OK, not really, but it’s a top-10 list:
Top 10 Amazing Chemical Reactions
The neatest stuff from chemistry without actually blowing anything up. (One reaction is labeled an explosion, but nothing goes “boom,” and technically the Meissner Effect isn’t chemistry, but I’m willing to give that a pass because it’s cool.)
I notice a slowdown in blog posts this weekend. I wonder if anyone has investigated the posting habits of US bloggers as it correlates with the weekend before April 15, which is tax day in the US. I did most of my heavy lifting a few weeks ago, and finished up the last hour or so of details yesterday.
I promise not to depreciate non-taxable items brought forth from the previous tax year!
U.S. Tax system disrupts Casual Friday at Cognitive Daily
A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY TO DO TAXES
It’s Too Warm to be Doing Taxes
One of the Usual Suspects – I’m sick of doing taxes.
The Weekend Daily Dog: All better now. …the way I felt earlier today while doing taxes
Doing taxes are the death of me
Twitter Updates for 2008-04-12 Doing taxes – yay!
taxes suck
That’s just a few, and not counting anybody who didn’t bother to blog about it, because they were too busy doing their taxes.
Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied.”
The “materials at hand” is one thing that continually amazes me. I read details of some century-old experiment and am reminded that their apparatus and supplies were hand-crafted, often in the same lab. You read about Rutherford doing alpha-scattering experiments in pure nitrogen. Did he order a tank of compressed nitrogen from the local welding-supplies shop, like I do? Of course not.
The nitrogen was obtained by the well-known method of adding ammonium chloride to sodium nitrite, and stored over water.
(My well-known method involves the internet and a credit card)