YTVotD, musical edition

Have you ever wondered why so many pop songs sound familiar? Or feel like you subconsciously recognize that song on the radio but don't know how?  Australian comedy band "Axis of Awesome" has this pretty, well, awesome skit to demonstrate to their audience that pretty much every pop song ever is really just based on the same four chords, played over and over in order.  The songs are labeled on-screen, but it helps a lot if you have a reasonable knowledge of bad pop songs going into it to better enjoy the mockery. Well done guys, despite the fact that it kind of makes me want to vomit. (Warning, one curse word at 4:58, so NSFW or sensitive ears)

SDO is live

At long last, the Solar Dynamics Observatory is live and the data is publicly available!  After a month or so of on-orbit checkouts and calibrations, the instruments that I worked on (HMI and AIA) are now streaming back tons (well, terrabytes really) of data each day in the form of high-resolution pictures of the sun in different wavelengths and properties.  There's a lot online that can explain it better than I can, so I'll limit myself to just posting a few of the amazing pictures from the press conference event yesterday.  It's exciting to see the pictures finally, and to see that so many other people (around the world) are excited too!  Here's to a good 5 (or 10) years of working telescopes.

Physics Poetry

Today as part of an exam review, I had my students make up Haikus, Limericks, and Nursery Rhymes that had to do with Physics. Some are great, some are... welll... different! Here are some of my favorites:

The ball on the edge
Waits in anticipation
Full of potential

There was an old man from Maine,
Who fell from a flying airplane
His Kinetic Energy soared
While his Potential was floored
When he hit the ground he had no brain.

Potential is fun
Kinetic is very fun
I'm not good at this!

Lumpy Humpty sat on a wall
Lumpy Humpty had a great fall
Lumpy Humpty did not realize
That momentum and collisions
Would be his demise

More velocity
And my KE pwns yours, ha!
Yes for energy.

Twinkle twinkle little star
Started falling down so far
Used to be up there so high
Took a plane right out of the sky
Twinkle Twinkle, little star
Now there's a hole in the earth because of an inelastic collision.

I love kinetics
They involve lots of motion
Refrigerator

There once was a girl at the park
On a teeter totter above all the bark
She was making a Physics Rap video for class
But because of her potential energy she fell on her....
Face.

This morning the rain
made me slip and fall, oh no!
Friction, I hate you.

And one kid wrote a rap - you'll have to provide your own beats:

Collisions - kaboom!
Objects fly by like zoom zoom zoom.
When collisions are elastic,
It's quite fantastic.
They go bump-a-bump
And push away, not together like a clump.
Inelastic collisions are also cool
I'm not being sarcastic, or a fool.
They stick
And energy is released with a kick
Explosion!

Now let's talk about momentum.
It's a property of an object in motion
Like energy but a different proportion
P = mv,
Vector in the same direction as velocity.

Word.