Michael Burns-Kaurin

@mburnskaurin

physics professor in Atlanta; pedagogy, curriculum development, infusing computation into physics courses (he/him/his)

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Was it worth it, dropping the phone taking these pictures (only a small dent on the screen)? #iTeachPhysics #optics #spiderwebs #colors

Outside wall/corner of a brick house, with a spider web and the sun at the top. The web displays many different colors at different places, along arcs centered on the sun.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· 26d

In the middle of the picture, up in the trees, a spider web catches the sun light just right for light wave interference to produce interesting colors. #optics #iTeachPhysics

Leaves and branches high up in a tree, mostly in shadow but with some sunlight. In the middle, a spider web catches the sunlight, producing an area with shades of mauve or magenta color next to an area of vaguely greenish blue.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jul 13

Colors from a spider web strand in sunlight.

Some long narrow leaves bottom and left edges. Stretched from left to right, at a slant, a spider web strand with colors varying along the strand.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jun 18

Venus and Moon upper left, Jupiter sneaking in lower right.

dark sky, two horizontal power lines, lower half trees with a gap lower right. Moon and Venus in upper left, Jupiter faint in lower right.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· May 19

Jupiter wants in on the fun.

Crescent Moon and Venus lower right, Jupiter upper left.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· May 19

Playing with new phone.

Dark sky, trees low, crescent moon on right with earth shine, bright dot, venus, on left.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 29

Delayed on the way into the Science Center. First saw the 22 degree halo (just above the tree at the bottom), took lots of pictures. Looked straight up and there was the circumzenithal arc (towards the top). Gotta love those ice crystals. This was shortly after a heavy band of rain came through.

Wispy clouds, tree top towards the bottom. An arc just above the tree, somewhat colored like a rainbow. Towards the top, a strongly colored rainbow-like-colored segment.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 16

Notice from a library, saying "The Edge of Space-Time" by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is available for ebook checkout.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Feb 25

Halo there.

The top of an old-style lamp in front of a building, with the top of a leafless tree. Most of the picture is the sky, with the sun behind the lamp and a 22 degree halo around it (red closer to sun). Sky is pale color, with three parallel thin contrails and one at an angle to them.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jan 4

Ripples in a stream. Just because.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Dec 30

#moire pattern from two baking/cooling racks. #iTeachPhysics

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Nov 25

#iTeachPhysics #glowscript #webvpython Banked curve homework was turned in, so I added the force summation to the animation. Used labels for the first time. Code here glowscript.org#/user/burnsk...

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Nov 6

Just a small animation, to help the students visualize a car going around a banked curve for an assignment next week. Code at trinket.io/glowscript/7...

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Nov 3

In Thermal Physics, the students said they had trouble visualizing a 3d standing wave--I did show them a 2d wave. We'll see if this helps. Code at www.glowscript.org#/user/burnsk... #iTeachPhysics #webvpython #glowscript

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Oct 10

#iTeachPhysics Using this in class next week for uniform circular motion.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Aug 2

#aaptsm25 #iTeachPhysics #optics Looking in the mirror at the hotel, I see squares around my pupils. The mirror has a light around its perimeter, about 3 feet on a side. I'm about 2 feet from the mirror. My eye is about 1 inch across. Sometime I suppose I can figure the curvature of the cornea.

Close up of a bearded human face, white beard and white hair and white eyebrows. The pupils of the eyes have white squares around them.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jul 24

Another raindrop falling through the rainbow (blown up from a frame of a video), this one came out nice.

Out of focus trees, with a vertical line in the center that shows rainbow colors, red on top and blue on bottom.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jul 24

#iTeachPhysics #optics #rainbow I was watching a light rainfall and was sure that I saw individual falling drops (about three feet away) that went through the rainbow as they fell. Pictures did not show it, but video did (left side of picture).

Blurred picture of green foliage, left of center is a streak showing the color spectrum, red on top to blue/violet on bottom.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jul 17

Not as impressive on the video.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jul 5

This was high in the sky this evening, not at zenith but maybe 80 degrees or so, 1.5 to 2 hours before sunset. I did not get pictures showing clear curve, but sometimes it was curved down and others a bit up (or both). Looked at a book and wikipedia, not sure if circumzenithal plus 46 degree arcs

Silhouettes of trees bottom and left, solid clouds behind up to the middle, then thin clouds with a color spectrum, horizontal, blue above and red below.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jun 22

Sunlight reflecting off spider webs, can see some colors. Seems like interference?

Tree branches and green leaves. In the upper-left, lower-left, and upper-right are areas of various colors such as reddish, yellow, cyan, coinciding with spider webs.

Tree branches and green leaves, in the center area a spider web showing colors such as orange, cyan, magenta.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jun 19

It's always two weeks. From NPR.com,

Trump to decide on Iran action 'within two weeks,' White House says.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Jun 1

Had occasion to ask Google if Alabama was further south that Georgia. Got this. Sigh. This is the future?

Yes, Alabama is south of Georgia. Alabama borders Georgia to the west, meaning that Alabama is located to the south of Georgia.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 15

Cooling looks more like the exponential decay I would look for if Newton cooling held. dT versus delta T is ugly, since the changes were small.

A graph showing fairly exponential decay.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 15

Nope. Couple of reasons, including Newton's law of cooling/heating does not work if size is significant (different parts have different temperatures). Also see the slowdown near 100 deg C. This graph shows change of potato temperature vs oven minus potato (time goes basically right to left).

graph starting near vertical zero at horizontal 105, increases linearly to 1 at 125, then levels off until 140, then goes up again with peak at 160 and 1.7, then drops quickly to zero at 180. shows temperature change vertically, temperature difference between oven and potato horizontally.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 15

I'm tweaking the thermal conduction experiment (aka cooking) for our capstone course and could not find my old cooking data, so I had to bake a (sprouting anyway) potato. The potato lost about 23 grams of mass during the baking.

Graph of temperature vs time, starting fairly level (25 degrees celsius) then increasing at an increasing rate after about 100 s, then rate of increase starting to decrease at about 1000 to 1500 s (60 to 80 degrees celsius), almost level after about 2200 near 100 degrees celsius. Oven temperature was 204 degrees celsius.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Apr 11

Okay, when I plot each day instead of their binning, it is clearer. May even show a bit of decreasing slope.

a graph with a linear fit line, showing some deviation from the fit line near the beginning and the end.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Mar 15

Nice refresher on video analysis for me, first attempt (lost some frames, would like to average over a few pixels). Horizontal is frame number, vertical is value of image converted to black and white. Python, opencv, random web converter for getting video off youtube and converting to bitmaps.

Graph, with three plots, horizontal 200 to 1000, vertical 60 to 220. Plot label "one" is level until about frame 250 then goes up sharply, max about frame 480, then drops a bit then a slow rise. Label "two" is level until about frame 300, then goes up steadily, reaching the same at the end as "one". "Three" is level until about frame 350, then increases steadily reaching just over half the level of "one" and "two" at the end.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Feb 14

Okay, I can't resist posting mine.

Apparently, the head of a bearded man inside a microwave, just the head.

Michael Burns-Kaurin@mburnskaurin· Feb 13

Iridescent clouds today.