Fryeburg Academy Physics

I hope everyone is enjoying their vacations. Be ready to work when we get back!

I came across this video this morning, and it’s worth a look. It explains the science behind how your clothes get washed, but I think it’s just cool to see the candy corn sticking together like that.

In Honors Physics we did a demo with peeps and the vacuum tube, and of course there’s a lot more you can do with peeps (besides the obvious snacking). The Washington Post newspaper holds a contest around Easter time for the best diorama involving peeps, and today they published the 40 finalists with photos. Some of them are very clever!

In case you get bored this weekend, here’s a site I recommend you visit. It will make you laugh (hopefully), and it might make you cry. Will it change the way you think? Probably not. Will there be things that are over your head? Yes probably, but there’s also a lot of things that you will understand.

The website to which you have been directed is the official homepage of The Flat Earth Society. Yes, there are apparently still people out there who don’t believe the earth is round. I also recommend the Wikipedia article about the FES for some further reading.

Are there really people who believe we live on a flat planet and everyone has been deceived by an elaborate conspiracy? Can anyone really be that dumb? Does anyone take this seriously?

I don’t know. But I really, REALLY hope not.

A colleague pointed this article out to me today. In Honors Physics last week we did a lab to measure the speed of sound with a tuning fork, hollow plastic tube, and a graduated cylinder filled with water; this blog post suggests a way to measure the speed of sound while singing in the shower. Let me know if it works*.

I recommend the blog too; it’s written by a physics grad student, and is pretty entertaining. Add it to your RSS reader. Don’t know what one of those is? Try here.

*I will not be responsible for laughs or strange looks you may get while attempting this.

Here’s another post of The Boston Globe’s feature The Big Picture, this time a series of photos of a recent eruption of the volcano Mount Redoubt in Alaska. #1 is now my desktop background. There are some great photos in here, I recommend you check them out.

Yes, it matters. I shared this with some classes, and I’m posting the entire recording here so that you may listen to the whole maddening conversation. I’m glad to hear that all of you recognized that changing the word behind a number can change the number a great deal, and I hope you maintain that level of common knowledge and sense in your travels through the world. 

The episode inspired a blog to keep track of everything that was happening, and you can read all the details here.