M.J. Dunlavy

Tuesdays are the new Mondays. Maybe?

Maybe give it another day, when hopefully the models will start to agree.

predicting 15cm of snow on Monday

Predicting 2.5cm of snow

Predicting 12cm of snow

Predicting 10-19cm of snow

Mondays are back! Maybe!

Good movie. Go see it. It has a surprising relevancy to the subject of government funding of the sciences.

Could not have picked a better evening to re-watch "Network".

I feel a societal index can be created based on at what point "Network" goes from cynical satire to depiction of modern times. I figured we're at the 1:50:00 mark (our of 2:01:00), though in 1978 it was more like 0:35:00

Text of "A Study in Scarlet" = "My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

In Doyle's very first Sherlock Holmes story ("A Study in Scarlet"), there's an exchange where Holmes calls Watson a fool for believing that astronomy is something worth knowing about. Very weird bit!

This week is when our Gaussian Error tutorial runs in 1st yr lab. We've been doing this for many now and the amassed histogram of student measurements now has a couple of thousand points. See the development of the bell curve here:
#iTeachPhysics

Let me just check next weekend's forecast...

25-35cm of snow. Great. Amazing.

The best streaming service and it isn't even close.

Cheese pizza and garlic fingers

SDP - Snow Day Pizzas

Freshly baked loaf of bread.

SDSD - Snow Day Sour Dough

A Graph

0.9

Pic of frozen pond where underwater bubblers create large periodic circular openings in the ice.

Forget crop circles. We're doing Ice Circles now.

weird "dimly-lit area" text

hmmm

Geez, this dimension. With the sounds and sights and minds...

Aw dang. I unlocked a door with the key of imagination and you'll never guess what was beyond... a whole other dimension!

The image shows the hourglass shape of the length of the day and night over the 365 days in 2025. Diagonal bands indicate when the Moon was up in the night sky.

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

Should have added: the more conspiratorial, the better.

If someone was looking to understand the platonic form of the True Crime/Conspiracy format, what are some recommended podcasts to listen to?

Not necessarily looking for quality, I just want some insight into the format.

Screen in the Halifax Public Gardens preparing to show The Princess Bride.

Last summer, we went to see an outdoor showing of "The Princess Bride" in the Halifax Public Gardens. Everyone there had seen the film countless times and everyone had a gol'darn blast that night watching it.

RIP Rob Reiner

Good news everyone. I found our last working Drawdio.

A simple 555 oscillator circuit (output to speaker) where the holder is part of the feedback resistance.

My favourite movie of the year. Maybe go see it?

When I came into my current job, I quickly discovered that I was left with some "legacy issues" from my predecessors.

So I like to think that what I spent my morning doing was just honouring them...

YouTube video by SMUPhysics "Seeing" Thermal Conductivity in Infrared

New video! Looking at the thermal conductivity of two very different materials in infrared vision.

youtu.be/5uLbq8CoVYk

#iTeachPhysics

Finally, something happened today that wasn't the most tiring version of that thing. Up till then, this day was a complete wash.

🎟️ DEAL: Save some $$ on Carbon Arc's wealth of wonderful Halifax film screenings with a discounted 6-Film Punch Pass, now on for $50 (normally $60)!

Get to it before the deal vanishes Monday: www.carbonarc.ca/tickets/punc...

Heck yeah

For once, you weren't the first person to tell me the moon is currently in the sky!

1) Stoppard the Best
A) Science is improved by the Arts and vice-versa.