Sunday, April 4, 2021

Would be possible to generate artificial gravitational waves that could be detected with the current detectors (LIGO, VIRGO)?

There has been a stunning revolution in astronomy over the past ~6 years with the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO and VIRGO consortium.  Now that we are detecting "naturally" made gravitational waves, I've been wondering could we generate them artificially - and detect them?

Would be possible to generate artificial gravitational waves that could be detected with the current detectors (LIGO, VIRGO)?  Short version - seems like no.  Sources that have currently been detected are mergers of black holes and neutron stars that are 10's to 100's of megaparsecs away, so first I consider reducing the mass and having the source be closer - and this still requires incredibly large masses moving very fast (now in close dangerously close proximity!)

I also tried a quick idea about using motion of electrons within atoms to generate gravitational waves, but electron motion is not that much faster, and the mass of the electrons is much too small.  Motion of atoms within molecules would not achieve the required speeds and thus would require even more mass.

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Sunday, January 3, 2021

Understanding MOSFETs for use in a thermostat

Basic MOSFET background and operation

A MOSFET is basically a switch that can be controlled electronically - it's an acronym for Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor.  Here is the electronic diagram of a MOSFET, note it has 3 leads labelled D, G, S:
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Thursday, December 31, 2020

Betting on the 2020 US presidential election *after* the election

A couple weeks after the 2020 US presidential election was held, Nate Silver tweeted several times about the irrationality of betting markets (for example PredictIt), since they still had a 10% chance of Trump wining various states.

Screenshot of tweet - text of tweet: Political betting markets still give Trump a >10% chance, both nationally and in several states where *results have been certified*. As I've said before, it's a bit alarming there are so many delusional people out there that the market equilibrium is this detached from reality. Tweet contains screenshot of betting market odds / map of US colored by odds of who wins each state.

Other versions of this tweet talked about "free money" and "money left on the table".  I decided to try it out for myself discovering along the way that Nate failed to take into account transaction costs and market limits/barriers that contribute substantially to maker distortion.  In other words, it's not solely as Nate says irrational people, but also other well know sources of market inefficiencies..
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Thursday, December 24, 2020

using LaTex in blogger

 Bit of a meta post here - how I use LaTex formatting for math / equations in blogger.  Starting with this Stack Exchange TEX question/answer, I copied the provided code to load the MathJax library and then followed these blogger/google instructions in the section "change your blog with HTML or css", in the html section - edited the blog template, added the code copied from above into the <head> section.  Seems to be working now:

$$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$$

$$y(x) = sin(\omega x)$$

$$c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab \cos(c)$$

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hello world physics - part 1 classical mechanics

I've been struggling to understand General Relativity - the theory that describes gravity - for a long time now.  One thing I realized might help is a very simple example - solving a very simple, recognizable problem using general relativity.  In an analogy with software engineering, I'm looking for how write "hello world" in new programming language.

For the equivalent of programming's "hello world" in physics, I'm going to choose the problem of tossing a ball up into the air.  I'm going to solve this problem using 4 different types of physics:  classical/Newtonian, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and quantum electrodynamics.  I hope this will give me (and you perhaps) a better understanding of the differences and similarities between these theories, and some practical understanding of how one uses / applies them.

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Monday, October 12, 2020

Looking at and thinking about lightning strikes

 I captured some lightning strikes on video, it was neat to look at the individual frames and observe the qualitative standard progression of how they work.

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My visceral reactions to GLOW: delving in to my childhood during the 1980's

I recently watched GLOW - the Netflix TV series about the 1980's female wrestling show of the same name (Gorgeous Ladies Of Wresting) and was extremely surprised that seeing the styles of the 80's and hearing the music had a deep / profound impact on me.  It hit me.  It connected.  I was 9-10 years old at the that time, but hated it!  It's not that I decried the music publicly but secretly loved - I have no memory of ever enjoying it.  I wrote this blog post to explore why I deeply enjoyed it now, and have loved watching GLOW.

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