Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-Carl Sagan

An alternative perspective on Math.

"Math, my dear boy, is nothing more than the lesbian sister of biology." - Peter Griffin

A Newton's Laws of Motion Problem!

Two adults and a child want to push a wheeled cart in the horizontal direction x. The two adults push with horizontal forces and as shown in the free-body diagram. (a) Find the magnitude and direction of the smallest force that the child should exert. You can ignore the effects of friction. (b) If the child exerts the minimum force found in part (a), the cart accelerates at in the +x-direction. What is the weight of the cart?

(a)If the box is pushed in the +x-direction by the total force of the two adults and the child...

Because the question asks for the magnitude, take the absolute value of the final answer -17N, which is 17N. The direction in which the little girl is pushing is 90 degrees with respect to the x-axis.

(b) Because we know the x-components of the forces, we can find the mass, which will allow us to calculate the weight of the cart by w=mg.

Indefinite Integrals

Here is a problem on the first homework for my Calculus II class. I thought it was pretty nice so here you go!

Use to help evaluate the integrals:



To be able to evaluate this integral using the stipulations above, we have to rewrite it in such a way that looks more familiar. One way this can be done is by rewriting the integrand using as a substitution for x/2.


Because we have exchanged x/2 for theta we also have to change dx to .



Substitute then we will have:


Now doesn't this look familiar?

If it does look familiar, you should notice that it is a part of the identity:


Do some rearranging and we get this:


Now we can rewrite the integral again and get:


Okay don't get too excited! We're not done yet! Remember that


Plug these back into the equation, do the cancellations and we get:


Integrate to get the final answer:



That was fun right?! I thought so! :]

I'm not going to go through the second integral because it's basically the same thing. Try it for yourself and you should get the answer:

Willst Du Mit Mir Gehn?

So far this summer has been great. It is my first time taking summer classes and I really like the way they work. Most students would gawk at having to attend a class or two over the summer, but I thoroughly like it much better than the semesters. The thing I hate the most about going home and having no school during the summer is that I tend to lose track of things. I get lazy and its always difficult to get back into the swing of things at the beginning of the semester.

I just got done with the first summer session today. I took Calculus 1 and English 102. The final in Calculus was pretty easy. The only thing I was taken off for was because I wrote in the infinity symbol instead of DNE (does not exist) - which I think is dumb, because it's the same thing if x is approaching infinity from the left or the right side. But its cool though, I'm not worried about it. As long as I get an A in the class!

English 102 was actually to my surprise a very good class. Despite having to write a lot of papers and reading responses, the reading material was pretty interesting. Some of the articles were by people like Althusser, Pollan, Singer; just to name a few. The novel we read towards the end of the class is titled Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I'm not going to go into what the book is about because that would take another whole blog post! But basically the theme of the class was the Rhetoric of Food. For the final project we were put into groups based on our topic of interest to make a website. My group created a site to inform the general public about the dangers of fast food and how it is affecting our nation and the world. The website consists of a few papers we did in class such as a Food Narrative, Article Summary, and interviews of people with different views on fast food. You can view the website by going here:

http://fastfoodgroup.webs.com

Now that this first session is over, tomorrow will be starting anew with Calculus 2. I am very excited because I will taking the class with a couple of friends and will be able to have a study group again. In the future I will post entries on the progress of the class and possibly a problem here and there.

Also here is a song I really like!

Looking for a good time?

Make the u substitution:


Differentiate:




Now distribute, solve for dy/dx and simplify! :D

An Introduction.

Hi, this will officially be my first post on this blog of mine. Since I am unsure of any really interesting topic to write about at the moment, I will tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Adam, which I am sure you might have guessed by now - hence the title above. Basically, I am 21 years of age and a student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I constantly enjoy learning new things whether it be science, languages, cooking new dishes, or some random skill.

I am currently studying Physics, Asian Studies, and Computer Science. I know that's a lot to try and tackle all at once, but I am often conflicted because I am still unsure what I really want to do for the rest of my life. I love physics for the intellectual challenge and the continual search for knowledge of how the world truly works. I love Computer Science for it's logical approach to problem-solving, inventiveness, and the opportunities it gives the physical and natural sciences for further advancement. Without the power computers have given us, physics, chemistry, and biology would not be where they are today. Finally last but not least, I am very interested in learning languages. Not only is it a fun and rewarding endeavor that allows you to communicate with people of different cultures around the world, I firmly believe that the study of language, or linguistics per say, should have it's own place within the field of science as well. The last frontier of science is the discovery and exploration of the "mind" ...or consciousness if you will.

To sum it all up, I feel that following these three passions of mine simultaneously will possibly lead me to a field in neuroscience/neurophysics. Our brain is the most important aspect of our existence, but also the least known. I think unlocking the mysteries of the brain will lead us into a new era of thought, thus changing our world view and how we perceive reality. All that we experience is the manifestation of the brain's trillions of neurons processing information. This concept leads us to interesting philosophical and physical arguments about whether our brain is dependent or independent of what we directly perceive in our daily lives. How do we know we're not plugged into some virtual world like the Sims or Habbo.com - and the laws we know of as physics aren't just some computer program? A program written by who? I don't know. Maybe God? Maybe some advanced civilization of mice? - Maybe the universe itself. This is only but one of the challenges that modern science is currently facing and upon which will make new and exciting discoveries in the future.

Equation Generator

I have found a great equation generator that produces equations in HTML format, allowing anyone to post equations in the comment section. Tell us what your trying to say with equations! sometimes it makes all the difference in the world.

Generate your equation here!