Swans on Tea

T-rex bed

That’s not recursion. This is recursion.

Zoom in on a striking weather-related photograph to reveal hundreds more photos making up the original. Then zoom again at each level for an endless array of images, each submitted by users to My Shot.

Secret play room uses armoire as hidden doorway

Cool. Next time I’m home I’ll have to remember to document and post the secret compartments my dad built into the house; he converted our attic into a bedroom, and the crawl spaces have a secret door.

TED 2010: Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosqitoes Dead

Myhrvold demonstrated a “Death Star” laser gun designed to track and kill mosquitoes in flight. The device was crafted from parts purchased on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory.

Video here: High Speed Videography of Mosquitoes

The third video is the best one, showing the critters being smoked. Literally.

a lighter bulb

A while back, gg explained Earnhsaw’s theorem and the application to magnetic levitation; you can’t trap a dipole with static fields. But that’s OK, because you want a time-varying field so that you can transfer the energy via induction. The bulb is modified to do this.

another h/t to Buzz’s owner

We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do.

AT Europe: London Close-up – The Amazing Staircase

Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome.

flight patterns

Long exposures of bugs under a street light.

Oh, this is just TFC. I expect I will be staking out a streetlight with my DSLR in the near future.

But for the people walking, this looks like a model railroad setup.

Tilt-Shift Trains Switzerland

Atmospheric pressure is about 10 N/cm^2, but there are a whole lot of square centimeters on that tanker — the more familiar unit is N/m^2 (Pascals), where 1 atmosphere is 101325 Pa (or possibly even more familiar 14.7 psi).

Various sites showing this have claims about this happening after the tanker had been heated (from steam cleaning), and all the valves shut while it was still hot. One claims frozen (perhaps they mean liquid?) nitrogen being added. Plausible? Heating the tanker to 373K and then letting it cool to ambient should drop the pressure by 0.20 atmospheres. A tanker that’s 2 meters in radius and 10 m long has a surface area of 125.6 m^2, for a total force of 12.7 MegaNewtons. 20% of that is a lot. I don’t think the liquid nitrogen is strictly necessary, but would add to the effect.

The heat of vaporization of liquid nitrogen is 5.56 kJ/mol and its specific heat capacity of the gas is 29 J/mol-K. The volume of 125.6 m^3 means 5600 moles of an ideal gas, requiring 160 kJ/K to cool it down. Each liter of liquid nitrogen (29 moles) takes about 160 kJ to boil off, and then another .84 kJ per degree as the gas heats up from 77K. So ten liters of liquid nitrogen dumped into it will cool it about 20-25 degrees, depending on the starting point of the tanker. So that won’t hurt, but what’s probably more important is that the tanker was built to withstand some pressure difference and we see the catastrophic failure when its critical pressure difference is exceeded. Unlike the kind of test you can easily do with a can where you boil some water inside, seal it and watch it crumple as it cools, because it wasn’t designed to withstand and significant pressure difference.

Oh. I mean fractal ink

Easter Island Panorama