Built on Facts

After writing yesterday’s post I happened across a news article about the Aptera moving closer to production. What’s the Aptera? It’s a car, but not just any car:
The Aptera Typ-1 will be the most efficient passenger vehicle in the world. The first production models are planned to be available in December 2008 with [...]

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In daily life, there’s pretty much three kinds of frictional forces that you’re likely to encounter if you classify them by how much they are affected by speed. We’ll not worry about the direction of those forces since for our purposes it’s good enough to say that friction acts in the direction opposite the [...]

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Tom Hudson was a retired small-town engineer, an avid remote control aircraft hobbyist, and a good friend. When I was a young person living in Slidell between 1989 and 2001, he and his wife Lucy were my family’s next door neighbor. Our families became very close, and in a way they were like [...]

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Have you seen The Dark Knight yet? No? What’s wrong with you, go add to its box-office gross now. It deserves it. No, I’m not kidding. Also, stop reading since there’s about to be some minor spoilers.
This post was inspired by my mom, who wants to know how plausible the [...]

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Picture a railroad spike, held vertically as if to be pounded into a railroad tie. Now picture a 14 pound bowling ball poised 35 feet above the spike, and then let drop straight down to hammer the spike down into the ground.
The energy m*g*h works out to about 600 joules, a typical energy for [...]

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This weekend we’ll add a little statistics to our ongoing Sunday tour of the zoo of mathematical functions!

This is the Poisson distribution for λ = 4. To be formally correct, it’s only defined for integer values. This pops up in physics all the time in the context of counting discrete events with independent [...]

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Let there be pi?
Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math has an interesting post taking down a guy who thinks messages from God are encoded into pi.
Stare at any number, and set of numbers, or any numeric coding of a text. If you try hard enough and long enough, then you will find some interesting [...]

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Disclaimer for casual readers: I write posts which vary wildly in technical difficulty, this one is a little more mathematical than most. Don’t let it scare you off! Even if you’re a little lost, it’s good to have seen it.
The various worked problems I’ve been doing recently have mostly been on the intro [...]

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I love teaching, but I have to say I am not a fan of teaching the summer session. Everything is way too disorganized. Oh well, at least it’s only for another three weeks or so.
The way undergraduate intro physics is taught is usually in two halves, and right now I’m teaching the second. [...]

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I am a huge fan of the environment. I’m not a huge Al Gore fan. Human beings are part of the environment as well, and the default setting of Gore and many other bureaucratic environmentalists seems to be “Do as I say, not as I do, follow my rules, pay new taxes, and [...]

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