s Watch Repair Business
Scene: It’s a crisp, sunny fall day. Lion is strolling through the forest enjoying the fall foliage, when he sees Fox walking towards him down the path, head drooping down.
Lion
“Hello, Fox. Why are you looking so gloomy?”
Fox
“It’s been like this all week. First my cub got sick, then the car started making a funny noise, and last night I accident put my watch through the washing machine and it quit working.”
Lion
“Well, I can’t do much about the child or the car, but I can fix your watch for you.”
Fox
“That’ll be the day. You with your big claws? You would have trouble picking up the watch, let alone fixing the insides. You’ll just break it even worse than it already is. I’d better take it into town.”
Lion
“Let me take it into my den for a couple minutes. You’ll be surprised.”
So he disappears into his den with the watch. A few minutes later he returns: the watch is fixed.
Later in the week, Lion is sitting in the warm sun by the river, when Wolf comes running by, looking flustered.
Lion
“Wolf, why are you headed into town? I thought you wanted to work on your grant proposal?”
Wolf
“The hard-drive on my laptop crashed last night, so I can’t get anything done until I get it fixed.”
Lion
“I can fix that for you real quick: there’s no need to walk all the way into town.”
Wolf
“What? You? The lion whose paws are too big to even type on my keyboard? The one who left great blue smears on the trees when he tried to paint his front door? I don’t think so.”
Lion
“You’d be surprised: just let me give it a try.”
So the Lion takes the laptop into his den. In a few minutes, he returns with the laptop, now working fine.
Scene: inside the lion’s den
In one corner, next to the coffee machine, is a smug-looking lion lying on a couch cleaning his fur. In a second corner, there are piles of IEEE Computer, Byte Magazines, and Viz Comics reaching up to the ceiling. In the final corner, there are seven industrious rabbits surrounded by tiny parts and precision tools.
Moral: It doesn’t matter whether you can write working programs or prove theorems. It doesn’t matter whether you can do a slick demo or generate pretty pictures. What really matters is whether your graduate students can.
The simplest solutions are often the cleverest and they are also usually wrong! So the search for simplicity is guided by what Einstein taught us : “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Simplicity doesn’t mean lack of complexity - simplicity just means you stop appearing complicated to others; like fractals - which are very complex, yet simple in many ways. The fractals became simpler, not because the complexity goes away, but because one understands the underlying simplicity and the simple self repeating patterns.
For a physicist, understanding the complex is the final achievement; the understanding breeds simplicity and hence the euphamistically, simplicity becomes the final goal.
The most noble, powerful and meaningful wish that one can bestow upon a physicist is that they discover simplicity in their endeavours.
So my new year wish for all visitors is that:
“May you have a simple 2009!”
Happy New Year!
I sometimes joke that if the physicists were given all the laws of Physics and asked to create a universe, we might have come up with galaxies, and stars and suns and moons and mountains and may be even rain, but we would have never ever come up with a rainbow!
An exceptional picture of a rainbow. It was taken by Eric Rolph in Alska at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Click for a better view.
You can, of course see the double rainbow, but you also see supernumerary rainbow ; at least two of them!
On the inner fringe of the primary bow you will notice that the colors start repeating themselves for what appears to be two more cycles. Supernumerary rainbows are clearest when raindrops are small and of similar size.
