20090630

Astronomy in the marketplace: star party beer!

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3668359867/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Stargazer India Pale Ale bottle, BevMo!, San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len, with a Nokia e71 smartphone.

20090629

Astronomy in the marketplace: Rare Earth hypothesis?

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3668358953/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Rare Earth cabernet sauvignon wine bottle, BevMo!, San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len, with a Nokia e71 smartphone.

20090628

Non sequitur: bee!

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3668307249/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Bee! Green Acres Lavender Farm, Atascadero, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len, with a Nokia e71 smartphone.

20090626

Bon mots: success and failure

"One essential to success is that your desire be an all-obsessing one, your thoughts and aims be co-ordinated, and your energy be concentrated and applied without letup."
--Claude M. Bristol

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success."
--Henry David Thoreau

"Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
--Thomas Edison

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
--Sir Winston Churchill

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
--Truman Capote

"The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success."
--Irving Berlin

"Success is the point of self-deception. Failure is the point of self-knowledge."
--Graham Greene

"I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me, and I didn't have the heart to let him down."
--Abraham Lincoln

"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of other."
--Jules Renard

"If there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put yourself in the other's place and to see things from his point of view--as well as your own."
--Henry Ford

"In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed."
--Charles Louis de Montesquieu

"Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles."
--Walter Cronkite

"Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort."
--Givens, Charles J.

"Success isn't permanent and failure isn't fatal."
--Mike Ditka

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
--Bill Gates

"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--which is: Try to please everybody."
--Herbert Bayard Swope

"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others."
--Jules Renard

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."
--John Dewey

"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
--Booker T. Washington

"One does not get anywhere simply by going over the success again and again, whereas by talking over the difficulties people can hope to make some progress."
--P. A. M. Dirac

"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure."
--Bill Cosby

"As long as an experiment yields data, it's a success."
--Adam Savage

"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."
--Steven Wright

"It is possible to fail in many ways, while to succeed is possible only in one way."
--Aristotle

"Fail again. Fail better."
--Samuel Beckett

"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."
--Mark Twain

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."
--Thomas Watson, founder of IBM

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
--Quentin Crisp

"At first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
--W.C. Fields

"If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence that you have ever tried."
--Ricky Gervais

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
--Herman Melville

"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
--Michael Jordan

"Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."
--George Washington Carver

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
--Charlie Chaplin

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"This thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down."
--Mary Pickford

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
--Henry Ford

"There are two kinds of failure: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
--Laurence J. Peter

"The big failures aren't data failures; they aren't issues of 'We don't know.' They're issues of 'We don't want to make the effort to be rigorous.'"
--Dan diBartolomeo

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"It is not enough to succeed, others must fail."
--Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed."
--Richard Brinsley Sheridan

20090625

Found physics: thermal volume expansion

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3656904465/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Volume expansion disclaimer, Costco fuel pump, San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.

20090624

Found physics: accelerating carbonation bubbles

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3656904227/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Rising carbonation bubbles in Wider's pear cider, Black Sheep Bar & Grill, San Luis Obispo, CA. Assuming that bubbles are forming and being released at regular time intervals at nucleation sites, increasing space between bubbles indicates acceleration (due to the buoyant force and Newtonian fluid forces, etc.). Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.

20090620

Infrared and ultraviolet light, made visible

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3577304878/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Flickering infrared beam from DVD remote, while not visible to the naked eye, is detectable with a charged-coupled device (CCD) found in digital cameras. Video by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.


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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3577276128/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

"Invisible" ink puzzle on the back of a Milky Way bar Star Wars promotional package, normally not visible to the naked eye, but made visible when illuminated by an ultraviolet lamp, causing the ink to fluoresce in the visible spectrum. Video by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.

20090619

TireWriter(TM): spiral arm formation model

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3567609008/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

TireWriter(TM), from Schwinn, demonstrating how density waves create the spiral arm structure of the Milky Way. Massive main-sequence stars are luminous and short-lived, and thus are only seen where their formation is triggered. Video by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.

20090618

Cuesta College star parties (San Luis Obispo campus, North County campus)

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3567637614/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Waxing crescent Moon, taken with a Nokia e71 smartphone through the 14" reflector at the Bowen Obsevatory atop the Building 2400 Science Forum, on campus at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.


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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3567639114/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Waxing crescent Moon, taken with a handheld Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ8 through a 10" Newtonian reflector at a Cuesta College North County Campus star party, Paso Robles, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.


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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3567641398/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Cuesta College Physical Sciences division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len (L), and Astronomy 210L students and guests from both North County and San Luis Obispo campuses during the end-of-semester North County campus star party.

20090617

Central Coast Astronomical Society monthly meeting: Cal Poly meteorite collection

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3566822715/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3567636770/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

California Polytechnic State University Physics Department professor Dr. John Keller gives a presentation on meteorite (and meteorwrong) samples at a monthly Central Coast Astronomical Society meeting held on campus at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.


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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3586244186/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Acid-etched iron meteorite slice, revealing the characteristic Widmanstatten pattern, indicative of slow cooling and crystallization within the iron-nickel cores of larger asteroids. Note the "vug" inclusion on the middle left of the slice. From the California Polytechnic State University Physics Department meteorite collection, presented at the April 2009 meeting of the Central Coast Astronomical Society. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.

20090615

Kudos: to be honest...

"To be honest I am not sure how to go about solving this problem..." by Student 4284
Physics 205A
May 2009
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

20090602

Student scribble: Hi P-dog!!

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/waiferx/3566830155/
Originally uploaded by Waifer X

Student graffiti, May 6, 2009, Science Forum 2402, Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA.