Archive for the ‘SCIENCE!’ Category
Long Shot
Anyone have any good advice for a newly-minted graduate with a B.S. in Physics and a minor in math?
After getting out of the army a few years back, I thought it’d be a good idea to finish up my bachelors degree, so I’ve spent the last few years cloistered in the Physics & Atmospheric Sciences building at the University of Arizona. Now, I’m in the home stretch: if everything goes to plan, I will graduate next spring and be married shortly thereafter.
Unfortunately, this brings up the big question, “What next?” Do I go into industry? If so, where? Doing what? Maybe work as a lab technician? Teach? At what level? Do I go on to graduate school? Where? For what1 Should I pursue a Masters or shoot for the Doctorate?
My soon-to-be-wife is a high school math teacher in the Phoenix region. While she makes a decent salary, it’s insufficient for her to be a sugar mama. Fortunately the grad schools I’ve been looking at will cover my tuition and pay of a stipend (not much, but it’s enough to live on), and the VA will give me ~$600 or so per month plus some money for tuition and books for three years, so we should be reasonably set for money, so long as we’re smart about it.
In addition to actually doing scientific research, I enjoy teaching, and would very much like to be a university professor at some point. In nearly all cases I’ve looked at, this requires a Ph.D. and from what I’ve been able to find out, it’s generally better to get started on this sort of thing early. Alas, I seem to have a bit more generalized love of science than a focus on a specific topic, so finding the necessary focus needed for a doctoral program would be challenging.
It’s a bit of a long shot, but do any of you, the gentle reader, have any advice for a person such as myself? While comments are welcome, I’d really appreciate email, as it allows for me to respond more personally.
Thanks!
- Physics? Engineering? I really enjoy science, particularly space science (as opposed to, say, quantum mechanics), rockets, etc. and would like to stay involved in related fields. [↩]
Fun at Work
While the Epic Intercubicle Nerf Battle from two weeks ago was fun, my boss just informed us of an upcoming, interesting project: aerial photography.
We need to come up with effective ways to take photos from a long pole, a kite, and a balloon. These contraptions are to be constructed and provided to high school students to do various observations around campus.
I never thought that IT work1 would be this much fun.
- Hey, it helps pay the bills while I finish up my degree. [↩]
Rocket Fail
According to the BBC, the recent rocket launched by the North Koreans failed to achive orbit. The BBC quotes the US military thusly:
In a statement on its website, the US Northern Command said North Korea launched a three-stage Taepodong-2 missile at 0230 GMT.
“Stage one of the missile fell into the Sea of Japan/East Sea. The remaining stages along with the payload itself landed in the Pacific Ocean.
“No object entered orbit and no debris fell on Japan.”
Heavens Above, a orbital object tracking database, confirms the failure.
Perhaps someone should inform the North Koreans?
Rocket science is some pretty demanding stuff. New rockets require a lot of careful design and testing, and failures are commonplace. That’s why you actually do the testing prior to launching valuable payloads. Even so, failures still occur, which is why launch insurance is a good idea.
It seems incredibly unlikely that the North Koreans would be able to independently develop a rocket and successfully put a satellite into orbit on their very first attempt. Not even the US or the former Soviet Union were able to do that without extensive testing, large numbers of rocket scientists, a lot of ICBMs, and huge amounts of funding.
Of course, the Korean state-run media would never admit such a failure. That’s one of the things I love about living in a free country: our failures, in addition to our successes, are widely reported and known (who doesn’t know about the Challenger or Columbia accidents?). We never claim to be perfect, and such failures are experiences that we learn from.
Maybe the North Koreans should prioritize their people’s basic needs (food, water, etc.) rather than wasting resources on space and nuclear programs, not to mention their massive military? It seems like they’ve got their priorities all wrong.
Useful Math Site
It’s been a while since I’ve written about science here.
Recently, I’ve had need to exchange rather complicated math formulas with someone via email.
Sending formulas like
![[\hat{x}\hat{p},\frac{\hat{p}^2}{2m}]=[\hat{x},\hat{p}]\frac{\hat{p}^2}{2m}+ \frac{\hat{p}^2}{2m}[\hat{x},\hat{p}]](http://www.arizonarifleman.com/wp-content/plugins/easy-latex/cache/tex_1922a2ac3859ccc004be7c6c059d8630.png)
is difficult to do clearly via email, as there’s no real means of formatting one’s text with math markup.
Fortunately, there’s LaTeX, an excellent typesetting system that is the de facto standard for marking up documents containing math. I hear it’s also common in the publishing industry, but have no personal knowledge of that industry.
For a long message, it’s probably easier to create a LaTeX document and attach it to the email, but my messages are often less than a page, and that is a bit of a hassle. Sending the raw LaTeX markup via email would also be unsuitable. That assumes the other person (a) has the software installed to read it, and (b) the time to copy-paste the code into their program and render it.
Similar problems exist for computer programmers, and the pastebin service exists as a highly effective way of exchanging programming code with other users. Surely there’s a similar thing for math and science folks, right?
