Global Spin

Tonight I read the geeklet a story at bedtime, the kind of thing that’s designed to be restful with a hint of mind-broadening moral reassurance. As I finished, he looked thoughtful. “We wouldn’t be here without this.” He tapped on the floor. “I don’t mean the floor, or the neighbors downstairs. I mean the ground [...]

Posted by Chris in Evolution, Science on April 10th, 2012 | Comments Off

Sometimes I get the urge to write a short story. Usually the feeling passes, but this one stuck with me and kept nagging until I let it out. More story notes at the bottom. A shaggy dog barred my path through the door. He was my sister’s dog, a long-suffering poodle lounging in the Louisiana [...]

Posted by Chris in Science, Science fiction, Writing on March 29th, 2012 | Comments Off

[Note: Each week my geeklet and I have "experiment sunday", a brief and casual exploration of hands-on science and engineering.] This week’s experiment was a great success. That isn’t to say that it went off without a hitch; the hitches made for more valuable learning than the experiment itself. We set out to make a [...]

Posted by Chris in Science on February 13th, 2012 | Comments Off

I just read an intriguing article on the Mpemba effect at Skulls in the Stars. Between the history of the effect and the continuing puzzle of what causes it, this is the best example of science-as-a-process I’ve ever seen: Mpemba made his accidental discovery in Tanzania in 1963, when he was only 13 years old [...]

Posted by Chris in Science on June 1st, 2011 | Comments Off

This may seem like an odd diversion, but John asked about it just this morning so I thought I’d share with the rest of the class. Electrons, in their secret life as wibbly-wobbly quantum particle-wavey things, have a property called spin. To quote a handy article I just ran across: One of the things that [...]

Posted by Chris in Science on December 28th, 2010 | Comments Off