Grains of Sand

Have you ever sat on a beach and wondered how many grains of sand there were?  I have, but I may be a special case.  Today we're going to take that a step further, and figure out how many grains of sand there are on the entire earth.  (Caveat: I'm only going to consider sand above the water level, since I don't have any idea what the composition of the ocean floor is).

Lifetime of Liquid Water

Apologies for the hiatus recently, it's been a busy time (when isn't it).  I hope to get back to talking about experiments soon, but for now I wanted to write up a quick problem I thought up a while back.  The question is this: how long does a molecule of H2O on earth remain in the liquid state, on average?

Coriolis Effect on a Home Run

Citizen's Bank Park

I like baseball.  Well, technically, I like laying[3] lying on the couch for three hours half-awake eating potato chips and mumbling obscenities at the television.  But let's not split hairs here.

Anyway, out of curiosity and in partial atonement for the sins of my past [1] I would now like to do a quick calculation to see how much effect the Coriolis force has on a home-run ball.