I visited the site. but they're way too aggressive over there to my liking. But I guess they are doing fine as a site, attracting lots of traffic

if you'll look at our statistics area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics, we are definitely doing fine except for visits. they are far too low. we should do something about those google hits, I guess

I think we should ask more questions in order to attract more visits

the problem is that many physicists are really not the type to partecipate in a community

it's not about quantity of questions

there are other sites which have similar number of users and questions but hugely bigger visits. we should try to find what they do differently

e.g. my uncle (who is a physicist) is still using pine to read emails...

well, think about apple.SE... :-)

perhaps it's just because physics is not so popular like programming or politics (say)

yes

well, pine is the best, so good for him :-)

physics is not as popular, however physics topics are

although i switched to gmail long ago :-)

true. so what do you suggest? asking popular questions?

maybe questions that are related to popular queries

e.g. related to currently broadcasted documentaries

unfortunatelly, I no longer have any idea about popular physics. perhaps I should look at some old Hawking books or something like that to get inspiration

yeah, that's a nice idea

there are new books out by hawking and penrose... or something about mythbuster episodes? They have some non-obvious physics in there

as I said, I no longer keep an eye on popular science. at some point it stopped being useful. but I lost a contact with normal people interested in physics, which is a shame, I guess

yeah, mythbusters is definitely lot of fun. often it's more about chemistry and engineering though

yes, i was flipping through the list of episodes to see if there was some suitable question

so what are you working on by the way?

okay, keep looking. I might take a look too

statistical mechanics, more concretely lattice models. even more concretely, massless scalar field on a 2D lattice

Can a motorcycle pull a tablecloth out from under a setting for a banquet?

hm, that's an interesting question but I don't like how it combines two independent phenomena

one is properties of motorcycle (mainly it's acceleration) and second is friction and inertia of those objects on the table

but I guess it could be formulated as a valid question

btw, the answer is no because the banquet table is too long, and the tablecloth starts flipping around. not so obvious.

hm, I didn't realize that banquet table is long. then the question is more interesting than I though

*thought

the acceleration of the bike is relatively important, in the sense that the cable tying the bike to the tablecloth might be long and not under tension initially. so the bike can speed up first and pull the tablecloth later with a lot of acceleration

yeah, the question is definitely interesting

all right, I am looking forward to your asking it but I have to go to sleep now :-)

so good night

@Marek since it came up, for analysis of the physics of Mythbusters my favorite source is wired.com/wiredscience/tag/mythbusters

also I do some similar things on my own blog (ellipsix.net/blog/tag.53.html) but I'm not as good of a writer...

the point is, there is physics there to analyze if we wanted to do that

wow: the answer here wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/… totally pre-empts my question

but if wired is doing the physics of mythbusters it means that it's a good google magnet, no doubt

I'm going to bed too, good night

The guy who writes these posts actually just semi-recently moved his blog to Wired, but he's been analyzing Mythbusters episodes since long before that. So I don't think they necessarily have the writeups there because they're Google magnets. But I'm sure they get a lot of attention.

I'm sure there are aspects of the physics of Mythbusters that are unexplored in the blogosphere which we could host questions about

and/or we could go into more depth than some other analyses

@David: your blog is great. It's in my feeds now :-)

those wired articles also look quite good