I know water polo is a taxing sport, and it’s great that the US took a silver. But watching the players walk along side the pool, I couldn’t help but thinking their headgear looked like baby bonnets, and that they looked like giant infants.
Daily Archives: August 24, 2008
Colorful, But No Plaid
Looking Down at Those Who Looked Up
Ten ancient observatories spied from space
Image taken by GeoEye’s Ikonos satellite at 400+ miles above earth.
The Truth About Cats & Dogs
What they write in their diaries (as opposed to what animals talk about)
Soda vs Pop
One thing I usually forget when I go on vacation to western New York is that I’m in “pop” country; “soda” means club soda. If it comes up, I make the mistake once, and then I remember … until the next trip. I grew up on the other side of the state, in “soft drink = soda” country. However, I don’t recall it being so much an issue in some other map areas — they’ve got Orlando, Fl as a “Coke” area, and The Willamette valley in Oregon looks like it’s supposed to be a “pop” area. (Orlando has so many resettled folks, though, that there are lots of ways that it doesn’t seem like the south. Get outside of town, though, and that can change in a hurry)
The largest linguistic difference I recall from CorVegas was “sack” instead of “bag” at the grocery store.
Who's the Fairest Helium Atom of Them All?
Smoothest surface ever is a mirror for atoms
Metal materials reflect helium atoms much better but are harder to bend precisely into the right shape. Now materials scientists from the Autonomous University of Madrid led by Amadeo Vázquez de Parga have combined silicon and metal to make what they say is the smoothest surface ever made.
They made the near-perfect mirror by coating a thin layer of lead onto a silicon surface. This is not straightforward, because when a very thin metal layer is deposited onto a flat silicon surface it usually forms an uneven coating of differently sized bumps that perform badly as a mirror for helium atoms.