Chad Orzel's Blog, page 23

047/366: Late Bloomers

Another Saturday full of kid stuff, chiefly a rather brisk soccer game– around 45F at game time, with a stiff breeze. It was interesting to see how different kids reacted to the cold. One or two got hyper, and ran around crazily to stay warm, while some others just disengaged from the game. And a couple had so many layers on that they appeared to be having difficulty running.

I was solo coaching today, so no action shots this week. I did, however, take a picture of these flowers by our front walk:

October flowers.

They’re very pretty, as you can see, and you should admire them while you can because it’s supposed to be well below freezing tonight, so I don’t expect they’ll look quite so nice a couple days hence…

046/366: Alchemy

It was kind of an annoying week in a number of respects, which called for something frivolous and morale-bosting. Thus, this:

Dr. Brown is horrified to discover who’s been funding Dr. Red’s research on the Philosopher’s Stone.

The shiny rocks are from a collection of “Gold and Diamonds” (i.e. pyrite and quartz) SteelyKid got at a local farm “mining” thing last weekend. The Legos are from the extensive collection in Chateau Steelypips.

That’s about it for me. Have a great weekend.

045/366: Home Improvement

In addition to a bunch of work-related stuff, I’m trying to devote some time during my sabbatical to fixing various problems that have piled up around Chateau Steelypips over the last few years when I was too busy to deal with much of anything. Thus, today’s photo is this fairly unremarkable shot:

Jury-rigged extra shelves for the spice cabinet.

This exists mostly to document my recent reorganizing of a bunch of stuff in the kitchen. These cabinets above the stove are somewhat awkwardly located, and serve to hold spices and other cooking stuff. They’re a little too deep to be ideal for that, though, and as a result I’ve spent a lot of time leaning over hot burners rummaging through dozens of bottles of stuff trying to find the basil (or whatever).

Thus, this little bit of improvisation: these are wire bins from Target attached to the inside of the cabinet doors using screw eyes and cable ties, which isn’t especially aesthetic, but does vastly increase the effective “front row” of the cabinets (and approximately doubles what Kate can reach without a stepstool…). Which hopefully will make it easier to keep the stuff I actually use regularly in a place where I can find it quickly.

(Really, we need to do a large renovation of the entire kitchen, because the cabinets in there were never all that nice to begin with, and are getting pretty beat. That’s going to cost a lot of money, though, so we’re putting it off as long as possible. Which is why I’m bodging this together from $20 worth of bits from Target…)

044/366: Pot of Gold

One side effect of this photo-a-day business that I probably should’ve anticipated is that I spend a lot of time now looking at stuff and saying “That’s make a good photo…” Which is annoying when I’m out and don’t have the camera with me, so I’ve started throwing it in the car when I go out to run errands.

This paid off this morning, when I took The Pip to day care, and was greeted by this:

Rainbow over the entrance to the JCC this morning.

That’s his day care sitting right at the end of a rainbow. Which is a lovely metaphor for either the value of having access to excellent pre-school, or the amount of money we’ve shelled out for day care for the kids. Possibly both.

The view a bit to the left of that was pretty cool, too:

The other end of the rainbow.

This is, in some ways, a nicer picture, but the metaphorical value of the other one makes it no contest at all as to which of these is the photo of the day.

043/366: Morning Walk

I’m helping coach SteelyKid’s soccer practice tonight, but that’s no problem for the photo-of-the-day blog, as I got that out of the way early:

Scene from this morning’s walk with Emmy.

This is what it looks like when Emmy and I go for our morning stroll these days, a little after 6am. Which is sort of pretty, maybe, but it’s a little depressing to realize it’s not going to be substantially brighter than this until next March, give or take…

042/366: Distortion

For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here’s a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something:

Graph paper shot with several different lenses, to look for distortion of the images.

OK, this needs some explanation…

So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either a 10-18mm zoom or the 24mm fixed “pancake” lens), because SteelyKid and The Pip tend to want to be right on top of me a lot of the time, and it’s hard to get good pictures with them fully in the frame otherwise.

Occasionally, images shot with these lenses look a little odd, which is not all that surprising, really, because it’s a tricky optics problem to get a really wide field of view without some fish-eye distortion. It’s tough to quantify that, though, so yesterday I spent a little time trying to make an experimental check of how much these lenses distort things.

