Intelligent falling, redux

A few weeks ago, the mak­ers of water-rock­et launch­er the Aqua­pod sent me a review copy of their device. It’s a plas­tic tri­pod with a bike pump noz­zle and a pres­sure valve to pre­vent your pres­sur­ized water bot­tle from explod­ing on the launch pad. A string and sim­ple latch hold the bot­tle in place, and a tug launch­es the bot­tle up to 100 feet into the air.

One fine autumn after­noon, sev­er­al of my NCSE col­leagues and I head­ed out to test the Aqua­pod in a near­by park. There’s noth­ing like peo­ple fuss­ing around with strange equip­ment to draw a crowd, and we soon had a dozen or so peo­ple, rang­ing from about 4 to a few ear­ly teenagers and sev­er­al par­ents, watch­ing the test. After the first suc­cess­ful launch, all the kids want­ed a turn, and many swore they’d ask for one as a present this year.
As you see in the video above, put togeth­er by my col­league Steve New­ton, there were some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties along the way, but once we got a low enough angle on the string, it was­n’t hard to launch repeat­ed­ly, and to great joy and amuse­ment by the assem­bled kids.

When the weath­er warms a bit, I’ll see about dis­abling the safe­ty valve and refin­ing the shape of the water bot­tles to improve launch char­ac­ter­is­tics. This is nec­es­sary, of course, to ful­ly test the impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic insights of Intel­li­gent Falling.

Citizen science and adventures with eclipses

Last night I did­n’t get to bed until 4 am. Along with a cou­ple hun­dred oth­er peo­ple, I hung out at the Chabot Obser­va­to­ry, watch­ing the Earth slide in between the Sun and the Moon. One of the Obser­va­to­ry’s tele­scopes was open, and sev­er­al peo­ple brought their own ‘scopes, some home­made. The view­pieces were big enough to allow me to take some pic­tures through the telescopes.

The focus is a bit off there, but you can see the craters and plains of the Moon’s sur­face, and at the low­er right cor­ner, you can see the sur­face start­ing to dark­en as the penum­bra of the Earth­’s shad­ow begins to cross it.

It’s astound­ing what you can do with just a tri­pod, a mid-range dig­i­tal cam­era, and a tele­pho­to exten­der. The tele­scope spins the image around, so the shad­ow in this image is at the upper left, instead.

Below the fold, more pho­tos of a late night, high above Oakland.

Read more “Cit­i­zen sci­ence and adven­tures with eclipses” →

Total eclipse tonight

At around 3:37 am, Pacif­ic time, the moon will be entire­ly swathed in Earth­’s shad­ow. If you live in the right areas, and are pre­pared to stay up late, you can watch it happen. 

Oak­land’s Chabot Space and Sci­ence Cen­ter and Wichi­ta’s Lake Afton Obser­va­to­ry are both hold­ing spe­cial events all night long. You can watch the eclipse through their tele­scopes, lis­ten to pre­sen­ta­tions about what you’re see­ing, and stay up way too late (or get up way too ear­ly) with a bunch of oth­er sci­ence nerds. What’s not to like?

Those of you not in Kansas or the Bay area are encour­aged to start dri­ving, or just head to your local obser­va­to­ry. It’s not often you get such a pow­er­ful illus­tra­tion of the cos­mos at work.

Statistics in sport?

Chad is bemoan­ing the increase of “stat-geek­ery” in sports:

I’ll admit that I’m some­what torn about this. I am, after all, a pro­fes­sion­al nerd, and enjoy work­ing with num­bers, so I can see the appeal of quan­ti­ta­tive data. And a lot of the reg­u­lar sta­tis­tics used in bas­ket­ball are pret­ty crude mea­sures, so I can under­stand try­ing to devel­op bet­ter statistics.

Very, very crude. And that is where my beef comes from. Can you think of a sports’ sta­tis­tic that includes a mea­sure of error?

Read more “Sta­tis­tics in sport?” →

Damn you Steve Jobs!

In your astound­ing bril­liance, you’ve man­aged to make the coolest thing ever. Again. The iPhone has an 8 gig hard dri­ve, a 2 megapix­el cam­era, and OS X. It can play video, it can con­nect to WiFi net­works and view nor­mal websites.

In my bag, I usu­al­ly car­ry my lap­top, a black and white Palm device, a love­ly iPod, my cell phone, and my 4 megapix­el Olym­pus 4040Z. I love all of them, and have no deep desire to part with any of them (though upgrades are always welcome).

This new iPhone can do much of what each of those devices can do, and it looks damn good while doing it. It even has push email, the main weapon in Black­ber­ry’s dom­i­nance of the smart-phone market.

Of course, it won’t be avail­able until June, it costs a good chunk, and I’m not on Cingular.

The oth­er thing I’ll note is how easy Apple’s life has been because it chose to build OS X on a Unix/Mach base. They made a tremen­dous­ly smooth tran­si­tion to Intel chips, and now they have the OS run­ning on a cell phone. It’ll be inter­est­ing to find out what they had to do to port it to that third plat­form, and whether pro­grams like Skype will work on it. The idea of being able to car­ry a videochat-capa­ble device around in your pock­et is pret­ty cool.

It’s like we live in the future, at last.

Where it comes from

Papa TfK sends this video of a real live music visualizer. 

Beware

Thanks to A Voy­age to Arc­turus for this reminder: