Built on Facts

A while back the county government in my home town was considering a request from a phone company to construct a new cell tower to bring cellular service to a rural area. The government balked, largely for aesthetic reasons, though they couched their opinion in safety terms. They said they were concerned about [...]

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Swans on Tea has a short but very fascinating post about paper. Turns out the little milimeter thick gram-mass bits op finely smashed tree pulp our civilization relies on shares a lot in common with mile thick billion-billion-kilogram-mass tectonic plates. Here’s a selection from the preprint’s conclusion:
Looking in more detail at the correlations [...]

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Apropos of the Indiana Jones post exploring some of the sketchy physics in the new film, we have this new Irregular Webcomic. (And if you haven’t already, read Dr. Pion’s much more thorough and extremely entertaining discussion of even more Indiana Jones 4 physics!) This comic, like the more famous Foxtrot, is written by a [...]

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There’s not many people who love space exploration more than me. And I’m not one of these scientists who wants to scrap manned spaceflight to divert the budget to cheaper and much more scientifically useful unmanned probes. Human exploration of space is both a necessity for the future and a noble endeavor purely [...]

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Like the Batman problem a few posts down, there’s another classic failure which has reached internet fame and glory by virtue of its spectacular flameout.

Wonderfully eccentric, but the sad part is that the problem is literally one line away from a correct solution. The block starts off with a gravitational potential energy mgh. [...]

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Yesterday was the Idaho Republican primary. As far as primaries go it wasn’t very meaningful, since the presumptive nominee has already almost certainly wrapped things up. The Democratic nomination is not quite so certain, but we’re getting to the point where there’s realistically not much doubt remaining as to the outcome.
How can we [...]

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Yesterday I went to a cookout at a friend’s house. As usual when there’s lots of good food outside, soon enough a large number of flies decided to crash the party. There’s not much you can do about it. Chemical sprays will get into the food, so there’s the most effective option [...]

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Quantum mechanics is difficult. “Yeah, yeah,” you say, “tell me something new”. But it’s not only a bit tricky to learn. Mathematically there’s simply not a way to get exact solutions to all of the problems we face. They just don’t exist in a nice short closed form. But we’d [...]

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Memorial Day in the US is the day we honor and remember those who have fought and died for our country in the armed forces. I think we should also remember the scientists whose efforts have also helped preserve freedom. Here’s just a few from WWII.
Robert Watson-Watt, a British scientist who pioneered the [...]

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Energy has to come from somewhere. The law of conservation of energy prevents energy from being created out of nothing, so any energy that we use has to be acquired from some source. The energy that fuels our bodies comes from plants (and animals that eat plants), which get their energy from the [...]

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