Month: June 2015

  • BWISER and summer outreach

    One of the Wooster summer traditions is the BWISER science camp for 7th and 8th grade girls.  The physics department has been responsible for an evening of demos for the campers since before I came to the College in 2003, and I’ve taken over responsibility for running our highly-choreographed rotation of nearly 100 girls through…

  • Criticality in Sandpiles and in the Brain

    I’ve started following various science sites on Twitter as a way to keep up on the latest research, and last week an interesting article popped up on Phys.org with the title “Functioning brain follows famous sand pile model”.  Since my current research on avalanches on the beadpile is a essentially an experimental investigation of criticality…

  • Chaos in the Clockwork

    The work of Newton and Laplace suggested to many that the solar system was like a giant clockwork, which was illustrated by beautiful mechanical models called orreries. The controversial Molchanov hypothesis avers that every oscillatory system evolves to a resonance governed by a family of integers, like the 3/2 resonance between the orbits of Pluto…

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