Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s monstrous new clock
The monster momentarily stops the turning dial with its foot to mark the minutes, shown as blue LED lights shining through slots. It was originally conceived by Taylor as a literal interpretation of the grasshopper escapement invented by his hero, the Georgian clockmaker John Harrison whose fabulously accurate mechanisms solved the problem of establishing longitude at sea.
Another h/t to Caroline
Pictured: Rare upside-down rainbow spotted in the UK
Rainbows are formed when sunlight is refracted in a raindrop.
But in a circumzenithal arc, the colours are in reverse order from a rainbow, with violet on the top and red at the bottom.
The arc usually vanishes quickly because the cirrus clouds containing the ice crystals shift their position.
Ice particles in high cirrus clouds occur all year round, but circumzenithal arcs are usually obscured by lower level clouds.
Circumzenithal arcs are so named as they go around the zenith – the point in the sky directly above the observer- rather than the sun.
(Pedantic man notes that rainbows actually refract the light twice)
More on circumzenithal arcs
h/t to Caroline
Most of what follows falls (as it were) under the heading of “what happens when you fail to keep the center of mass above the supports.” The “ooh, that’s gonna leave a mark” cringe-o-meter registers noticeably in some scenes.
(The male gymnast’s vault at about 2:30 looks faked. Is that just me?)
via Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom
Yes, I’ve been up to no good again. Together with my band, now named The Quirk Side of the Moon, I’ve created yet another parody song, this time of John Lennon’s Imagine.
Imagine you were in a world with no math…
I was wiring up some stuff in the lab, and wondered what color-coding we had used for that component on the prototype.
“It’s red” was the almost immediate reply.
Duh. I had expunged this from the buffer. They’re almost all red. That’s why we went with color coding — so much easier than labels.