Michael Burns-Kaurin
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mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Michael Burns-Kaurin
@mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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physics professor in Atlanta; pedagogy, curriculum development, infusing computation into physics courses (he/him/his)
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mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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...
November 6, 2025 at 1:17 AM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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
November 3, 2025 at 4:58 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
#iTeachPhysics
Using this in class next week for uniform circular motion.
October 10, 2025 at 2:11 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
#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.
August 2, 2025 at 10:53 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
July 24, 2025 at 11:06 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
#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.
July 24, 2025 at 10:31 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Not as impressive on the video.
July 17, 2025 at 1:17 AM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
July 5, 2025 at 12:02 AM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
June 22, 2025 at 5:30 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
It's always two weeks. From NPR.com,
Trump to decide on Iran action 'within two weeks,' White House says.
June 19, 2025 at 7:08 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
June 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
GA, MS, LA, TX? I asked Google if Alabama is south of Georgia, got this
Yes, Alabama is south of Georgia. Alabama borders Georgia to the west, meaning that Alabama is located to the south of Georgia.
June 1, 2025 at 6:35 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
April 15, 2025 at 9:28 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
April 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
April 15, 2025 at 7:02 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
April 11, 2025 at 11:06 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
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.
March 15, 2025 at 6:23 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Okay, I can't resist posting mine.
Apparently, the head of a bearded man inside a microwave, just the head.
February 14, 2025 at 8:37 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Iridescent clouds today.
Corner of house blocking the sun, with a partial bright circle and concentric colored bands vaguely reddish, purple, cyan, somewhat yellow, magenta, blue green, purple. Bare trees in the foreground.
February 13, 2025 at 6:54 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Moon and Mars, through scope (with meh optics and some chromatic aberration).
Lower portion of the moon with small red dot below it (Mars).
January 14, 2025 at 2:23 AM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Moon and Jupiter tonight. Or as Governor Hogan might say, alien drone and its mothership.
Through silhouettes of tree branches, bright full moon in center, bright dot to the right, near moon some clouds show some slight reddish color.
December 15, 2024 at 2:15 AM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Sundog.
Bright sundog with spectrum of colors, with lamp to the left and tree branches to the lower right, wispy clouds to the upper right.
December 13, 2024 at 10:03 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Nice ice crystal display today.
Tree in front of sky with thin clouds, slightly colored arc over the tree, bright sundog with streak to the left, sun barely visible through the tree.
December 13, 2024 at 9:58 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Smartphone camera for optics. Camera is manually set to focus "far away".
On the left, in-focus image of a backyard and blurred image of a nearby ruler. On the right, inside the blurred image of a magnifying lens, the in-focus image of the ruler and the blurred image of the backyard.
December 9, 2024 at 3:45 PM
mburnskaurin.bsky.social
Lightly sliding a finger around the rim of a wine glass with water in it can produce a pure tone, but pressing down harder produces lower tones and standing waves on the water surface.
November 26, 2024 at 10:15 PM