February 27, 2013

Browser clutter - February 2013 edition

This is where I dump some links that I've had in my browser tabs for awhile.  I don't want to forget them, but I don't have a better place to put them.

Music inspired by astronomy - from the Astronomy Education Review.  I wish the pieces in the article had better links.

Inertia games - We have some REALLY OLD computers at school that we keep mostly to do this for algebra based physics courses.  If I could find a port of this to some new platform it might free up some space and time in the labs. (Alternative link)

Love2D - an open framework for making games.  Maybe could write an Inertia Games clone in this.

Over the winter break I was able to go to the national AAPT meeting and give a talk on the history of modal analysis.  I titled the talk something like "From Chladni to the present, a history of modal analysis".  In preparing for the talk, I was surprised to learn about a bunch of pseudoscience that has taken from the work done by legitimate scientists and applied to all sorts of nonsense.  At the risk of increasing traffic to their sites, I will point out some of the more laughable crap that I came across:

Harmonic Resonance Theory - weird.

Cymatics history - history of, uh, cymatics (whatever that is) "research".

"How the leopard gets its spots" - In 1988 Scientific American published this article, which may or may not be good science. All I know is that the inference that the modal analysis of a metal plate cut in the rough shape of a animal skin is related to how the patterns of spots appear in the animal's fur is just bizarre to me.  (Google search)

--END PSEUDOSCIENCE LINKS--

Making cloud chambers - I've tried this a number of times, and they never quite work for me.  :(

More links later!




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