Category: Nature

  • 3D Printed Theodolite and Survey for Stellarium

    3D Printed Theodolite and Survey for Stellarium

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    For years I’ve wanted a theodolite but even used they are not particularly affordable. To support planning sky viewing a wanted to be able to survey the obscuration from buildings and trees in my front and back yards. Thingiverse offered the answer–a printable 1 degree resolution theodolite. I ended up remixing it and you can…

  • 3D Printing the Mountains

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    Hanging on the wall, under the low ceiling in the basement of my childhood home was a map. It was plastic, and it had a 3D texture of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Flying over the range in my imagination I could see the high mountain valleys bowled in by the snowcapped peaks. As an adult…

  • Monsoon

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    In the desert it almost never rains. I know, you know. When I lived in upstate New York, in my foolish youth, I bought a motorcycle in the beginning of April. I was anxious to learn to ride. Too bad, because it rained every day for an entire month. Now I live in New Mexico.…

  • The Spiraling Shape

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    The Spiraling Shape will make you go insane Everyone wants to see that groovy thing –They Might Be Giants The chambered nautilus is sometimes called a living fossil. It is the closest living relative of the ammonoids, and cross sections of its shell are familiar to every adult in the western world. Most kinds of…

  • Candle Flame Flicker

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    For a project I wanted to make an LED flicker like a candle. I searched for the signal statistics of candle flicker, and I found no data. One student web site suggests that candle flame flicker is a 1/f-type random signal with roll-off of 20 dB per decade increase in frequency. Similar processes are typical…

  • I Don’t Tell You How to Do Your Job

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    This article begins with a story from my life, my fatherhood, about the time I was most afraid. The story ends happily with the birth of a healthy baby girl. The article, on the other hand, ends with an analysis showing how medical habit increased the threat to my daughter’s life by a factor of…

  • Big Centipede

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    Last August my son’s school started the year with a school-wide focus on insects. When we’d drop him off or pick him up we would see experiments laid out to determine various properties of ant behavior. We collected arthropods to bring in too, butterflies, bees, spiders, whatever we could find. One evening my wife was…

  • Birds of My Yard

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    Most of these pictures were taken through a window, with insufficient telephoto and probably insufficient tripod use.  Nevertheless, you can tell what kind of bird they are, and for me that is interesting. With luck, I’ll update these with better pictures over the summer, especially the hummingbird. The broad-tailed hummingbird is my best guess at…

  • Giant Juniper Berry

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    My wife took the baby for a walk yesterday, when the weather was nice.  She grabbed a juniper berry while she was out, because its size was astonishing.   It is pictured below, sitting a US quarter dollar coin.

  • Ants!

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    This morning, in the back yard, the ants swarmed. The first picture shows the main cluster of the swarm, the posts in the background are railroad ties, which are about nine inches wide. The swarm footprint is a semicircle cut from a circle about 18 inches in diameter. There was no obvious reason why the…