ScotBlogs

While grocery shopping, I normally just glance at the newspapers in the newsstand. However, this morning, I was excited to see “above the fold” of the Wall Street Journal a large reproduction of the first image of the supermassive black hole … Continue reading →

After the delightful Joint North-Central and Southeastern Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Cincinnati this month, some of the Wooster Geologists visited a fossiliferous exposure of the Bellevue Formation (Upper Ordovician, Katian) along the Bullitsville Road in … Continue reading →

Slide rules were widely used in engineering, science, and mathematics until the early 1970s, including during the Gemini and Apollo space programs. Although rendered largely obsolete by the advent of inexpensive electronic calculators, their descendants continue to have specialized applications, such … Continue reading →

Cincinnati, Ohio —  This week Professor Wiles, Nick Wiesenberg and I attended the 2022 Joint North-Central and Southeastern meeting of the Geological Society of America in Cincinnati, about a three-hour drive south of Wooster. It was quite satisfying to attend … Continue reading →

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 x + \log y [/latex] and … 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, literature review, and a … 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 arcminutes or about 1/2°.) Unlike the Hubble … 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 Robert Scott … 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, literature review, and a … 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 reading →