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

Sep 27 2012

The Witcher 2 is basically fantastic

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Video games

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witcher2-b-662x360

Fantasy isn't my favorite genre. It's nearly always set in some vaguely medieval setting, but without Christianity (who can separate those?) and includes a ton of lore about magic, dragons, along with elves, dwarfs, and other variations on humanoids who have different British accents. The trappings take over, and not much compelling ever seems to …

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Sep 17 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 23): Absolute Entropy and the Third Law of Thermodynamics

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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The heat capacity of water per mole across the temperature ranges from 0 K to 900 K.

Here I've been blabbering on and on about entropy, but all I've really talked about is changes in entropy. Irreversible things miss opportunities to do work, and that makes entropy go up. But what is the entropy of, for instance, a bottle of gas? It has pressure, temperature, volume, and internal energy. If the gas is …

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Aug 27 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 22): Other ways to create entropy

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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A chamber with gas is opened to a chamber that initially is evacuated, resulting in the free expansion of the gas into the new chamber.

I have to admit, I've been fibbing a bit. It is absolutely true that changing something's temperature by heating changes its entropy by . However, this is not the only way to change it. In fact, anything that's irreversible increases the entropy. And there are ways to decrease the entropy of a system without taking …

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Aug 06 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 21): Time reversal and breaking the 2nd law

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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Suppose you are recording a video of someone playing billiards. The balls crash into each other, and if you sit down and calculate the energy and momentum of the balls before and after a collision you will find that energy is conserved and momentum is conserved in each collision. Now, if you reverse the video, …

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Jul 27 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 20): Equilibrium, entropy, and how the universe ends

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

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It's hard to say much of anything about particles if you don't know anything about the system they're in. When air is flowing through a tube, for instance, it's a constantly changing, turbulent mess. However, we can say a lot about systems that have reached equilibrium. Equilibrium is what happens when you leave the system sitting …

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