Gummy Bear In Potassium Chlorate
Somewhere, someone is weaponizing gummi bears.
Category Archives: Video
Tweedle Beetle Battle
Last week Rhett introduced me to Hex Bugs, and I had to go out and buy a starter kit. Rhett’s thing is taking video and doing physics analysis. Mine is slow-motion:
The bugs vibrate, as you might be able to tell, and the angled legs give them a forward motion bias from the shaking. They even go up an incline of ten or 20 degrees. I tested three bugs in the hallway, where they were free to roam; one had a tracking bias clockwise, another anti-clockwise, and the third ran pretty straight. The legs appear to be silicone, so it’s not easy to change how they are bent (elastic deformation) to see if you can change that.
There are other form factors as well. More on that as my wallet is drained.
Debtris (US version)
Coordinate Transformation
Camera mounted on the tip of a sword.
It's Not the Worlds Smallest Violin Playing the World's Saddest Song?
Buckets of Watch
Quartz of them, at least.
Back from vacation, delayed a little by Snowpocalypse 2010 II: The Wrath of James Caan (It’s NOT Snowpocalypse 2010; that was the storm in February). I didn’t know how much snow the DC area would get and it seemed foolish to drive in during the storm or just as the cleanup were to begin. (And the part of abandoning my mom with whatever snowfall was there. That would have been bad). Turns out that DC got almost nothing — it had all melted by Wednesday evening — and Niskayuna got around 6″ (an amount easily handled), though you didn’t have to travel too far to find pockets which had gotten a foot or more, especially up in the hills. Further south and east got dumped upon. My route back, which was inland (Rt 88 to 81 to 15 to the beltway), was all clear.
So here’s a video about how a quartz watch works, which I found via fine structure
Physics Super Fun Time
Japanese reality TV is so much better than US reality TV.
Now, would a model airplane be able to take off?
Bandanimation
Carly Simon Physics II
A different kind of cloud chamber than I had linked to in the original. Both use alcohol, but the mechanism for condensation is a little different.
Crater Lake
Ran across this awesome time-lapse taken at Crater Lake, OR. During my time in grad school I only went there once, as it was a five-hour trek from Corvallis. The camping trips we took were generally closer to town.