eBook soon

The McGraw Hill eBook site is still processing our request for the textbook. They've been slow and 503 a lot, being as how it was the first day of school yesterday for so many places, tons of students.

I am hoping it will be squared away and available to you all sometime today.

Webcourses is my friend.

NOT.

But even if Webcourses/Canvas is not our friend, we will persevere and use all of our skills to defeat it this semester.

No homework tonight, but do try to get the textbook and your i>clicker2.

Welcome aboard, everybody!

Cold ocean water, from size of your hand to size of Pacific Ocean

Incredible finding!

The cold surface sea water that keeps the Galapagos dry is part of a basin-scale structure called the equatorial cold tongue, and is known to originate from beneath the surface.

...the equatorial cold tongue [figure above] is a tale of remarkable interactions across eight orders of magnitude, from turbulence (10^-1 m) to the size of the vast Pacific Ocean (10⁷ m).

Climate science: Unequal equinoxes
by Shang-Ping Xie

This is amazing once you consider the size scales involved. The extent of the equatorial cold tongue reaches from about the Galapagos Islands west to about Jarvis Island, an arc of about 69°. If you factor in the average depth of the Pacific ocean, about 2000 meters, it looks about like this scale diagram:

What I am reading

OH, brother! What a textbook, from the master!

Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei.

And first of all it seems desirable to find and explain a definition best fitting natural phenomena.

Translated from the Italian and Latin into English by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. With an Introduction by Antonio Favaro
(New York: Macmillan, 1914). Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/753 on 2013-08-07

Can't put it down...

This interesting biography of Rosalind Franklin is very hard to put down.

Lots of physics concepts set in the drama of a one woman's life. Excellent.

An interesting gamma ray burst during final exam week, GRB 130427A

An interesting gamma ray burst happened during finals week, GRB 130427A

Back in the early 1960s, the United States launched a few satellites, the Vela satellites, to detect secret nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union. By treaty between the US and USSR, no one was to test nuclear weapons above ground; underground testing was permitted. To monitor the Russians, US scientists at Los Alamos developed the Vela platform.

Nobody ever saw the Russkies nuking off any above ground tests, but while the detectors were not over Siberia, they could definitely see bursts of high energy gamma rays from sources outside the solar system.

Excellent.

In the 1970s, they began publishing scientific studies of these gamma ray bursters. The image below is an animation of the April 27 burst. Click the image to see the animation.

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There is still a lot of study going on as to why these GRBs happen all over the universe. We do not know for sure, and neither do the Russians. This GRB was so close and so well-imaged, that maybe someone will now crack the puzzle, using F = ma, quantum physics and all the concepts we study in PSC1121.

Next semester

Next semester, I will try to feature more biographical material on

1. Rosalind Franklin (DNA, xray diffraction)
2. Louis Pasteur (crystals, polarized light)
3. Michael Faraday (electromagnetic field, light)

Simplifying the grades page

I decided to simplify the grades page, by

1. removing the weight factors -- man, was that a mess;
2. pushing all the regular points from exam, HW and clicking into the "Regular points subtotal."

If you look at your regular points subtotal, you get an estimate of your semester grade, even though I have not added in bonus points yet. I am still fussing with bonus pointages but I will get them squared away as fast as possible.

Be patient, and keep alert, and we humans will defeat the machine known as Webcourses2.

Subtotals

I am updating a new row of your Grades page, "Regular points subtotal," which includes best two midterms, final exam, homework pointage and class participation iClicker 2 pointage.

I will be getting to the bonus points subtotal last.

Exam 2 squared away now.

I think the Exam 2 score is squared away now, for EVERYBODY, even those who threw a blooper on their PID or test form. You have one other other of these two:

1. disasterized version, 2× 16 scantron questions everybody had + 2× iclicker
   (Those of you who had form C, this is your only grade.)
2. conventional version, true scantron (out of 35) + true iClicker (out of 5).

Most people had the disasterized version as their better score, so that is the one you get, on account of the proverbial benefit of the doubt.

Also, the "best two midterms" sum is now up to date and final.

That's about it -- I do not think another 37 pieces of flair are necessary for Webcourses2 today.