Fryeburg Academy Physics

I hope everyone has enjoyed their Thanksgiving vacation thus far.  There’s one full day of vacation remaining, and I expect I’ll see most of the boarders returning to campus tomorrow sometime.  Be ready to go when we start up again on Monday!

In the meantime, here’s an interesting little optical illusion I found on the web.  Pretty nifty!

I’ve learned that NASA has a contest to name the next lander that goes to Mars, and it’s open to anyone in grades K-12 in a US school (that includes most of you).

The mission is called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and is scheduled to launch in October 2009, but it needs a catchy nickname.  You can submit an essay with your suggestion before 1/25/09; how cool would it be to have your idea on its way to Mars?  The previous rovers have been called Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity, so they might be looking for something along those lines, but if you have a convincing reason it should be called something distinctive like “Wahlgren,” by all means, send it in!

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is a website maintained by NASA that posts, as you might guess, an astronomy-related picture each day. Today’s picture features the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour passing in front of a nearly full moon during a night launch, and is just really cool. 

Enjoy your holiday!

…you should get a load of this place!  The Boston Globe features a picture or series of pictures each day from various places around the planet, and on Monday they had 32 pictures of Antarctica, including many of the scientific bases there. Some of these photos are spectacular; and yes, before you ask, penguins ARE birds.

Cool pictures from Antarctica

A few weeks back I posted an opportunity for extra credit: write a research paper about the use of ethanol as an alternative fuel source.  Thanks to the people who did this assignment; it can only help your grade!  Now that the paper is due, I’m going to give you my thoughts on ethanol.  Don’t take my word for it, feel free to research all of this information on your own.

Advantages
Ethanol is made from corn and other grains, so it has nothing to do with oil.  Perhaps the biggest advantage of ethanol is that it’s a renewable resource, so unlike oil there is not a limited amount of it.  It also burns more cleanly than petroleum products, so burning a liter of ethanol releases less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than burning the same amount of gasoline.

Disadvantages
While ethanol doesn’t produce as much carbon dioxide, it also doesn’t contain as much energy.  You’d have to burn about 1.5 liters of ethanol to get the same amount of energy as burning a liter of gasoline.  That means that when ethanol is mixed with gasoline in the pump, like many fuel companies do now, it causes the fuel efficiency of your engine to decrease.  My car is built to run on E85 (a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline), and if I fill up on E85 my car would only travel about 250 miles on a tank of fuel, as opposed to 310 miles on pure gasoline.  So the decreased carbon dioxide gained from burning ethanol is negated by the fact that you have to burn more of it.

Another big disadvantage of ethanol is that it is water soluable, which means it can’t be transported across land in pipelines (which always contain water and other contaminants).  If you can’t pipe it, you have to use trucks or rail cars, so there’s a lot of diesel fuel that needs to be burned to get the ethanol where it needs to go and reducing the impact of its lower carbon content.  When you consider this, some estimate that the efficiency of ethanol could be as much as -200%: 3 liters worth of ethanol would have to be burned to deliver 1 liter of ethanol to your car.  Other estimates are far less bleak, but it’s still less efficient than gasoline in that respect.

A third major disadvantage of ethanol is that it will increase the demand for the corn and other grains used to make it, making them more expensive for all of their applications (including food).  There are ways around this, but it would have to be addressed.  Some also claim that an increased demand for corn would lead many jungle-covered countries to clear cut even more of the rain forests, and using that land to grow corn for ethanol.  A field of corn doesn’t exchange nearly as much carbon dioxide as the same area of rain forest, thus offsetting the lower carbon content of ethanol even further.

You’ve probably guessed my stance on ethanol by this point: it’s just not viable.  I’m not saying it never will be, but I think the money spent on ethanol research would be better spent on other fuel sources.  Your thoughts?

Those of you who had me last year saw a few videos from this character.  He has his own opinion of scientific theories, and has made a few YouTube videos which he uses to share his thoughts with the world. Watch this video, think about it for a few minutes, and comment with your thoughts, reactions, and why he’s wrong if you like.

PS- If you want some more entertainment, watch his “Earth is Motionless Copernicus Was Wrong” and see what you think.  We’ll talk about the physics part of this video later, but it will give you an idea of what he believes

Following on the previously posted trivia question, the answer is:

The tip of your nose!

I was surprised when I learned that, and I bet some of you might be as well.  There were some good guesses in there, thanks for playing!