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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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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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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I loved the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sure the plot was ridiculous and there were a lot of “Lucas moments”, but it was a legitimately fun film. The nuke scene alone is worth the price of admission. I’m sure the fine folks at Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics [...]

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For better or for worse, physics has always been involved in warfare. Both the machinery of the human body and the character of the theater of battle exist in the physical world, and therefore an understanding of the rules of the world can prove to be a decisive advantage in battle. This isn’t [...]

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If you have a very long electrically neutral current-carrying wire, the moving charges inside it will generate a magnetic field.
But what if you have a charged wire that’s not carrying any current?  Well, obviously you’ll have an electric field but no magnetic field.  But let’s further say you’re in an airplane flying parallel to that [...]

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There’s a joke in physics that asserts that the time until commercial fusion power generation becomes viable is 15 years - and has been since 1940. Maybe that 15 years is a constant of nature, and like a jogger on a treadmill there’s no forward progress despite all the effort in the world.
Maybe, but [...]

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We live in a nice, classical world. We can tell where we are and how fast we’re going. We can spin things around at whatever speeds we feel like, and if we throw something through the air we can predict where it’s going to go.
Quantum mechanically, however, things are a lot fuzzier. [...]

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Ever wondered why nobody thought up relativity until Einstein in 1905? Like quantum mechanics, its effects are pretty hard to notice in the everyday world. Here’s a tiny example. According to the theory of relativity, time will pass more slowly for a moving object as measured by someone standing still. Why [...]

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