Swans on Tea

The Physics of Chocolate over at Cosmic Variance.

13 Crazy Examples of Why English is the Most Hilarious Language to Learn
And don’t fall for the con man selling you the sham poo.

… and then get myself back together again.
A modular robot that reassembles itself after being kicked apart
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After successful self-reassembly, the system stands up and continues its task
… which is apparently to fall over like a drunk sailor soldier. (Sailors walk randomly, but don’t [...]

The Top ten greatest experiments, with brief descriptions. More detail that the book review to which I previously linked.

Son-Of-A-Bitch Mouse Solves Maze Researchers Spent Months Building
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment.
[...]
“Had we obtained any usable data, perhaps that information [...]

Over at Skulls in the Stars
We want to put a sundial up on the new building on which I’ve been working. (sooooo close to being done, too). I had joked at one point that we would mount a light that would move around the gnomon, so you could read it at night. [...]

More than you probably wanted to know about ampersands and how they look in different fonts.
As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of “et,” the Latin word for “and.” Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint [...]

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… he’s my unbibium.
Reports of a naturally occurring superheavy element
Non peer-reviewed reports, mind you, this is on arXiv
In the neighborhood of Z = 122, A = 292, abundance = 10^-12, relative to thorium, and a half-life in excess of 100 million years. Found when doing mass-spectrometry on Thorium. The half-life appears [...]

Google’s Zurich office
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Password error message

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Notice that the ears are cooler — an elephant uses its ears for thermoregulation. The same idea as fins on any heat sink: lots of surface area. That’s necessary because of the elephant’s shape (the spherical approximation is much more reasonable for [...]