Author Archives: John F. Lindner

Thousands of years ago, ancient astronomers like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus combined careful observations with simple mathematics to measure the solar system, especially the diameters D of Earth, Luna (Earth’s moon), Sol (Earth’s star, th… Continue reading →

Saturday, March 8, 2008. A heavy snow, one of the heaviest I remember, shuts down the city of Wooster. Streets are undriveable, so I walk to Taylor Hall, getting snow in my boots. Taylor is deserted, as the College has … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The pressure and temperature near the surface of Venus is so high that its carbon dioxide atmosphere is a supercritical fluid, a global ocean of a remarkable state of matter, which fills any container like a gas but is as … Continue reading → Continue reading →

A chill went through the spaceflight community last week as NASA reported that it had lost contact with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Delivered to Mars under the belly of the Perseverance rover and intended as a 5-flight 30-sol tech demo, … Cont… Continue reading →

Because of the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu… Continue reading →

I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where … Con… Continue reading →

When I bought my new house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I asked Siri to wake me at 7:15 AM this morning so I could watch SpaceX’s second Integrated Flight Test of Super Heavy Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Unfortunately, my house suffered a rare power outage … Continu… Continue reading →

For the last two years, the Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab and I have labored to incorporate diversity in machine learning. Diversity conveys advantages in nature, yet homogeneous neurons typically comprise the layers of artificial neural networ… Continue reading →

A particle confined to an impassable box is a paradigmatic and exactly solvable one-dimensional quantum system modeled by an infinite square well potential. NC State’s Elliott Holliday and Bill Ditto and I recently explored some of its infinitely… Continue reading →