Archive for the 'Science' Category

The Death of The Bear

Published at July 20, 2008 in Fiction and Science. 0 Comments

Okay. I admit it. I wrote this for school. But, though it was the last paper of the year and I didn’t really need the grade that comes with hard/good work, I applied the latter nonetheless. I don’t like wasting time. So I might as well write science fiction that passes for a term paper if given the opportunity. The assignment was to observe, analyze, or explain the death of Old Ben in The Bear, a short story by Faulkner in Go Down Moses. So I made it a science fiction story. If you know the work I speak of, check out the parallels. If not, I hope you can enjoy it as a stand-alone piece. Read on…

 * * *

Beep…beep…beep…

Private Josh Kalder turned over underneath his blanket, simultaneously inhaling a lungful of crisp, faintly metallic-smelling air. Of course, he no longer sensed any variance from conventional air; the erstwhile tellurian had long ago become accustomed to the conditions of an interstellar lifestyle. It had been a good fourteen years, give or take a month or two, since his childhood departure from Planet Earth, and recollections of all but the most visceral aspects of mankind’s shared homeland had slipped away with the time.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

Kalder laboriously dragged himself from the depths of somnolence to sit up and press the small orange button on the side of his bunk which deactivated his personal alarm. 0600. Time to rise and shine. It was today that they would go after The Bear. Continue reading ‘The Death of The Bear’

What Happened? A Mystery…

Published at July 1, 2008 in Fiction and Science. 0 Comments

I was just recently browsing my old Google Documents account for anything interesting I could find, and I was pleased to find something that was interesting indeed. It was something I wrote back in sophomore year, apparently on the 9th of January, 2006. At that time, I was about half way through a terrible biology class; terrible in the easy, boring, and utterly noneducational sense. Anyway, the teacher had asked me (and a friend, one David Kwan, who served as an excellent editor) to write a narrative exemplifying the process of scientific investigation. Disgusted by yet another easy and meaningless assignment, I took it upon myself to write a blatantly tongue-in-cheek response to the prompt. As I recall, she loved it. I now provide it for your reading pleasure; please excuse all overt bull and ostensible errata found within - you can be sure they were intended.

It was a bright and sunny day in my neighborhood. I was lounging at our picnic table in the back yard, studiously completing some very boring homework for a class whose unworthy name shall not be mentioned. I felt my consciousness begin to slip, and as my head gradually grew closer and closer to the surface of the table, I began to doze. Suddenly I awoke with a start! Something had happened! But what was it?

Continue reading ‘What Happened? A Mystery…’

Water Rocket

Published at November 4, 2007 in Science, School and Math. 0 Comments

rocket.jpgMy most recent project in physics class was to build a water rocket, demonstrating the ideas of force, mass, and acceleration (yes, Newton’s 2nd law). Though mine was not the best by far, it performed substantially above average, reaching a little over 40 meters vertically and staying aloft for about six seconds (bottle initially pressurized at 50 psi, 23% full of water). You can see in the picture that it was going fast enough upon landing to though roughly mangle the nose cone. We obtained the height measure using a bit of trigonometry; we had people who measured the angle between the ground and the rocket at its apogee (positioned a known distance on four sides of the “launch pad”), and later averaged the results obtained by this (height=distance*tan(angle)).

I had much less time to build my rocket than I would have liked, being flooded with other homework the weekend I chose to do so. So I had to scale back some, not building the parachute apparatus that I had conceived, and going with a generic but nice design. I made the fins out of card stock coated in duct tape, with a wire spine running along the edge. The latter provided me the ability to bend the fins at will, so I could induce substantial spin upon the rocket (which I did). I weighted the nose cone with colored gravel, and left strips of the 2 liter bottle uncovered so it could be seen how much water was inside (roughly 460 ml is the optimal amount).

Through watching other rockets, I got some ideas to improve my design if I am ever to make one of these things again. First, I will make a parachute, and not connect the nose cone to the rocket, so I still get much height if the parachute deploys early (the cone will keep going). I will also use shorter, thinner, stiffer, less angled fins for less drag. I found this project quite fun, and, if I have the time (unlikely), I may construct my own launch pad so I can continue to build and test new designs.

A Simple Clock

Published at October 1, 2007 in Science and School. 0 Comments

The first project of the year in my physics class was to create a clock. This is not the kind of modern clock that we imagine at first, the kind with hands or lighted digits. No, all that was required was a consistent way to measure out a predictable interval of time (namely thirty seconds). Many people built water clocks, using the constant flow of water to measure out thirty seconds. Some people built ramps upon which a ball rolled down in a predictable amount of time. One guy even memorized a rap song that took exactly thirty seconds to recite.

