Reuben

Author's details

Name: Reuben Gann
Date registered: 11/30/-0001

Latest posts

  1. An illuminating trip to the Microsoft store — 12/29/2013
  2. Netflix streaming continues to founder as dozens of prominent movies are taken down — 12/28/2013
  3. Saints Row IV is the most fun I've had playing a game — 11/19/2013
  4. Statisticians need to see how experimental science really works, then shut up about it — 11/13/2013
  5. Surface Pro 2: first impressions — 10/24/2013

Author's posts listings

Jul 11 2012

On admitting loss

Categories:

General

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It's a regrettable fact that people who gravitate toward the morose are associated with a wretched underclass of people. Call them "downers", "goths", "emo kids", or what have you, these people spend an above average time thinking of death and loss. And what of it? Life is nearly entirely entwined with our relationship to loss. …

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Jul 08 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 18): Entropy

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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When we're talking thermo, we're talking about systems. A system could be the gas in a room, a chunk of metal, a beaker full of water---anything with a bunch of atoms. A system has volume, pressure, temperature, and internal energy. But, since we've started running into a problem with reversibility, you might start to wonder …

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Jun 19 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 17): Reversibility and your car's engine

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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Carnot Refrigerator Schematic

There are lots of processes in thermo that we can think of that are irreversible. That means that if you ran a film of the process backwards, what you see would never happen. When you put an ice cube into lukewarm tea, the ice cube melts. If you run the film backwards, you see a …

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Jun 14 2012

Something that confuses me about other people's viewing habits

Categories:

Film

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Imagine that during the course of a conversation I ask you what your favorite song is, and suppose that you answer "Stairway to Heaven". Suppose that I am unfamiliar with that, and so I ask you who the artist is, and you answer that "I think John Paul Jones is playing bass on it." That …

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Jun 10 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 16): How heat gets around

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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Conduction

So far I've kind of just talked about heat moving from one system to another, without much regard to how that transfer actually happens. The way that heat actually gets around is hugely important, so we can't keep avoiding the issue. Of course, we know that heating is the transfer of energy from one set …

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