Or, so some of my students in my Intro Physics lab think. Hopefully when you read the title you were ready to get your typing fingers ready to disprove me. You probably would have made an argument akin to the following mini-lecture. Gravity is a force between objects/particles proportional to the objects' mass. Newton's universal gravitation looks like this: Fg = - G m1m2/r2 where G is a proportionality constant, the m's are the masses of the two objects in question, and r is the d
It's really amusing to me that everyone is freaking out about this canonization stuff, mainly because this is what happened to me several years ago. As someone who ended up disagreeing with new canon information during BIONICLE's initial tenure, let me assure you: the new canon is meaningless. Even if Greg Farshtey says that Toa can transform into gigantic dinosaurs and feast on souls, it would mean absolute bupkis. Why? Because the fun of BIONICLE isn't what's officially created, but what we,
In no particular order, some fun physics jokes. Ready? GO! My friend was trying to talk to me about atoms, but I got Bohr'd. Did you hear that Albert Einstein developed a theory about space? It was about time, too. Never trust an atom; they make up everything. The oddly pleasant feeling of looking down on a physicist as they finish the last of their drink. The strange charm of a top-down bottoms-up. Why does hamburger have less energy than steak? It's in the ground state. Why are physics bo
Today I want to talk about something awesome: Special Relativity. It's a theory that was developed by this guy you may have heard of, Albert Einstein, and it's from this theory that arguably the most famous equation in physics, E = mc2, comes from. I'm not going to talk about E = mc2 today (in fact, I've already talked about it, but it's not the whole story!), but I wanted to talk about two other cool consequences of Special Relativity (SR), time dilation and length contraction. First and fore
I'm taking a second pass at this one. Instead, I'm going to talk about chaos. Chaos is complexity that arises from simplicity. Put in a clearer way, it's when a deterministic process leads to complex results that seem unpredictable. The difference between chaos and randomness is that chaos is determined by a set of rules/equations, while randomness is not deterministic. Everyday applications of chaos include weather, the stock market, and cryptography. Chaos is why everyone (including identica
With the rebirth of BIONICLE, a great debate has arisen, and I am now able to put all of our qualms to rest. In my recent entry about making mountains into molehills, the comments brought up a serious issue: the color of the element of electricity. Specifically, I am a proponent of its color being yellow because I don't buy into the popularity of the color blue, and that Pokémon represents the element with the color yellow. I had many (read: a couple) people disagree with me on that sentiment, s
Math is a truly wonderful topic, and since I'm procrastinating a little on my physics homework, I'm going to spend some time talking about the complex numbers. Most of us are used to the real numbers. Real numbers consist of the whole numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...), the negative numbers (-1, -2, -3, ...), the rational numbers (1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 22/7, ...), and the irrational numbers (numbers that cannot be represented by fractions of integers, such as the golden ratio, the square root of 2, or π).
Tomorrow my roommate (of three years), a fellow physics graduate student, and I are going to watch the three extended Lord of the Rings movies. In a row. In one day. My roommate has tried this once on another occasion, but we couldn't help but bleed into the next day. Here's hoping that we can manage it this time. Also, three day weekend! 8D
I like triangles. I like numbers. So what could possibly be better than having BOTH AT THE SAME TIME?! The answer is nothing! 8D The triangular numbers are the numbers of objects one can use to form an equilateral triangle. Anyone up for billiards? Or bowling? (Image: Wikimedia Commons) Pretty straightforward, right? To get the number, we just add up the total number of things, which is equal to adding up the number of objects in each row. For a triangle with n rows, this is equivalent
Science is awesome. I am currently reading a journal article about how people are making the acoustic version of iridescence. For those who don't know, iridescence is what certain insects, jewels, soap bubbles, and CDs exhibit as that rainbow effect that changes color depending on what angle it's viewed. The sonic or acoustic version of this is creating something that varies in pitch depending on the angle at which you stand relative to it. Awesome.
Today I wanted to talk about one of my favorite equations in all of mathematics. However, I won’t do it justice without building up some framework that puts it into perspective. To start out, let’s talk about waves.
A wave, in general, is any function that obeys the wave equation. To simplify things, though, let’s look at repeating wave patterns.
The image above depicts a sine wave. This is the shape of string and air vibration at a pure frequency; as such, sinusoidal wavef
Haldo, BZPorples, I hope everyone had some awesome holiday funtimes! Mine were packed with traveling, visiting friends, gift giving and receiving, and all the food. All of it. I also saw The Force Awakens twice while I was home. It was pretty fantastic. The part where we find out that Chewbacca is Rey's father was quite the twist![/trololololol] Now I am back at school. Though classes don't start until next week, I'm in my lab typing this and sorta doing work. (I've been at a loss to find
Not sure what started this fad, but I'm okay with this. I Am A: True Neutral Human Wizard (3rd Level) Ability Scores: Strength- 9 Dexterity- 12 Constitution- 12 Intelligence- 16 Wisdom- 14 Charisma- 12 Alignment: True Neutral- A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. S
You look really cool, and I'm sure I'd enjoy your features and such, but you're $15. For a Pokédex. If you had 3D battling capabilities/games that would work in tandem with BW/B2W2, I'd probably get you, but you don't. Sorry.
