Chladni Plate using salt.
You might want to turn the volume down — it starts to get pretty annoying about halfway through, as the frequency goes up, and you may be summoning all the dogs in the area.
Some Chladni solutions for a plate constrained at the center.
Via Built on Facts, it turns out that the cellphone-popping-the-popcorn movie was A FAKE! Gasp, thud. Making popcorn with a cellphone happens only in the movies.
(or should that be “only happens in the movies?”)
More than 6 million people have watched our little videos since May 28, 2008. We are very happy to have made this contribution to an important international public debate.
Important international public debate? Jane, you ignorant slut.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Churchill, inspired by Twain, pre-internet.
Genepax Unveils a Car That Runs on Water and Air
Try again, you sensationalizing hacks. Versions of this story have spread across the web like a bad rash.
Their new “Water Energy System (WES),” generates power by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes using a proprietary technology called the Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA). The secret behind MEA is a special material that is capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.
If there’s a chemical reaction taking place, then it’s not running on water and air!
As said in the press release
The main feature of the new system is that it uses a membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen.
Got that? It contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen. There’s a chemical reaction going on, for Odin’s sake! There are materials that like Oxygen even more than Hydrogen does. Introduce them, let them get acquainted, and they’ll get busy producing Hydrogen. But — and this is very important — the other material will eventually run out, and you’ll have to “refuel.”
To give an example, you can generate Hydrogen with water, Aluminum and Gadolinium (the latter is a catalyst which keeps the Al from forming an oxide layer, which would shut the reaction down, and the reaction is not exactly a “new process”). I don’t know if this is what’s going on here, but something sure is, because in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Update: good takedown over at Good Math, Bad Math
Volunteers asked to help find dead spacecraft on Mars
HiRISE software developer Guy McArthur, also at the University of Arizona, has invited the public to scan these images for signs of the Mars Polar Lander. It’s a huge challenge because although there are only 18 images, each of them is enormous – typically 1.6 billion pixels.
“If your computer screen is 1000 by 1000, that means you need 1600 screenshots to view one image,” says McEwen. “On the HiRISE team, we haven’t put much effort into looking for this – we’re too busy with other things.”
h/t to CD
There’s a video out there in the ether that purports to measure time dilation in a car. I’ve already shown that this can, and does, happen, but you need to have some pretty expensive toys at your disposal to make the measurement.
For a good experiment (I’m perhaps charitably assuming this wasn’t just an out-and-out fraud), one would also want to measure the stopwatches against each other to make sure they were running at the same rate, and calibrate them if they weren’t. Ideally you’d want several clocks, but that’s a little advanced for this level of execution. Then, you’d want to make sure that you weren’t perturbing the clocks with different environments, like temperature differences, so make sure you aren’t blasting the AC on the stopwatch. Finally, you’d want to predict the difference to compare it to the measured difference. Ignoring effects from any elevation changes, a half-hour trip at 60 mph is going to give you a dilation of around 7 picoseconds.
My conclusion is that your stopwatches suck.
A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.
It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000”
What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
The business decision of empowering kids
A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.”
With some multivariable optimization thrown in.
Name that tune in three elements
Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.
What surprises me isn’t that someone did this. No, what surprises me is that the survey appears in a chemistry journal and it’s paywalled. There is a press release that mentions some of the songs.
But . . . Gold is the best song of the 80’s? File that under ‘Things that make you go buuhhhhh!’
Er, Marlin.
As part of its case, ”Cruel Camera” showed scenes from that much-beloved series ”Wild Kingdom.” It was broadcast regularly on NBC from 1968 through ’71, and then went into syndication, although new episodes were produced through 1978. How did ”Wild Kingdom” rescue a bear, apparently stranded in a swamp? Someone pushed the bear overboard and scared him half to death first. How do you get an alligator to attack a water moccasin? Tie a string to the water moccasin’s tail; throw him out and reel him in. Wait long enough, and the alligator will attack the water moccasin out of sheer boredom or exasperation.
Oh, man, I did not need to know this. But now that I do, I’m not keeping it to myself.
Via Bug Girl, who asks
Is this just a cost of doing business? Or is it that we prefer our nature television like we prefer our porn?
Everything is pretty, the narrative is simple, and there are lots of money shots. It’s close up, sped up, and set to music. There is always a climax to the story.
And they’re faking it.
Dinosaur extinction: what they don’t want you to know
Like, the Larsonite hypothesis
During the last days of the Mesozoic, the dinosaurs took to smoking. This unfortunate activity led to a higher incidence of lung cancer and other diseases, and as such ended up wiping out the dinosaurs.
This hypothesis is much simpler than the others presented on this page, and thus more credible. Most research on it these days is carried out at the Midvale School for the Gifted.