Deeper Calculations to Amuse

For students and learners and the generally curious, willing to do math and to follow chains of concepts at some length.  Over the years, particularly the last several, I have presented and written up excursions into math, science, and technology, with more-or-less intensive calculations to bring out ideas that are useful or at least amusing and mind-exercising.  These include:

Math and science forays already created – they’ll pop up as PDFs; if you’re on a limited-resolution mobile device, you may want to download them for viewing later:

Lenticular clouds at sunset over the Organ Mountains, southern New Mexico – forming at the condensation height

  • The old sling psychrometer, with its wet bulb and dry bulb, does work.  How?
  • Riding a bike saves fossil-fuel energy, up to a point, when we consider fossil-fuel use in the extra food we eat to propel a bicycle and in the manufacture of a bicycle.  Don’t worry – it’s good for the environment until you get a real peloton that could have fit into a van.
  • Soda cans explode in the freezer.  At what pressure, and is it all from the expansion of water when it freezes?
  • ex and ln(x): getting a grasp on these mathematical functions for those who are new to the math, or just want a little depth.  This is handwritten.

And scrolling posts (blog), showing latest 5 posts):

How cold is that rain?

How cold is that rain? If you’ve stood outside in the rain, even on a warm day, you’ve felt the ...

Model rocketry – equations and tests

Sort of a one-stop-shop for model rocketry theory, experiments, and data analysis for a high-school class, or an advanced middle-school ...

The archive of all posts from this page is available (useful when more than 5 posts have been made); the full content of each blog is present there.

Upcoming, with content developed, but not yet linked:

  • Comparing the heat liberated in combustion with heat trapped by the liberated CO2.
  • What determines the habitability of a planet?  That is, what conditions,  geological, radiative, chemical, kinematic, etc.  We may well be alone, which isn’t bad.  This section may include just pieces of a much longer write-up, the whole of which may go into a book.