Swans on Tea

No, not that kind of trick, you pervert*.
I was doing some homemade wiring, and whether it’s power or signal, you generally want to use twisted-pair (or triplet, or quad, etc.). It’s faster than running all of the single-wire, so there’s a labor-saving aspect to it, but there’s a data quality aspect to it as [...]

Some more great discussion over at Science after Sunclipse: What Science Blogs Can’t Do
My thesis is that it’s not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don’t have the incentive to write the kinds of posts which are necessary. Furthermore, when [...]

THE ITCH by Atul Gawande from the New Yorker
Fascinating article, albeit with occasionally disturbing imagery, on itching and phantom pain.
Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s [...]

Photochrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of chemistry
Makes you think all the world’s a funky lab, oh yeah!
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Zap the molecule with UV and it turns green. This is due (as I understand it) to the molecule changing to [...]

via kottke
In celebration of Euro 2008, public prankster and more-than-fair soccer striker Rémi Gaillard made the following video of himself using the urban landscape as a soccer pitch. Gaillard scores goals into police vans, trash cans, open windows, etc. to the annoyance of his oblivious goalies.
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Narrowing down some historical dates with astronomy
Look to the ancient skies…
Marcelo Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis identified four astronomical events in the epic poem [The Odyssey] and calculated dates within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit in with the events described around Odysseus’s return home and the ensuing slaughter of men propositioning [...]

No, not of an alien at the window.
Here’s a little movie showing atoms being trapped and mistreated. What you’re seeing is a video of the monitor that’s hooked up to a little IR camera on the vacuum chamber. The really bright spot that’s squirming around a little are the atoms, or technically, the [...]

Lady spinning on escalator handrails. Nominally the net force is zero, assuming each rail exerts the same magnitude of force, but there may be some differences depending on what part of her body is in contact, or the escalator speeds. They each exert a torque in the same direction, though, so she spins.
You [...]

Do grocery stores give us the right mix of nuts?
Does anyone like Brazil nuts? Anyone?
Taking a look at the data from the other direction, we can ask another question. Is there anyone who likes Brazil nuts and doesn’t like any other nut? In other words, how many people might not find any nuts at all [...]

Commentary on Lego fun snacks
excerpt
You can’t tell me that this isn’t a lawsuit just waiting to happen. I can only assume that their next product is fruit flavored thumbtacks.
via Daring Fireball

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via The Quantum Pontiff