iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

New addition to the website. Hate that this needs to be said.

new side banner on the site saying no AI is used in the creation of materials for the website.

M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Q: What's the best thing to use as an example of something that weighs 80lbs? A big dog (german shepherd)? 10yr old kid? Asking for a friend...

screen cap from a video attempting to explain what 80lbs translates to.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Partially-eclipsed sun as seen inside the partially-air conditioned Atrium at SMU

Eclipse sen through Atrium skylight windows

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

An underrated aspect of the prism-rainbow refraction effect is that since the transparent prism bends all of the light, it leaves a shadow as if it is opaque.

A transparent prism creates both a rainbow as well as a dark shadow.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

2001 NYT crosswords hit different.

the solution to the clue "Bachelor's counterpart" is "Spinster"

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Let me see... what do I remember from that weekend...

Box Office Game for the weekend before 9/11

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I thought I was proud of this mushroom-spinach risotto *before* putting it on the table...

$Plate of risotto with a diffracted sun beam on it from a prism in the window on a sunny day.$

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

And here are some measurements made with a contactless IR thermometer against both interior and exterior surfaces as a function of number of steps from the ground floor.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Here's what is looks like from the inside in infra-red. It can be hard to see, but the upper floors (at the top) are much hotter than the lower floors (bottom of pic) 2/3

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

So we have in the Atrium a glassed three story stairwell that acts as a type of greenhouse column. On a hot day like today, the temperature difference from top to bottom is noticeable! 1/3

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

After far too long, the "Search" function on the site has been fixed! Now teachers and students can search for the demos they are looking for as if this site was made in the 21st century. demos.smu.ca

Website search function returns for the term "forces".

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Do this long enough, and you can hear feedback from the future while you are editing. (and yes, I can also hear your typo comments)

Text card saying "But! (I hear you ask) Is it truly random?"

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

The issue with filming at 1000fps (with my camera, at any rate) is the lo-res pixelation. Throwing lots of light at it helps, of course. But in this case, I think it works as an effect for the "indeterminate" state.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Ok. Doing a full video of this.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Was green. Then orange? A nice way to demonstrate superposition of states and how measurement (catching) collapses them. #iTeachPhysics

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Dang. Gonna get what-for from the Multi-Media office for this one...

Sticker on a slide projector with the text "On long-term loan to the Physics Dept. from the Multi-Media office Dec./77"

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

They can't all be winners. For instance, here's Mr. Eclipse-Eyes. He gets happier as the eclipse proceeds.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Deleting old videos on my desktop and found this sadly doomed rocket launch from 2016. I like the way it seems to head for the moon.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Coming soon: Updates to all of our filmed-on-video-tape Van de Graaf demos.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

There are so many ducklings in the Public Gardens right now.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

So does macOS have the passive aggressive module installed by default?

macos Tips notifications offering "Learn how to organize your desktop"

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Slo-mo (240fps) outtake from a thing I'm working' on...

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Still working' on a thing. Enjoy this slo-mo outtake, demonstrating my cat-like reflexes in catching a tennis ball.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Fog on the harbour can only mean one thing:

Ghost pirates from “John Carpenter’s The Fog”

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Science on the Cheap. Dollar store pizza pan makes a great Chlandi Plate. Plus! The rim keeps the sand from getting everywhere.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

In Doyle's very first Sherlock Holmes story ("A Study in Scarlet"), there's an exchange where Holmes calls Watson a fool for believing that astronomy is something worth knowing about. Very weird bit!

Text of "A Study in Scarlet" = "My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

This week is when our Gaussian Error tutorial runs in 1st yr lab. We've been doing this for many now and the amassed histogram of student measurements now has a couple of thousand points. See the development of the bell curve here: #iTeachPhysics

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Forget crop circles. We're doing Ice Circles now.

Pic of frozen pond where underwater bubblers create large periodic circular openings in the ice.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Last summer, we went to see an outdoor showing of "The Princess Bride" in the Halifax Public Gardens. Everyone there had seen the film countless times and everyone had a gol'darn blast that night watching it. RIP Rob Reiner

Screen in the Halifax Public Gardens preparing to show The Princess Bride.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Good news everyone. I found our last working Drawdio. A simple 555 oscillator circuit (output to speaker) where the holder is part of the feedback resistance.

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I starting using a different music player on my phone and it gives me stats on how much music by each artist (I don't use spotify etc, I just listen to music I've bought). All that to say that this was a surprising amount of The Fall.

Artist: The Fall - 464 Songs - 32hrs 27 minutes

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Did you know the colour of an LED is dependent on the band gap of the doped semiconductor inside? And that that band gap is temperature dependent? And! If you (gently) dunk said LED in liqN2, neat things happen! #iTeachPhysics

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M.J. Dunlavy @mdunlavyca.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Outtake. Trying and failing to get a magnet to spin on a superconductor without knocking it off the disc. Three misses is a strikeout!

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