Chad Orzel's Blog, page 22

055/366: Take Off

You didn’t get a photo of the day yesterday because this was my day:

Southern California at sunrise, from the air.

I spent about seven hours on planes, starting before the sun was up in California, to say nothing of the time spent in airports. I had the good camera with me, so I got some cool photos out the plane window, but when I finally got home, I didn’t have the time or energy to GIMP them up and post one.

So, instead, I’m doing it just before sunrise on the East Coast, before I walk Emmy and wake up Kate and the kids…

054/366: Unprecedented Catblogging

As noted yesterday, I’m visiting my sister for a few days, since I was on the West Coast anyway. Being here in Southern California, it seems appropriate to jack Kevin Drum’s style and do some cat-blogging, and luckily enough, my sister is the Cat Person in the family. So, here they are:

My sister’s cats. Clockwise from top left: Tate, Topher, Mona, Calliope, Oberon, Molly.

SteelyKid was really into the idea that we should get a cat for a while, though she’s kind of cooled on that, but she’ll probably like this photo a lot. Emmy… not so much.

I’m flying home tomorrow, leaving at an ungodly hour, so I’m not sure what you can expect by way of a photo of the day. But that’s half the fun of this whole exercise, isn’t it?

053/366: Mount Rubidoux

Having successfully given two talks in Sacramento, I’m spending a few days visiting my sister in Riverside, CA, because it’s not often I’m on the West Coast at all. She had to work this morning, so I went on a bit of a hike up and down Mt. Rubidoux, where the city has built a really nice paved trail that winds around the mountain:

Part of the Mt. Rubidoux trail, coming down from the top.

I went out at around 9am, which had the advantage of being relatively cool and pleasant for walking. The disadvantage is that there was a ton of fog, making it hard to get good photos from up on the mountain. The best I could come up with was to get a little artsy and try to make a virtue of the mists by using a large aperture to photograph something else with the foggy downtown in the background:

A hazy view of Riverside, CA from the slopes of Mt. Rubidoux.

Another hazy view of Riverside from Mt. Rubidoux.

I suspect that if I went up there now, I could get much clearer shots of the city and the valley. At the cost of probably melting, so I’m going to pass on that…

Anyway, it’s a very nice trail, and I enjoyed my walk quite a bit. And now, my lingering jet lag and I are going to take a nap.

052/366: Fire Sheep

Having a slow morning here in Sacramento, because yesterday started before 4am and ended after 1am, according to my internal clock. This provided the opportunity to take some nicer pictures than just the obligatory hotel-window shot, so I went for a walk on the bike path by the American River. Where I saw Fire Sheep:

Animal grazing fire fuel reduction in progress.

OK, technically, according to the signs they had up, this is an “animal grazing fire fuel reduction” program, but I think “fire sheep” sounds cooler. There was a pretty sizable herd of sheep wandering around the side of the path, munching on the undergrowth. This particular shot was at a point where a whole bunch of them had decided to move up over a little hill, kicking up some dust that made for those cool visible sunbeams. You can also see why they’re needed, thanks to the burned tree trunk in the foreground.

I’m heading over to the CSU campus in a bit, and giving a colloquium talk this afternoon. I doubt I’m likely to get a cooler shot than the fire sheep, though, so I’ll just post this now, and not have to worry about it later…

But lest the Sacramento tourist board decide to hunt me down for mocking their fair city, I’ll throw in a bonus pretty photo of the American River:

Tree reflected in the water of the American River.

But, really: fire sheep.

051/366: OBParkingLot

I’m in California for a few days, to give a couple of talks in Sacramento. I’m told that it’s traditional to commemorate such travel by taking a photo of a hotel parking lot, so here you go:

The obligatory hotel parking lot photo.

There are, in fact, palm trees around here, just not any that are visible from the hotel room window.

And now, I need to be horizontal for an hour or so, because OMG, long travel day.

050/366: Physics Toy

When we were in DC back in July, SteelyKid purchased a toy Newton’s cradle. And I already owned a 1000fps video camera, so it was inevitable that the one would end up in front of the other…

I spent a while this afternoon making high-speed video of the toy clicking back and forth, but didn’t have time to write up the analysis. And I’m leaving wayyy too early this morning to fly to California for a few days (giving a couple of talks in Sacramento, then visiting my sister for a bit), so you’ll have to settle for this teaser image for now:

SteelyKid’s toy Newton’s cradle in mid-swing.

Well, OK, here’s the video, too:

But you’ll have to wait to see the detailed analysis, and that’s that.

I am not 100% certain I’ll get time to edit and post photos while I’m on the road, but I’m taking my DSLR with me, and if I can’t post while I’m there, I’ll catch up when I get back next week.

049/366: Frozen Fractals

We’ve had a serious cold snap over the last few days, with temperatures dropping from the 60F kind of range down to 40F. And with that comes, well:

Frost on the windshield of my car.

