Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this “Sports Science” clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I’ve been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett’s just working on a “misery loves company” theory, here: […]
Category: Everyday
Energy Dissipation in a Physics Toy
A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid’s toy Newton’s cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video: I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn’t have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, […]
The Evolution of a Sad Balloon
A few years back, I did a couple of posts on the physics of a sad balloon (that is, a helium balloon that can no longer lift itself up to the ceiling), the first on simple buoyancy, the second on how long it takes for the helium to leak out. These were based on only […]
026/366: Pancakes in Infrared
The image here of a pancake cooking isn’t particularly interesting in its own right, other than as documentation of our weekend ritual at Chateau Steelypips. Saturday and sunday mornings, Kate sleeps in while the kids watch cartoons and I cook pancakes for them. SteelyKid absolutely drowns hers in maple syrup, then refuses to eat them, […]
020/366: Scratch Work
I got a little bit of time today to play with the new lens, which included a couple of nice shots of the kids. I’m trying not to have this be “photo of the kids of the day,” though, so here’s a different shot making use of the limited depth of field of the f/2.8 […]
SteelyKid and the Makey Makey
A couple of weeks ago, after one of my Forbes posts, I got contacted by a publicist working for Makey Makey. They really wanted publicity in Forbes, but that’s above my pay grade; I did, however, say that it sounded like the sort of thing my kids would get a kick out of, and I […]
A Quantum of Sunshine
It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd’s take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid. Sadly, it’s now grey and dreary, […]
My Quantum Alarm Clock
One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can’t get enough of “spooky action at a distance,” but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes […]
The Physics of Our Back Gate
It’s winter, and as usually happens in winter, I’m having a hard time opening the gate to our back yard. Why? It’s not the snow, it’s physics. We have a standing policy that as much as possible, Emmy goes in and out through the back door for walks and small-animal-chasing in the backyard. This has […]
Winter Thermodynamics: Foggy Glasses
We’re having a brutal cold snap at the moment, and while today’s early-morning dog walk was considerably warmer than yesterday’s, it was still 0F/-18C out, which is way colder than I like. When I came back in the house after the walk, my glasses instantly fogged up. But I had to take some stuff outside […]