ScotBlogs

I awoke yesterday at dawn in a log cabin in Vermont. Fortunately, the wifi was good. Each successive test of the SpaceX Superheavy Starship has been a significant improvement over the previous one, and test five was no exception, with … Continue reading →

On the second floor of Wooster’s Scovel Hall, in a room behind the main teaching laboratory, are six cabinets completely full of labelled rocks and fossils (see below). There is even an additional set of specimens too large for the … Continue reading →

Today my wife Gloria and I visited the reconstructed Fort Meigs in the northwestern corner of Ohio in Perrysburg, just south of Toledo. It was a beautiful day and we practically had the place to ourselves. It was our first … Continue reading →

Yesterday, as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis became the youngest person to walk in space. Today, on a space-qualified violin, she performed Rey’s Theme, composed by John Williams as the musical leitmotif for Rey, the … Continue reading →

Up before dawn this morning to watch the Polaris Dawn space walk, the first commercial space walk and the furthest from Earth since the Apollo program over half a century ago. After stalling for so long, human space flight is … Continue reading →

Recently, with members of NCSU’s Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab, I completed a 3.5-year project as a subcontractor working on an industrial project. As an academic, this was a novel experience. Unlike most of my research, this work will not result … Continue reading →

Students work on social problems and challenges in the community “We haven’t had these many projects for a long time!” said Dr Mariola. Last fall, Dr. Matt Mariola (Environmental Studies) and Dr. Amyaz Moledina (Economics) began speaking to various community organizations … Continue reading →

Caltech, Saturday night, grad student pizza. The conversation turns to a famous general relativity puzzle: does an electric charge at rest in a gravitational field radiate? According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, a static homogeneous gravitational field is indistinguishable from constant … Continue reading →

After the conference in Switzerland, I stopped in Tübingen to visit Otto Rössler. Nearly everyone who learned about nonlinear systems knows the nowadays named Rössler attractor and his work in chaos theory in the 1970s. For the last four years … Continue reading →

The second stop of my Europe trip was Switzerland. In Zürich, I visited places where Boris Belousov (the discoverer of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction I am using in my lab) lived and studied during his time in exile (1910-1915). But the … Continue reading →