Snowflake Photos

In this post, I'm including some of the photos of snowflakes I've taken over the past few days. As usual, these close-ups were taken using my macro setup. I did not edit the photos in any way.

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Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...

5 Methods for Approximating Pi

Happy super-π day! π-day falls on March 14 every year, because the month-day combination results in 3-14, which are the first 3 digits of π. But this π-day is particularly special: include the year, and you get 3-14-15, the first 5 digits of π. We won't get another π-day like this for another 100 years, so you better enjoy this one! A particularly special time will be at 9:26:53 PM tonight, when we'll get 3-14-15 9:26:53, or the first 10 digits of π. In honor of the occasion, I'm going to post 5 simple methods for approximating the value of π. 1. String and Tape Measure Draw a circle with a diameter of 1 foot and put a piece of string around the edge. Cut the string until it's the right length, and then measure it with a tape measure. The string should be about π feet long. This can be implemented more accurately using a computer program: take the arc length of √ (1 - x 2 ) on the interval (-1, 1). The result should be π. var pi = 0; var step = 0.0001; var previous = 0...

2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant. In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order. Spring 1. Cold Hummingbird I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless. 2. Green Landscape I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked. 3. Indian Paintbrush The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually brigh...

Cosmos Computed

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