In continuing my trend of reviewing 90s LEGO System sets, I'm turning my criticism to one of the most beloved, nostalgic LEGO sets arguably of all of LEGO's existence. Presentation From the design of the box to the instruction manual, these are the first things you see before building the set. Ah, the desert. Something about it inspires adventure. Perhaps it's the survival aspect of it. Anyway, the box pulls off the desert background very nicely, and the action of a bunch of caval
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
I made a Post-It note dodecahedron: It was fun. 8D For the record: each face is made up of five Post-It notes, each a different color, so that, per face, no color is repeated.
Me: "Hau just handed me a person named Max Potion. I think that's human trafficking." KK: *bursts into laughter* Me: *joins in laughter because he didn't expect that joke to land* Another typical Friday evening.
The above image is known as the Pentagram of Venus; it is the shape of Venus' orbit as viewed from a geocentric perspective. This animation shows the orbit unfold, while this one shows the same process from a heliocentric perspective. There are five places in Venus' orbit where it comes closest to the Earth (known as perigee), and this is due to the coincidence that When two orbital periods can be expressed as a ratio of integers it is known as an orbital resonance (similar to how a strin
While days 2-4 were relatively uneventful (mostly collaborating days, doing research) my last three days in Edinburgh were pretty cool. Day 5: I climbed Arthur's Seat for a second time; it was sunny, so the view was even better than on Sunday when my advisor and I climbed it together. I also got proof That I made it to the summit. 8D Day 6: I went to Edinburgh Castle and walked around the former residence of the Scottish royal family. There were a few museums that were mainly dedicated to th
So, I decided to take the Pottermore Sorting quiz with all questions available on some third party quiz site, because while I love the Thunderbird, the house's traits do not really fit me (I can be adventurous, but let's face it: I'm a schooler). So, I took the full Pottermore quiz, and my results were somewhat predictable. Indeed, Horned Serpent is my Ilvermorny house by a decent margin, with my second place house being Pukwudgie, then Wampus, and Thunderbird being my least compatible hous
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
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
I made it in GIMP. A cardioid is the envelope formed by a set of circles whose centers lie on a circle and which pass through one common point in space. This image shows the circle on which the centers of the circles in the above image lie. A cardioid is also the path traced by a point on a circle which is rolling along the surface of another circle when both circles have the same radius (here is a cool animation of that). What is the cardioid's significance? Well, it looks like a heart, which
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
Ah, the pentagram, a shape associated with a variety of different ideas, some holy, some less savory. But to me, it's a golden figure, and not just because of how I chose to render it here. The pentagram has a connection with the golden ratio, which is defined as This number is tied to the Fibonacci sequence and the Lucas numbers and seems to crop up a lot in nature (although how much it crops up is disputed). It turns out that the various line segments present in the pentagram are in gol
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
I've felt rather unproductive recently on BZP, so I decided to do another set review. This time, we look at the new Monster Fighters theme's largest set (for now), Vampyre Castle! Presentation From the design of the box to the instruction manual, these are the first things you see before building the set. The trunk dented the upper left corner of the box. Sad face. The titular castle sits here in front of a sinister, spooky background with bats trailing from the moon and a ghostly gr
I've decided that This Day Aria is my favorite song from A Canterlot Wedding. Its juxtaposition of Cadance singing about her love for Shining Armor with Chrysalis singing about her callous indifference and plot to use him is amazing. Also, it's (at least partially) a villain song, and those tend to be awesome.
Just saw the concert. Amazing. The Twilight Princess movement was my favorite of the main symphony, but the best encore was, without a doubt, the recently added Majora's Mask suite. This Zelda fan is quite pleased.
So, I've decided to do one of those daily-like blog entries, though I can't guarantee that I'll be able to do this every day (being a busy grad student and all). I figured that, being a physics grad student, math might be one of my stronger suits (next to reviewing LEGO sets), so I'm going to try and share an equation with you and see if I can explain it well enough for people to understand. 8D Tonight's equation: The wave equation. This says that the sum of the change in the change
Over the past couple of months I visited and interviewed at a college interested in hiring someone to teach one semester of courses for their physics major series. My name was given to them through the grapevine and, after giving a mock lecture, presenting my research over lunch, and meeting with the department, I got the job. Starting later next month, I will officially be Professor Akano. I'm excited.
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