The composite above is spliced together in GIMP from the top just-over-half of a bunch of individual shots of a sheet of graph paper, shot with a bunch of my camera lenses. From top to bottom, these are the 10-18mm zoomed all the way out, the 10-18mm zoomed all the way in, the 24mm pancake, the 50mm fixed lens, and the 55-250mm telephoto zoomed all the way out. (The paper doesn’t fill the frame in that one because it wouldn’t focus any closer than where it is… I didn’t test the 18-55mm lens I got with my original camera, because I was getting tired of swapping lenses and repositioning the graph paper.) These were all taken using a tripod pointing more or less straight down; the bits of yellow are Post-It notes I used to label which lens was which.

What’s the upshot of this? Well, I’m really impressed with Canon’s optical engineers. These are all really good, in terms of producing images of straight lines that actually look like straight lines. I mean, there’s some visible bowing of the lines at the edges of the frame in the widest of the wide-angle lenses:

The 10-18mm lens zoomed all the way out.

But that same lens zoomed in all the way is way better:

The 10-18mm lens zoomed all the way in.

(Admittedly, the paper doesn’t get all the way to the edge in this one, so there might be more distortion in the corners that it’s not really picking up…)

And here’s the 24mm, which is the other wide-field lens I’ve been using a lot:

The fixed 24mm lens.

Again, a little bit of bowing of the lines in the top right corner of the image, but otherwise really good.

So, you know, kudos to Canon. This also makes me want to get my hands on a real fish-eye lens to see what more significant distortion looks like, but I may be approaching “admit you have a problem” levels with my lens acquisitions…

041/366: Fall

‘Tis the season when things get all colorful:

Colorful leaves on a tree in the front yard of Chateau Steelypips.

Not much to say other than that, really. This is the tree next to our driveway, shot with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. I spent a while shuffling around underneath the tree finding just the right angle– getting the in-focus leaves against the sky and clear of the background ones– but I’m pretty happy with how this came out.

040/366: SoccerKid

Rhett is off at some sort of football game, but don’t worry, I’ll step up to make sure the Internet has pictures of kids playing soccer:

SteelyKid in action at rec soccer.

I’m assistant coaching the team (and the only coach for every other game), which makes it hard to get photos of SteelyKid, but I brought the camera to yesterday’s game, and managed a few good shots. I try to avoid posting photos of other people’s kids on the Internet, though, and this being second-grade soccer, it’s not easy to get any photos near the ball where the frame isn’t kind of crowded. So this cropped shot of SteelyKid dribbling is what we’ll call the photo of the day.

(It was a good game, for the record, and other than a minor crisis where SteelyKid initially agreed to play goalie and then tearfully withdrew, she played well. They don’t officially keep score at this level, but all the kids know how many goals were scored and by who, and they’ll be happy to tell you.)

In the afternoon, we drove up to Schuyler Farms for the corn maze and various other fall activities, which was good fun but seriously exhausting. Which is why posting this picture was delayed to this morning, as predicted yesterday…

039/366: Mist Vortex

Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day.

I’ve posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here’s one that’s just science museum stuff:

Smoke tornado at MiSci.

That’s the artificial tornado exhibit– a platform with mist rising from it and some fans set to blow in a way that introduces some vorticity. And when it’s left alone for a bit, it sometimes makes these cool misty tornado things. Interestingly, they tend to be wider at the bottom, the reverse of the classic funnel-cloud shape. I suspect this is because the fans stirring things are at the bottom rather than the top, but my knowledge of fluid mechanics is about as solid as that column of mist, so I could easily be wrong.

Anyway, I thought they looked cool, so there’s your photo of the (yester)day. Today’s a soccer-coaching morning, followed by something or another for the afternoon, so don’t expect great artistry, or on-time posting…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Football, Air, Relativity, Wrong Guesses, More Football, and Uncertainty

Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:

— Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.

— The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.

— How NASA’s Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental physics, specifically via a 1976 experiment to test general relativity.

— Predicting The Nobel Prize In Physics: I continue to suck at guessing who will be awarded a big pile of kroner.

— Football Physics: Why Throw A Spiral?: Like so many other things in physics, it’s really all about angular momentum.

— The Certainty of Uncertainty: Scientists Know Exactly How Well We Don’t Know Things: When physicists and other scientists talk about uncertainty in their results, they’re not admitting ignorance or covering for “human error.” They’re quantifying what’s left after all the “human errors” have been corrected, and expressing confidence in their result.

Far and away the most popular of these was the Nobel prediction post, which is no surprise. The uncertainty one kicked off a long discussion between a bunch of people I don’t know in my Twitter mentions, which was kind of odd. And the Mars thing just totally sank without a trace, which really surprised me. Oh, well, such is blogging.