Michael Hurben, PhD
After running out of birds to chase down, I wanted a new challenge. Go after dragonflies, they said. It ll be fun, they said. Dragonflies and damselflies are so much harder than birds. They are tiny. They fly faster than my disease-ravaged eyes can possibly track. They often do not stay perched for very long. They More I Asked For a Mission, and For My Sins They Gave Me One The post I Asked For a…
Introduction The reflection of light at a boundary between media with different refractive indices is one of the most common and important phenomena in all of physics. Depending on the specific index values, the angle of incidence, and the polarization of the light, different outcomes are possible, including partial reflection and transmission, total internal reflection, More Fixing the…
So I ve had some very nice reviews of my book, The Physics of Birds and Birding. I am very grateful for these, and they have been coming from birding organizations, birders, bloggers, and several ornithology journals. On a recent podcast, the American Birding Association had three reviewers good through their top five birding books of More Initial Reviews of my Book: Many Good, One Rather…
In late May we took what was likely our last guided birding trip ever, in the form of a three-day outing around the Valencia and Alicante regions of Spain. Why last ? Well, my life list now stands at 5,044 species, and while I welcome the idea of adding more to it, it is hardly a More Winged Beauties in Spain and Rome The post Winged Beauties in Spain and Rome first appeared on Physics, Birds and…
I just found a small math error in my book. How annoying and frustrating. It is subtle and not something that most people would ever notice or care about, but before some astute, mathematically-inclined reader points it out, I want to provide the correction here. It doesn t impact anything substantive I say in the book, More Errata, Some Fractals and Musings on Mandelbrot The post Errata, Some…
Pelagic Publishing, based in the UK, is set to release my book, The Physics of Birds and Birding, on May 20. Here s the Table of Contents: Preface : Looking Up1 At the Feeder: Birds, Mathematics and Symmetry2 In the Garden: Hummingbirds, Flowers and Forces3 On the Open Seas: Length Scales, Migration and Molecules4 In a More The Physics of Birds and Birding: The Sounds, Colors and Movements of…
It was a pleasure to be interviewed along with Martha Steele and Jerry Berrier, two totally blind birders that I am happy to call my friends. We discuss our experiences of enjoying birds with vision loss here: https://thomasconry.podbean.com/e/bird-watching-while-blind-join-the-movement/ The post Blind Life Cafe Interview first appeared on Physics, Birds and Blindness .
We must have bought this game back in 1993 or 1994. You cannot find it anymore, except on eBay. The date on the box is 1990 35 years ago! The passage of time certainly seems to accelerate as you get older. It was called The Birding Game with Roger Tory Peterson. It was very much More The Birding Game, Anki, and Dragonflies The post The Birding Game, Anki, and Dragonflies first appeared on Physics,…
Dealing with Non-normal Incidence In the previous post we developed the TMM for the special case of light incident in a direction perpendicular onto a multilayer coating. And as developed in the post before that, our treatment of the reflection and transmission coefficients required nothing more complicated than some commonsense assumptions about the behavior of More Anti-Reflection Coatings Part…
The Headache of Multiple Layers In the previous post we calculated the effect of a single dielectric layer placed between air and glass, and showed that with a judicious selection of index and thickness, it would serve as an anti-reflection coating that would pass 100% of the light at a nominal wavelength, and at least More Anti-Reflection Coatings Part II: The Transfer Matrix Method The post…