Turns out there is: the Mathbin site allows one to enter text marked up with LaTeX and display it to others without any installed software. Very handy.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Exponents
How often do you see people using the words “exponentially greater” to me “very much greater”?
Pretty often.
Of course, it’s almost always used incorrectly by the mainstream press and general public, and this irritates me greatly.
Just like how there’s a clear meaning for words like “clip” and “magazine” (and they don’t mean the same thing), there’s a very clear meaning in math and science for “exponent” and “exponential growth“, and they don’t mean “very fast”, “very large”, or anything of that nature.
Don’t get me wrong, for large exponents, exponential functions increase extremely rapidly. But one can also have negative exponents (resulting in “exponential decay”, which is used to model things like radioactive decay), or very small positive exponents which result in extremely slow growth and long e-folding times.
In short: unless one intends to describe the actual expoential growth or decay of a certain function, please refrain from describing very large things as being “exponentially greater” than some other reference point. It makes you look almost as tardful as using “decimated” (to reduce by one out of every ten) to mean “utterly destroyed.”
Quantum Physics Is Hard
Who would have thought?
In other news, physics is sucking all my time and energy. Muse is still on vacation.
Burning Stuff for Science and Preparedness
A year or two ago I purchased a rather large bottle of olive oil (it was on sale) in the hopes that I’d use it for cooking at whatnot. While I did use it for cooking, I used it in such moderation that it passed the “use by” date while still having about three-quarters of the bottle remaining.
I purchased a new, smaller bottle of oil and have been using that for cooking, but what was I to do with the old bottle of oil? Throwing it out seemed like such a waste, so I decided to put it to good use.
By setting it on fire.
After doing some brief searching on the internet, I discovered that many old oil lamps (prior to more modern kerosene-burning ones) burned olive oil, so I was in luck. All I needed was an oil reservoir and a wick and I could make a lamp. In addition to being a rather fun thing to do, it would also yield a useful source of long-term, low-intensity light that would be handy in extended power outages — candles are bulky and don’t burn for long, and flashlights (of which I have several) require batteries which burn out relatively fast. Olive oil is relatively safe compared to other oils, as it is very difficult to ignite without a wick, and so wouldn’t cause a massive fire if the lamp were to tip over.
I decided to start with the basics: I had an empty, clean, dry jar that used to contain spaghetti sauce and a paper towel. I punched a hole in the lid of the jar, widened it to about a quarter-inch, rolled up the towel, inserted it into the hole with about a bit more than a quarter-inch protruding, filled the jar with oil, put the lid on, and let the oil soak up into the wick. Once it was soaked, I lit it with a lighter. It took about 5-10 seconds to light, but once lit it’s burned cleanly and smokelessly for several hours. I haven’t been able to detect any odor, and the lamp is not unpleasant to be around. The paper towel wick has turned black where the flame is, but has not burned down by any noticeable amount in the last several hours.
I could go about punching more holes in the lid and adding more wicks for greater output at the expense of greater oil consumption, as well as using a better wick (I’d imagine that the paper towel will eventually degrade in the oil) like cotton or something. We shall see.
Anyway, the point was that I was able to make a very inexpensive, clean, long-burning lamp using only the most basic of household ingredients. While a mass-produced oil lamp would likely be more effective for lighting, this sort of MacGyver-esque approach is useful for people without a lot of storage space that can be dedicated to emergency supplies (such as my small studio apartment), as well as a lot more fun.
I’ll post some pictures once I find my camera. It’s somewhere around here…
Photos
I recently discovered the fantastic program called Autostitch that will “stitch” together pictures into a panorama. Obviously, the pictures need to be taken from the same position and at differing angles, but Autostitch does all the hard work.
Here’s one of my better ones from today:
(click to enlarge)
There’s some obvious blurring and visual artifacts due to several factors: people/vehicles moving around between each frame, the photos were taken through glass at different (occasionally shallow) angles, and I moved the camera between two positions about 5 feet apart (different panes of glass, with different angles). Even so, it turned out reasonably well.
For those who are curious, the large, white-roofed building in the center is the Physics & Atmospheric Sciences building at the University of Arizona, which is where I spend most of my waking hours. The red-roofed, horseshoe-shaped building across the street from it is the Yavapai dormitory. In the lower-right-hand corner, there are four tall palm trees; barely visible between the heads of those trees is a weather research station. In the distance, slightly to the right of center is the university’s football stadium. The picture was taken from the 10th floor of the Gould-Simpson building on campus.
I should really see about getting more panoramic photos of various interesting places, like the local range. Taking pictures on campus is a pain, as there’s always people moving about.
On a similar note, is anyone aware of a flash or Java-based viewer for panoramic images? Displaying them in 2D creates a lot of distortions.
Merry Christmas!
At the risk of offending my religious readers, I post the following image:
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Is there anything explosives can’t do?
Evidently one can make nanometer-sized diamonds using explosives.
Awesome.
(Photo courtesy of WearScience.com, a place with awesome t-shirts.)