Swans on Tea

Things have been rather hectic lately. On top of the normal (and abnormal) bureaucratic stuff, there was a little matter of moving our clocks to their new home in another building. The capacity for disaster was simply terrifying, because this represented several Simoleons worth of equipment, and scientist-years of effort. Breaking a [...]

My balls, when I’m not using them. (The brass ones are kept in a climate-controlled vault). People will occasionally pick them up and play with them.

The reason why I have them in my office: several years ago, a colleague arranged to have a construction crew replace a telescope dome with a new, [...]

I’ve used it before. This time it’s Caves: The World Beneath the World at Dark Roasted Blend.

Lighting up the night
Berlin, Germany is hosting its “Festival of Lights” this week, until October 26th. Dozens of landmarks are lit up with lamps, projectors and lasers, accompanied by fireworks and other events. We humans light up the night for many reasons, practical, artistic - even reasons with more meaningful messages. Pictured below are night [...]

Seven of the greatest scientific hoaxes
Interesting, I thought.
Then I scrolled down to the discussion, and there was crud about how AGW, relativity and evolution should be listed with the hoaxes.
The trouble with most folks ain’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so.
Josh Billings

Don’t try to understand this
Just knock, ring and canvass
Soon we’ll be votin’ high and wide
Obama Takes Lead in Galactic Polls
M83, known sometimes as the “Southern Pinwheel”, is a more complicated case, as its electoral votes are divided following Interstellar Congressional districts. The rural regions continue to hold out for McCain, with disaffected liberals in the [...]

The Fire Rainbow: An Astonishing and Rare Marvel of Nature
To name it properly, a fire rainbow is a circumhorizontal arc. It is also known as a circumhorizon arc but whichever you chose, scientists (and aficionados) call it a CHA. It is given its name because it looks as if a rainbow has spontaneously [...]

More atomic force microscope writing. (Like spelling out ‘IBM’)
‘Atomic pen’ writes with individual atoms
An Osaka University research team has demonstrated an “atomic pen” that can inscribe nano-sized text on metal by manipulating individual atoms on the surface.
According to the researchers, whose results appear in the October 17 edition of Science magazine, the atomic pen [...]

Mysterious ‘dead water’ effect caught on film
Research has already shown that dead water occurs when an area of water consists of two or more layers of water with different salinity, and hence density – for example, when fresh water from a melting glacier forms a relatively thin layer on top of denser seawater. Waves that [...]

Enceladus up close
Saturn’s tiny, icy moon Enceladus has recently been visited by NASA’s Cassini orbiter on several very close approaches - once coming within a mere 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the surface. Scientists are learning a great deal about this curious little moon. Only about 500 kilometers wide (310 miles), it is very active, [...]

Compromising your keyboard by sniffing the EM radiation signature.
We found 4 different ways (including the Kuhn attack) to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all [...]

Erwin may or may not have killed a cat. (His wife’s cat) But he didn’t humiliate it.
Catahedron Costume
What’s cuter than a platonic solid? A cat dressed up as a platonic solid for Halloween!