Boy, that escalated quickly… I mean, that really got out of hand fast. Ron Burgandy If you’ve ever kept an aquarium, you’ve probably worried about algae. If you’ve maintained a planted aquarium with powerful lighting, doubly so. The neat, sort of counter-intuitive thing, is that it is really quite possible to grow plants successfully under […]
Archive for January, 2011
Reverse Engineering
January 18th, 2011
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…[O]ur barrier does not move so when our car carrying the surfboard hits it, it’ll come to a complete stop, and all that momentum from the car will be transferred to the surfboard. Tori Bellacci I want to give the Mythbusters some props for trying to introduce the concept of momentum; however I must instead […]
Rayleigh Benard Convection
January 16th, 2011
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I know that this is probably pretty common to see, but I try to avoid heating up vegetable oil regularly. That being said, I had occassion to heat up a thin layer of cooking oil while preparing dinner yesterday and noticed a geometric pattern take shape in the surface of the oil. I knew enough […]
Optimum College Field Goal Distance
January 15th, 2011
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Dr. Allain wrote up a great post on this subject, so I’ll reduce the scope of what I was going to say, and let you read his analysis for the rest of the story. He used dot products for a much more elegant analysis than my trig-based approach. I’ll focus on a more specific question […]
