Built on Facts

I believe I originally planned the Georgia trip post for Monday, and then pushed it back to Tuesday. Here it is Wednesday and I’ve finally written the darn thing. C’est la vie.
Where to start? Last Thursday morning I drove from College Station to Houston where my flight was departing. There’s an [...]

[Read more →]

See that equation there? It’s the unsung hero of Maxwell’s equations. It says in English, “This is where I would tell you how magnetic fields are generated from magnetic charges, but there aren’t any such thing as magnetic charges.”
In its integral form as above, it’s usually the second of Maxwell’s equations that my [...]

[Read more →]

Inside Higher Ed has an article about graduate students at the University of South Carolina.  Seems they don’t make very much money for their work.  By not very much, I mean it’s about the same as the average income… in Brazil.
Graduate students at South Carolina make an average annual stipend of $9,590, a sum that [...]

[Read more →]

As you read this, I’m probably on the road back to my university to start teaching the second summer session for Physics 208 - Electricity, Magnetism, and Light.  It starts this Wednesday, and it’s the second half of the calculus-based intro physics class. Mostly engineers take it, though I’ve seen a few from scattered [...]

[Read more →]

The Atlantic has a pointed and somewhat grim article by a pseudonymous Professor X (no, not that one) about assigning failing grades to failing students. It’s called In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. Professor X is an English instructor at a community college teaching largely adult students, so he’s not dealing with [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]