Year: 2009

Open Source Physics Educational Java Tools

Well, it’s good news bad news time.  I was excited to find these via an article in the Physics Teacher.  Clearly, I haven’t been paying attention, because they’ve been mentioned before, but the item which caught my attention was an article that used a program called Tracker to analyze 2D motion.  I immediately thought of …

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Another Reason to Turn off the Lights

Yet another study has found a connection between cancer and night-time lighting.  Last time it was breast cancer, this time is it prostate cancer.  In Darkness, Melatonin may Suppress Breast and Prostate Cancers, Science News reports on another study that shows a link between burning the midnight oil and human health. The great irony to …

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Pendulums

For his science fair project, Jonathan investigated pendulums.  His hypothesis was that how fast the pendulum swings, its period, should depend on how heavy it was.  So I arranged to have 1-inch diameter pendulum bobs made of copper, steel, and wood.  We suspended each from a horizontal beam, carefully measured so they were all the …

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How Fast is Sound?

A few months ago, I read an article in The Physics Teacher (published by the American Association of Physics Teachers) on measuring the speed of sound using a couple of microphones hooked up to a computer’s line-in jack.  Apart from having to make a trip to Radio Shack to buy some parts to convert two standard unpowered microphones into a pair of powered microphones for stereo input, the process was amazingly straightforward.  I did a quick proof-of-concept in the dining room one evening and go

Globe-at-Night Survey Wants You!

The Globe-at-Night program is an annual program where you (yes, you) can help by providing data on the visibility of stars in the night sky. Your role as an amateur scientist is to make some observations (details on their web site), record the results, and submit them to the Globe-at-Night program. Your observations, along with …

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