Ad for a Galileoscope showing a cost of $90 USDollars

US$90, you say?

But I can see a photo sometime in the office, right?

www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/vid...

Radio Telescope Operator Protagonists A list of 3 films compiled on Letterboxd, including Contact (1997), The Arrival (1996) and The Dish (2000).

There was a 5 year period there where filmmakers were all-in on radio astronomy.

letterboxd.com/mjdunlavyca/...

"Project Hail Mary" = Fun film. Go see it. Some points:
1) Y'all promise not to try and learn science from films and I won't try to decode film narrative in the lab.
2) It's way more "Sunshine"+"2010" than "Apollo13"+"Interstellar" (compliment!)
3) Little too long, little too "comfy". But good.

Science on the Cheap.

Dollar store pizza pan makes a great Chlandi Plate. Plus! The rim keeps the sand from getting everywhere.

Who's up for an awesome heist?

Condensed-matter physics pioneer and Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett dies aged 87 – Physics World Leggett made Nobel-prize-winning contributions to the theory of superfluidity in the 1970s

I had several colleagues who met him and everyone agreed he was one of the nicest people in physics. Apparently always had time to talk to students at conferences about their work.

physicsworld.com/a/condensed-...

Making Aircarts Travel Uphill YouTube video by SMUPhysics

RVTIL2GMEO: Recent Videos That I'd Like To Get More Eye On

#1: Making Air-Track Carts Travel UpHill

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd6i...

#iTeachPhysics
#MagneticHill

Don't usually post these here but I was pretty jazzed to get this one:
Actorle #1451 7/8
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬛🟩
Play here: actorle.com

There are certain scores that absolutely boost productivity by several tens of percents.

Tuesdays are the new Mondays. Maybe?

Maybe give it another day, when hopefully the models will start to agree.

predicting 15cm of snow on Monday

Predicting 2.5cm of snow

Predicting 12cm of snow

Predicting 10-19cm of snow

Mondays are back! Maybe!

Good movie. Go see it. It has a surprising relevancy to the subject of government funding of the sciences.

Could not have picked a better evening to re-watch "Network".

I feel a societal index can be created based on at what point "Network" goes from cynical satire to depiction of modern times. I figured we're at the 1:50:00 mark (our of 2:01:00), though in 1978 it was more like 0:35:00

Text of "A Study in Scarlet" = "My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

In Doyle's very first Sherlock Holmes story ("A Study in Scarlet"), there's an exchange where Holmes calls Watson a fool for believing that astronomy is something worth knowing about. Very weird bit!

This week is when our Gaussian Error tutorial runs in 1st yr lab. We've been doing this for many now and the amassed histogram of student measurements now has a couple of thousand points. See the development of the bell curve here:
#iTeachPhysics

Let me just check next weekend's forecast...

25-35cm of snow. Great. Amazing.

The best streaming service and it isn't even close.

Cheese pizza and garlic fingers

SDP - Snow Day Pizzas

Freshly baked loaf of bread.

SDSD - Snow Day Sour Dough

A Graph

0.9

Pic of frozen pond where underwater bubblers create large periodic circular openings in the ice.

Forget crop circles. We're doing Ice Circles now.

weird "dimly-lit area" text

hmmm

Geez, this dimension. With the sounds and sights and minds...

Aw dang. I unlocked a door with the key of imagination and you'll never guess what was beyond... a whole other dimension!

The image shows the hourglass shape of the length of the day and night over the 365 days in 2025. Diagonal bands indicate when the Moon was up in the night sky.

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

Should have added: the more conspiratorial, the better.