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People Hearing Without Listening
I’ve seen several links and discussions today to this paper about judging classical music competitions. The experimenter had people observe clips of musicians in competitions, then guess how well the...
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Blogging Update
For a long time I’ve updated this blog at best sporadically, often holding back from writing because I thought something wasn’t interesting or noteworthy enough, or that I wouldn’t write well enough or...
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How interesting is that license plate?
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the...
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Unnecessary Truncation
We should consider every day lost -Friedrich Nietzsche You miss 100% of the shots -Wayne Gretzky People often say motivation doesn’t last. -Zig Ziglar I hated every minute -Muhammad Ali We can’t help...
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Not as interesting as I thought
As often happens, after writing yesterday’s post, it stuck around in the back of my mind, and I think I might be wrong about it. Briefly, the background is that a friend was looking at lopsided results...
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Weights on a pendulum
A friend of mine is one of the people in charge of winding a clock tower. He was showing my physics class how the tower works, and we were looking at the pendulum. Here is a photo of the pendulum in...
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Answer: weights on a pendulum
The problem asked why weights are added or subtracted on top a pendulum, and also how much friction is needed to keep the weights from falling off. The weights are added on top the pendulum to make it...
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Simple experiments with beats and hearing
In the class I’m TAing, we are discussing beats. Beats are when you play two tones that are close to each other, but at slightly different frequencies. They will slowly drift from in phase to out of...
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Why You Keep Seeing Me
Yesterday afternoon I ran into a friend, by chance, for the third time that day. “Why do I keep seeing you?” he asked. “Good question,” I said, “you see, about eight light-minutes in that direction...
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Why is kinetic energy proportional to v^2?
I answered this question here, channeling this. That seems like the best answer – kinetic energy is proportional to v^2 because of Galilean relativity. The more common answer, though, is to say that...
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