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2024
7 articles on this page- There Is No Such Thing as Full Accessibility — Only Barrier Reduction The German word ‘Barrierefreiheit’ promises freedom from barriers. That promise is structurally impossible. What we can achieve is Barrierearmut — a reduction of barriers. The difference is not semantic; it has consequences for policy, design, and institutional honesty.
- Are Cats Liquid? The Deborah Number and the Rheology of Cats Marc-Antoine Fardin won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for a playful application of rheological language to cats. The Deborah number De = τ/T is a standard timescale ratio for materials; assigning a cat a relaxation time is an analogy, not a rigorous material classification.
- Hunting Exoplanets with Your Phone: A Classroom Experiment That Actually Works Finding planets around other stars sounds like it requires a space telescope. It does not — at least not the analogy version. This is the story of how a lamp, a ball, and a smartphone became a peer-reviewed physics classroom experiment, published in The Physics Teacher in 2024.
- You Cannot Have All Three: The Fairness Impossibility Theorem For an imperfect binary classifier with unequal group base rates, predictive parity and equal false positive and false negative rates cannot all hold simultaneously. This is not an engineering failure. It is a theorem. Choosing which criterion to prioritise is a normative decision, not one made by mathematics alone.
- What the Videography Manual Didn’t Cover: Filming Music Education The classroom videography manual we published in 2023 was about filming teaching. Music education has the same word in it — teaching — but it is a fundamentally different recording challenge. Sound is the subject matter. The lesson is often one person, in a practice room. And the feedback cycle the teacher needs to reach is mostly the one that happens when no camera is present. A reflection on what the manual missed, and a software prototype that tries to address part of it.
- When Musicians Lock In: Coupled Oscillators and the Physics of Ensemble Synchronisation The Kuramoto model explains how heterogeneous phase oscillators can develop collective synchrony. It is a useful analogy for ensemble timing, applause, and delayed feedback, but it does not by itself predict a universal networked- music latency limit or prove neural coupling between musicians.
- The Impossible Heptagon A regular heptagon is not constructible by classical compass and straightedge. That theorem can illuminate seven-fold imagery, but it does not document Danny Carey’s compositional or symbolic intent.
2023
3 articles on this page- Twelve Is Not an Accident: The Group Theory of Musical Tuning Why has twelve-tone equal temperament become so useful? Continued fractions explain its unusually good fifth; cyclic-group structure explains some pitch-class symmetries. Neither fact makes it the only musical possibility.
- Non-Commutative Pre-Schoolers Socks before shoes is a useful analogy for order-dependent operations. It does not explain quantum uncertainty, and infant sequence memory is not evidence of group-theoretic understanding. The shared structure is narrower: changing operation order can change, or prevent, the result.
- LK-99: Six Weeks That Showed How Physics Works On July 22, 2023, a Korean preprint claimed that LK-99 — a copper-doped lead apatite — was a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Within six weeks, converging null results and impurity studies had rejected the claim. The episode is more interesting for what it revealed about the sociology of science than for the compound itself: how a global community self-corrected at extraordinary speed, and how the media managed to fail at conveying uncertainty despite watching it happen in real time.