Web watch

To suggest topics or sites for Web Watch, please visit http://www.physicstoday.org/suggestwebwatch.html . Compiled and edited by Charles Day

http://www.ametsoc.org/videos.html

From the American Meteorological Society comes The AMS Video Journal, a series about the weather, climate, and their impact on society. In a recent video, Max Mayfield, the former director of the National Hurricane Center, examines how well forecasters predicted the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina.

http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/exhibits.html

The prolific inventor Jacob Rabinow is the subject of an exhibit at NIST’s Virtual Museum. Rabinow, who was born in 1910 in Kharkov, Ukraine, spent much of his career at NIST’s precursor, the National Bureau of Standards. There, he in vented, among other things, the first magnetic disk memory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9NohlfWfQw

In Magnetic Movie, filmmakers Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt superpose animations of solar magnetic fields on filmed scenes from the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The movie’s soundtrack is provided by SSL scientists, who explain the nature of solar magnetism. The five-minute movie can be viewed on YouTube and as an installation at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where it runs from 26 February through 31 May.