This Month in Physics History: Louie de Broglie

Every month I get the APS News (the dead-tree version, which I can carry on the subway), and the two parts I always read first are the Members in the Media (link is to Oct 2010 issue) and This Month in Physics History. Both of these sections help in putting a personal face on physics, …

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Windows XP Ate My Images

In order to save space on my Windows XP laptop, which I use for a lot of my imaging, I used the built-in compression to zip up the entire directory tree from the 2009 Summer Star Party. When all was done, the final archive was nearly 4 GB. Nearly, but not quite. To my horror, …

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Modeling the Moon’s Phases

I originally built these models a couple of years ago, but didn’t realize it was something “novel” until I got some comments at this past year’s NEAF where I had brought them for the children’s section. Quite frankly, I think it works well with adults, too, as I’ve heard some well-educated adults propagating common misconceptions …

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Estimating Risks

The April 24, 2010 issue of Science News has an interesting article entitled "Gambling on Experience" which reports on research into how we (people) guestimate risk in real life. I call it interesting both because it is an interesting social question, but also because of a recent dialogue about the topic of cell phones and …

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