Swans on Tea

C’mon … we’ve all done it!
Just about anyone with access to liquid nitrogen has dunked things and smashed them.
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Back in June I wrote up a post an the Abraham-Minkowski controversy, which concerns the momentum of a photon when it’s in a medium.
Depending on the assumptions one makes, one can show that the momentum increases or decreases inside the medium, and obviously both solutions can’t be correct. But for a long time [...]

Freezebubbles
It’s very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles. If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down.
Damn. I wish I’d thought to do this when the temperature dropped to ~ 0ºF while I was home.

Tiny bubbles. Then bigger bubbles.
Here’s what happens when you add an antacid tablet to a big water drop in microgravity.
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The Shape of Alpha
Using Where-On-Earth geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr, one is often able to reverse-engineer maps, sometimes even at the neighborhood level.
Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? [...]

See how Emmanuel Guibert created the art for his graphic novel ALAN’S WAR
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I’ve used it before. This time it’s Caves: The World Beneath the World at Dark Roasted Blend.

10 Most Incredible Waterfalls of Ice
BP (before physics) I used to wonder how waterfalls could freeze. But if one looks at the physics, it’s apparent that the motion of water moving in a stream, river or waterfall is small compared to the thermal motion, so this motion really has little effect.
Take a peek at [...]

Air Hog Zero G micro car. Think “reverse hovercraft” — a fan inside makes it hug the wall or ceiling.
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The car is 6″ long and perhaps 3″ wide, and the shipping weight of the whole thing is 2 lbs, so let’s say that [...]

Cory Doctorow’s Cipher Wheel Wedding Rings
Cory Doctorow wanted a secret decoder wedding ring, and he asked me to help design it.
[…]
[N]ow it’s time to create some cryptographic applications for the rings. Cory and I are holding an open contest for the cleverest application.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

Adam and Jamie demonstrate serial vs parallel computation with paintball guns.
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9 amazingly unique bridges you may not have seen