Physics Blogging Round-Up: Camera Tricks, College Advice, Hot Fans, and Lots of Quantum

Several weeks of silence here, for a bunch of reasons that mostly boil down to “being crazy busy.” I’ve got a bunch of physics posts over at Forbes during that interval, though:

— The Camera Trick That Justifies The Giant Death Star: I busted out camera lenses and the kids’ toys to show how you might make the Death Star appear as huge as on the Rogue One poster.

— How Quantum Physics Could Protect You Against Embarrassing Email Hacks: Using the DNC email leak as an excuse to talk about quantum cryptography.

— Four Things You Should Expect To Get Out Of College: Some advice for students starting their college careers about what will really matter for long-term success (the time scale of a career, not just a first job).

— How Quantum Sudoku Demonstrate Entanglement: One of the things contributing to “crazy busy” was the second round of the Schrodinger Sessions workshop, at which I heard a clever analogy for entanglement from Howard Wiseman by way of Alan Migdall, and turned it into a blog post.

— Is Your Fan Actually Heating The Air?: We talk about temperature as measuring how fast atoms in a gas are moving. Does that mean that a fan setting air into motion is actually increasing the air temperature?

— Three Tricks Physicists Use To Observe Quantum Behavior: Another post prompted by the Schrodinger Sessions, this one a big-picture look at the general approaches physicists take to doing experimental demonstrations of quantum phenomena.

So, you know, that’s a bunch of stuff, all right.