Those who divide the people in the world into two types, and those who don’t.
Or, you can divide experiments up by classifying them as edible or inedible: Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive
Category Archives: Other science
There Are Two Messages
Get a flu shot, sure. How about covering your damn mouth and nose when you sneeze? Yecch.
Some Pig
Bacon sandwich really does cure a hangover
I never needed to have a hangover as an excuse for a bacon sandwich. Bacon on toast is one way of undoing the damage of overcooked, super-crispy bacon (I prefer bacon that can’t be snapped in half like a dry twig)
The UnReagan Effect
Putting UP a big wall. 6,000 km along the Sahara.
BLDG BLOG: SAND/STONE
Clarifying the biochemical process through which his project could be realized, Larsson explained in a series of emails that his “structure is made straight from the dunescape by flushing a particular bacteria through the loose sand… which causes a biological reaction whereby the sand turns into sandstone; the initial reactions are finished within 24 hours, though it would take about a week to saturate the sand enough to make the structure habitable.”
Beans on Toast
Many unaware of alcohol calories
Pint of cider = Beans on toast = 200 Calories
“British cuisine” is an oxymoron
Roll Your Own
What’s next — self-assembling snowmen?
No Volcanoes Here
You Killed My Mascot!
Sometimes I think my students lack a sense of humor
It turns out that thousands of years before the falls retreated to their current position, a big chunk of that upper layer of rock fell on top of a giant beaver who was unfortunate enough to be building a dam in the vicinity. (When they say giant, they aren’t kidding. Those suckers are apparently about 300 pounds full grown. One of my students, who is a football player, said that it’s too bad they’re extinct as they might be useful on the football team.) The skeleton of the beaver, which is on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota, was radiocarbon dated to determine how long ago it died. The students use this age to determine the overall rate of retreat for the falls.
I’m not sure if the giant beaver is the actual mascot of Oregon State, but it should be. Some of the iterations they used when I was there looked too much like Chip ‘n Dale
Everybody's Doing It
C’mon baby, do the polar motion!
I mentioned that I printed out several posters for some colleagues for our Open House. Since they were displayed to the public and not copyrightable (work of the US government), I feel free to share.
Earth rotates about an axis, but this axis does not always coincide with the (geographic) North Pole.
The plot shows the location of Earth’s spin axis over the past few years. The center of the spiral is not at the geographic North Pole: it’s about 9 meters (~ 27 feet) away.
Why: early-20th-century geodesists adopted the rotation axis position of 1900 as the geographic North Pole; the rotation (spin) axis has migrated to its current position since then.
Knowing the true location of Earth’s spin axis is important when using star locations for navigation and timing, because the true spin axis determines where the stars will appear in the sky (as opposed to where one would expect them to be, were the spin axis at the North Pole).
“Polar motion” – the difference between Earth’s true spin axis and geographic north – is computed by combining measurements from radio astronomy, GPS and satellite ranging.
Redoubtable
The Big Picture: Alaska’s Mount Redoubt
Beginning March 22nd, 2009, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt, began a series of volcanic eruptions, and continues to be active to this date. Ash clouds produced by Redoubt have pushed 65,000 feet into the sky, disrupting air traffic, drifting across Cook Inlet, and depositing layers of gritty ash on populated areas of the Kenai Peninsula and Anchorage, about 180 km (110 miles) to the northeast. Mount Redoubt has erupted at least five times since 1900, with the most recent event taking place in 1989. (27 photos total)