Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

Slide rules were the analog computers that ruled science and engineering for 400 years. Their brilliant innovation was using logarithms to convert multiplication and division to addition and subtraction, [latex display=”true”]\log xy = \log… Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: Independent Study (IS) at The College of Wooster is a three-course series required of every student before graduation. Earth Sciences students typically begin in the second semester of their junior years with project identification, lite… Continue reading →

Yesterday, Webb optical telescope element manager Lee Feinberg said “We made the right telescope” while reporting that its focus has reached the diffraction limit of 70 milliarcseconds. (For comparison, Earth’s moon subtends 31 arcmin… Continue reading →

Although a child of the Apollo program, I was gripped by Alfred Lansing‘s 1962 book Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage, which tells a great true story from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. In the 1910s, shortly after Roald Amundsen and Rob… Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: Independent Study (IS) at The College of Wooster is a three-course series required of every student before graduation. Earth Sciences students typically begin in the second semester of their junior years with project identification, lite… Continue reading →

The Webb telescope has arrived at its halo orbit about the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point. But how can it orbit an empty point in space? In the accompanying animation, a star (red) and planet (cyan) orbit their common center of … Continue readin… Continue reading →

We all hope this is our last pandemic semester. The College of Wooster began all its courses remotely for the first week of the semester, a format we are all very familiar with by now. In the second week we … Continue reading → Continue reading →

After MANY months of not traveling, I scheduled a meeting with Robert (Bob) M. Mazo, Professor emeritus from the University of Oregon, now living outside Philadelphia. In 1971/1972 he helped developing the key model to describe chemical reaction-diffus… Continue reading →

A liquid-fueled rocket engine is a turbopump, plus some miscellaneous other stuff. Gas generator engines burn a little fuel to drive a turbine, which turns a centrifugal pump, which rapidly pushes the fuel and oxidizer propellants to the combustion cha… Continue reading →

My Estonian colleague and friend Olev Vinn and I have a chapter in the new book The Evolution and Fossil Record of Parasitism. Ours is chapter four on the evolutionary history of colonial organisms as hosts and parasites. One of … Continue readin… Continue reading →