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Archive for June, 2008

Green astronomy

Posted in Physics, Science on June 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

In matters relating to the Mother Star, Core77 point out a company claiming to build higher-efficiency solar collectors: instead of a flat photo-voltaic cell across the entire collection area, a small-but-more-apparently-more-efficient cell is placed at the focus of a curved mirror:
Now wait just a minute, there. Photons, check. Primary and secondary mirrors, check. CCD-analogue, check. [...]

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Pretty robust directions

Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Another item in the pantheon of amusing tweaked Google results:

(ht: Andrew Sullivan)

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It’s OK, Pluto …

Posted in Science and the Public on June 27, 2008 | 4 Comments »

It seems that the International Astronomical Union’s decision to re-classify the Planet Pluto has reached the ears of T-Shirt makers. Here’s a funny design from Snorg Tees:

That’s probably the funniest astronomy-related-T-shirt I’ve seen, but it doesn’t have much competition.

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A Calendar Puzzle

Posted in Mathematics, Puzzle, tagged , , on June 19, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Here’s a nice, neat puzzle for those with a spare minute.
I was at a mate’s house and saw that he had a desk calendar that worked as follows. The day of the month was displayed using two cubes, which had one number on each face. A quick calculation would suggest that the first cube (the [...]

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Tetris Archaeology

Posted in Statistics and Metrics on June 9, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Recently, I was watching my cousin Ben play Tetris on his home computer. Being related to the Brewers, Ben has a somewhat obsessive personality, and playing Tetris had become a habit, something to do when there’s nothing else to do. One day, while discussing Tetris, Ben mentioned that all of the high scores on their computer (shared between Ben and his brother Andrew) were between 18,000 and 21,000. “Wow”, I said, “you guys must play tetris a lot”.

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The Imperfection of the Musical Scale (Part 2)

Posted in Uncategorized on June 8, 2008 | 7 Comments »

We saw from one of my previous posts that we can’t choose the notes of the musical scale such that, from every note, an interval of a perfect octave (ratio of 2:1) and a fifth (ratio of 3:2) is available. In this post, I will explain how this problem is fixed in the modern [...]

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The weirdo’s have found us

Posted in Science and the Public on June 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »

A while ago I posted on Joy Christian’s supposed disproof of Bell’s theorem, under the title “Did the universe just get less weird?” I was just looking through the statistics of how people find our blog. At some point today, someone stumbled onto my post by typing the following search into Google:
How to be less [...]

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