Happily, it’s going to warm back up over the next couple of days, but it won’t be long before I need to extend nearly every morning’s routine by a few minutes to clear a thick layer of frost off my car. For the moment, though, I can still enjoy the novelty of the cool spikes and stuff.

Oh, and here, have an earworm:

The Evolution of a Sad Balloon

A few years back, I did a couple of posts on the physics of a sad balloon (that is, a helium balloon that can no longer lift itself up to the ceiling), the first on simple buoyancy, the second on how long it takes for the helium to leak out. These were based on only a couple of data points, though, and it’s always risky to extrapolate too far from just two points.

Of course, in a house with two kids, we have helium balloons show up with some regularity, and SteelyKid’s birthday this year provided a bounty of them– four shiny Mylar balloons, bearing cheerful images of Scooby-Doo, some cartoon dinosaurs, Batman, and Pokemon. The Batman one was slightly larger than the others, and the Pokemon one was very quickly taken upstairs and tied to SteelyKid’s door (so quickly, in fact, that it didn’t make the photo with the others), where it suffered slightly less abuse than the other three, which were batted around every night until they deflated to the point where that wasn’t fun any more.

Three of the four colorful Mylar balloons used in the experiment.

This provided an excellent opportunity for a longitudinal study of balloon evolution, as measured by lifting capacity. Roughly once a day, I would chain together a bunch of paper clips (the mass of 27 clips, as measured by SteelyKid’s balance scale, was 9 grams, so a third of a gram per clip) and hang them from the balloon. Then I would remove clips from the chain until we achieved at least neutral buoyancy– that is, if I moved the balloon down slightly, it would either stay where I released it or rise back up.

So, what did I find? Well, it’s not science without at least one graph:

Lifting capacity of our various balloons over time.

This shows the maximum weight supported (in grams) over a bit more than a month following SteelyKid’s party. The longest-lived balloon was the Pokemon one that made it to relative safety upstairs (about 40 days before it couldn’t lift a single paper clip), followed by the Batman one, which started with slightly more gas than the others. The Scooby-Doo and dinosaur ones took a pounding and succumbed relatively quickly.

That’s a much shorter lifetime than my estimate from 2011, which largely reflects the higher level of kid activity– back then, The Pip hadn’t yet been born, and SteelyKid was only three. With a three-year-old Pip and a seven-year-old SteelyKid in the house, the balloons absorbed a good deal more abuse.

The one thing I found surprising about this was just how straight those lines are. I was kind of expecting to see some curving– a more rapid drop at the start, when the pressure inside the balloon is higher, then a longer tail– but these are pretty darn linear. On reflection, I think that makes sense– while the initial pressure is clearly a bit higher than atmospheric pressure, it can’t be a very big difference, and the final pressure can’t be any lower than one atmosphere, so there’s just not enough of a difference to change the rate. Thus, the helium diffuses out at a fairly constant rate, and these curves look straight.

So, there you go, some birthday physics. For homework, estimate what pressure you would need to fill the balloons to in order for the helium to stop being a lifting gas, and speculate about what you might make such a balloon out of. Send your work to Rhett for grading.

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I’m currently helping support a survey of blog readers as part of Dr. Paige Jarreau’s research on science communication. If you read this or other blogs regularly, please take a few minutes and complete the survey. It’s for SCIENCE!

Who Are You People? Now With SCIENCE!

It’s been a while since I did it, but on a few occasions in the past, I’ve done posts here titled “Who Are You People?” asking readers to comment and say something about themselves. This is not remotely scientific, as a survey of blog readership, though.

Happily, an actual scientist is stepping up for this: Dr. Paige Jarreau, known to Twitter as FromTheLabBench and author of a blog by that name is a postdoc at LSU studying science communication, with a focus on social media. She’s put together a reader survey and recruited a bunch of bloggers to promote it, including yours truly.

The survey is here, and having gone through a preview version, I can confirm that it’s not overly burdensome to complete. At the risk of promoting excessive consumerism, there are a number of cool incentives for completion in the form of gift certificates, T-shirts, and art, so, you know, there’s that. Mostly, though, this is important as SCIENCE!, helping to understand who reads science blogs, why they read them, and how they got there in the first place.

So, go do the survey. Please. For SCIENCE!

048/366: Reading Race

Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids:

SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore.

We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We’re amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding– this week, he insisted on getting a “How to Draw [DC] Superheroes” book, despite the fact that he can neither read the text nor draw a steady enough line to follow any of the instructions. Because it was the only book with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman on the cover that we didn’t already own.

In a couple of weeks, the market moves inside, at Proctors, and the Open Door shifts to winter hours, meaning they’re not open yet at the time that would be most convenient for a market visit, which may curtail our visits a little. So, this seemed like an appropriate time to grab a shot of the store…