Arlen Ward dot com

Has it been a month already?
If it wasn’t for Twitter, you guys would be wondering if I was still alive!

But just to make it up to you, here is an anamated short about young Oxygen on the playground of the Periodic Table.

Things that bother me about some of my favorite TV shows all wrapped up in a four frames from PhD Comics

Over at Swans on Tea there was this gem today

The comments on the YouTube video got me thinking:

So if the density of Mercury is 13.5 g/cm³ and we assume Jesus weighed something around 80 kg, then he would be able to walk across a pool of Mercury with less than 6000 cm³ displacement. If his shoes are about the size of the ones I have on, he would sink up to his ankle.

This year I have been attending the opera, attending the opening night for both Madama Butterfly and The Pearl Fishers for Opera Colorado. And while the opera is entertaining, mostly it just gives me an excuse to wear my kilt.

You’ll notice I’m the only guy in this picture. That’s because my friend Neil faked two weeks of pneumonia in order to get out of it. But don’t ask him, he still claims it was legit.

As an added bonus, and because I have done this in a past life, and because it is also set to opera, I give you a production of VDOT Opera:

I know this blog has become a never ending stream of videos and comics lately, but this is too good to share. Maybe it rings true to me these days because I just recently added myself to the ranks of the iPhone users.

I love my phone. I hear that admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, but if anyone wants to tell me their favorite iPhone app in the comments, I wouldn’t mind!

The latest XKCD comic hits on one of my favorite subjects. I am sharing it with you now. These two statements are correlated.

The first rule of street-fighting mathematics is…

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club

Math is always portrayed as exacting and calculating, but there is a great need for those that deal with numbers on a regular basis to also have a sense for approximate answers. Throughout engineering school it is often referred to as “back of the envelope” calculation. Quick and dirty approximation that gives a sense of the exact answer.

A colleague pointed me to a class called “Street-Fighting Mathematics” over on the MIT Open Course Ware site. MIT OCW is a site with lecture notes, readings, exams and videos from quite a few classes. Now you have no excuse for sitting around doing nothing on a Friday night! Street-fighting Mathematics is taught by Sanjoy Mahajan, and it looks pretty well put together.

The course description reads:

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)

Seems to be the thing everybody should review every once in a while. Here is your first assignment, now get to work!

Below is a video where a 9 month old describes entropy to a general audience. This lecture is compressed from 4 hours to 2 minutes.

From Swans on Tea

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

Well, we made it to 2009, albeit a second later than normal. Looking back on 2008 there were lots of good things mixed in with the not so great.

2009 will, without a doubt, be another “good news/bad news” year. The main focus for me this year is to finish my dissertation and graduate (finally!). So there will be lots in this blog about writing (both the dissertation and the associated journal articles). I am sure there will be all the things that strike my funny bone, and the science-y and family things, so it won’t bore everyone to tears.

From Abstruse Goose

Best wishes for 2009 to all of you!