YTVotD

If anyone needs to know what I'd like for Christmas, one of these video projection systems would suffice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXvmDaY29xg

Totally Awesome Science Experiment

OK. You need a bowl, a little bit of milk (say 1/4 inch in the bowl), food coloring (the watery kind, not the gel kind), and some liquid soap.

Put the milk in the bowl. Put a drop of each color of food coloring around the outside of the bowl. Put a single drop of soap in the bowl, and prepare to be amazed. You may have to wait a minute or two, be patient. If you're absolutely sure nothing is happening, you can put another drop in, near the side .

You should go do this right now. Really.

SDO on KQED

Is everyone sick of SDO-related posts yet? No? OK good, because here's another video featured on our local PBS/NPR station. Oh, hey, who's that cool guy at around 6:29? Also, I think some of those fancy computer models with green lines going every which way were probably reader and commenter Marc's handiwork. And if that red wall at around 7:00 was transparent, you'd see me diligently working away.


QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Here's the link if you want to view it from the KQED page:
http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/journey-into-the-sun

Tour of California, Stage 3

I won't blame you if you haven't heard of it, but the Tour of California is the biggest bike racing event in the USA, and yesterday it rolled through our backyard, basically!  This year the Stage 3 route took them through the hills just west of where I work, and Alex and I took a long lunch break to ride out and watch the race go by.  I had never seen a major bike race in person, and while it all blew by incredibly quickly, it was really pretty cool to experience all the excitement and activity - lots of hardcore biker fans braving the cold rain and mist lining the sides of the road in the forest, dozens of police and official vehicles clearing the route ahead of time, the cowbells cheering on the lead group of racers, the 100-strong peloton churning after them up a "King of the Mountain" stretch, and even the wet ride back to the valley with all the other people that had the same idea as us.  Most of the major names in cycling (that you'll also see in the Tour de France, for example) were here, and I'm sure I was about 3 feet from Lance Armstrong at some point, I just couldn't tell which extremely fit white guy with wraparound sunglasses, a helmet, and skin-tight RadioShack jersey he was out of 5 or so.  I even had some freebie bags of Jelly Bellys tossed to me from the team car as I cheered them on!  Alex took a couple pictures, and there's some other representative ones from our vantage point below.

Here's the peloton, led by Team RadioShack, heading through the hills

Here's me waiting in the drizzle on the La Honda uphill

Here comes the throng of racers blasting through...

... followed closely by the throng of support cars that were inches apart (from each other and from the riders they were busy handing Gu, Cliff Bars, and water bottles to) while winding up the narrow mountain roads.  Yikes.

And here's a video Alex took of the lead group going by.  These guys finished the day in Santa Cruz having averaged an insane 23 mph over 113 miles, including 4 major hills.  They'll keep riding for the next week (eight stages total), ending down in LA.  I'll definitely head back to see this again next year!

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.

YTVotD

Two in a row!  Heard about this in Newsweek, of all places.  Who would have thought obsolete printed news media would be informing be about viral videos on web 2.0 sites?  Anyways - I think it's Ben Folds but could be wrong.  Warning, when they say "may contain curse words" at the beginning, they mean "does contain (one or so) innocuous curse words."

YTVotD

Time for another YTVotD, this time it's Dog Edition!



If only Banjo were coordinated enough to catch anything in his mouth, we could have shown him instead.  As it is, treats tossed to him usually bounce of his face and then he sniffs around for a while until he finds it.  My favorite parts are at 0:44 and, in what is a typical Banjo-face, at 1:08.

Performance Evaluation

While this may not exactly be a extensive scientific sample, I think this is pretty cool and I'm proud of my favorite physics teacher for doing such a good job (at least according to two students) in just her first year!  Being a teacher might not be the best career for getting promotions and all, but you do get some opportunities for unsolicited feedback, which seems pretty rewarding.  See below or follow the link HERE.

Hopefully Kate doesn't mind me posting this...