Ink and Equations

Real science, written as stories, poems, satire and speeches

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Ink and Equations

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Real science, written as stories, poems, satire and speeches.

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  1. How an Old Ball Swings the Wrong WayUnpacked, 8 Nov
  2. Why the Sea Bulges Away From the MoonUnpacked, 7 Nov
  3. Why Measles Needs Almost Everyone VaccinatedUnpacked, 7 Nov

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    Stars, planets, satellites and the Sun, from a power cut to a space station.

    12345 5 pieces, best read in this order

    1. Stories How We Found North in a Power Cut The lights went out across the whole campsite, and the only phone with any battery went with them. Our instructor pointed at the sky and asked for our fists. The idea Polaris sits within a degree of the point the Earth's axis points to, so while the sky turns around it, it barely moves; it marks north, and its height above the horizon equals your latitude.
    2. Rhetoric Give Every School a Telescope A speech arguing that the cheapest science lesson no school is teaching is pointed at the sky, and that it has almost nothing to do with zoom. The idea A telescope's power comes mainly from its aperture, the width of its main lens or mirror: the light it gathers grows with the square of that width, and the fine detail it can show grows with the width itself; magnification only enlarges what the aperture has already collected.
    3. Rhetoric Pluto Isn't Sad, and You Shouldn't Be Either A speech arguing that what happened to Pluto in 2006 was science at its best, and that it had happened once before, to a world nobody has made a T-shirt about. The idea In 2006 astronomers defined a planet as a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to pull it round, and dominates its orbit; Pluto is outweighed by the other icy bodies sharing its region, so it became a dwarf planet, much as Ceres was reclassified in the 1800s.
    4. Satire & Humour Sun Promises Five Billion More Years, Apologises for Summer The statement was released this morning and reached Earth eight minutes and twenty seconds later. It contained an apology, a physics lesson and a correction about summer. The idea The Sun shines by fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, turning a little mass into energy as E = mc² describes; it is about 4.6 billion years old and roughly halfway through that hydrogen; and Earth's seasons come from its tilted axis, not its distance from the Sun.
    5. Unpacked Astronauts Are Falling All the Time and Missing Gravity's terms and conditions said astronauts float because they're falling "with very good aim". That sounds like a trick. Here's the exact aim required, worked out with a cannon Isaac Newton never fired. The idea An orbit is falling and missing: anything moving sideways at about 8 kilometres a second near the Earth falls about 5 metres each second, exactly as fast as the curved surface drops away below it, so it falls forever without landing; everything inside falls together, so it seems weightless. Opens once you’ve read “Gravity's Terms and Conditions (You Already Agreed)”