I, however, used the power of gravity. No, I didn’t just drop something from 4.405 meters thirty times, though I did drop something. What I dropped was a weight, suspended by a string, which was wrapped around an axle, which spun a wheel, which was connected to a rod (off center) which was connected to a pendulum. The pendulum served to regulate the motion provided by the falling weight (escapement), as it has to completely stop twice every swing (every time it switches swinging direction), and thereby expends a consistent amount of energy, equal to that provided by gravitational acceleration at a certain critical speed. This speed I found to be roughly two “ticks” (swings of the pendulum) a second, and could thereby accurately and consistently measure out 30 seconds (+/- .4 seconds, I found) with every 55 ticks.

Perhaps a short video would illustrate this. I didn’t have it up high enough at the time I took the video, so I couldn’t get my full 30 seconds before the pendulum hit the ground. As can be seen, I used K’nex to build my clock (perhaps not the best building materials, but nice for making adjustments). Enjoy!

Notes on a Horse

Published at August 31, 2007 in The Great Outdoors and Science. 0 Comments

My mom is an adamant horse person, and today she asked me to accompany her to the farm where she takes riding lessons. Obliging her request, I got to meet her steed (”Pilgrim”), and notice some interesting things about the horse.

My first observation resulted from the comment of the teacher/coach/trainer/friend when she mentioned that horses have excellent depth perception. I noticed that, like most animals that were once not dominant on the food chain (aka prey), the horse’s eyes were positioned on the sides of his head, which (beyond providing better peripheral vision) spreads the eyes out farther apart than, for example, those of a human. Thus providing better depth perception (better triangulation).

The aforementioned exceptional peripheral vision was also of note. I noticed, when looking into his eyes, that his pupils are oval shaped (quite dramatically, actually), thereby allowing a purportedly full 180 degree horizontal visual range per eye. I find this fascinating. This means, though, that the horse has a lower vertical visual range, which could be the reason that horses are so touchy about things beneath them.

The 180 degrees per eye do not, of course, cover the whole area around the horse, overlapping and concentrating in a section directly in front of the horse. This makes sense, so they can see in front of them without any blind spot (which would be caused by the separation of the eyes; this way there is only a small triangular blind spot very close to the head). One casualty of this, however, is the blind spot in the back, which I noticed Pilgrim monitoring with back-turned ears quite often. Horses are very alert.

My last and quite a bit less scientific observation was of the slightly magical feeling one gets when in the presence of a horse. It must have something to do with the sheer size of the animal (1/2 ton!), or perhaps its immense physical intelligence. Anyway, it is slightly calming, and thoroughly enjoyable. I can see why horses reside as my mothers primary passion.

A Short Book Review

Published at August 25, 2007 in Science and Life. 1 Comment

I just recently finished reading Feynman’s Rainbow, a book which I recently received as a birthday gift. This short memoir, written by Leonard Mlodinow, is a touching recollection of the time the author spent with Richard Feynman (I sincerely hope you do know who this is) when they were both at Caltech. Mlodinow was experiencing uncertainty regarding his career in physics at this time, and Feynman (or rather, the presence of Feynman) played a part in helping him realign his life. Feynman’s Rainbow does an excellent job of providing a portrait of a man who is not only interesting (IN-ter-ES-ting) for his brilliance, but also his depth of character. The reader also becomes acquainted with other characters, such as Murray Gell-Mann and the author himself, as well as becoming somewhat familiar with the practice of theoretical physics as a profession. With regard to the physics, the book provides plenty of scientific tidbits to please those among the audience who are interested, but few enough not to bother those who aren’t (I reside in the former category). I greatly enjoyed it for the view into a profession I may pursue, and also just as a piece of genuinely good reading.

The Shadow Bubble Effect

Published at June 30, 2007 in Science. 0 Comments

While recently dining in rays cast by a certain solar entity shining through our bay window, I noticed that when my shadow and that of the table were about to combine, they sort of bubbled out to meet each other. I took pictures of the effect, and GIMPed them into the following concise example of this phenomenon (yes, this is a picture of shadows on a rug, please excuse the fuzz).

As shown in the image, when one shadow moves closer to the other, they tend to expand slightly to meet each other. So, being the person that I am, I decided to think of a viable reason why.

What I came up with is this. As you can kind of see, the shadows have a slight gradient of blurring around their edges, caused by the light source not being pinpoint (being spread out over a distance, say the surface of the sun). As the shadows move closer to each other, these fuzzy edges combine to form a shade more easily visible, making it appear that the shadows are bubbling out. Sounds good?

But why does the shadow on the left appear to bubble out more than the one on the right? My explanation of this is more of a hypothesis than anything, but I think that the curvature of the shadow has a great effect on this. On the right, the shadow is flat, while it is curved on the left. This may cause the condensed blur to appear as more of a part of the curved shadow than the flat one. I will need to experiment a little bit more to verify this however.

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