Swans on Tea

Oh, the humanity…
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I have a relative who sells appliances, and met Gordon Jump (who was later The Lonely Maytag Man) at some convention. Apparently a lot of people asked him about this episode.

I was playing around with Live Search Maps, typed in my mom’s address, and then the “bird’s eye view” option. Whoa. My car’s in the driveway. In one view — it’s gone when you rotate through the other angles. Which means it’s probably from Thanksgiving in the past few years, unless, [...]

Cool Spy Gadgets for the James Bond Within You

In your LEGO® safe?
You would think that breaking into a Lego safe would just mean taking a few bricks off but this one is quite a bit more complex. The safe weighs 14 pounds for starters. It has a motion detecting alarm so it can’t be moved without alerting people in earshot. The lock require [...]

It’s Thanksgiving, so why not stir the pot?
Larry Summers debacle, resurfaced over at incoherently scattered ponderings, (in response to a freakonomics blog post)
Do this simple experiment – go around and ask people to tell you in their words what was it that Summers said that got him in trouble. It’s an interesting Rorschach-test type question [...]

I had a vague notion of the quandry, and now know that it has a name: the Napoleon Dynamite problem, and it’s throwing a monkey wrench into a Netflix competition to improve their recommendation engine, i.e. the algorithm that tells you if you likes movie X, then you should check out movie Y
“Napoleon Dynamite” [...]

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has post discussing some Star Trek: TNG history, in which I happen to have some involvement.
Reverse the Baryon Flux Polarity!
The details involve the episode Starship Mine
In the annals of nitpickery, “Starship Mine” has a certain infamy. The “baryon sweep” which causes the evacuation of the ship is, we are [...]

Your Bacon Gift Guide
I wonder what percentage the Quantum Pontiff gets…
See also: Turbaconducken (Turducken Wrapped in Bacon)

Stephanie did the research, and now has written an article about Why physics teachers should read blogs for The Physics Teacher, and here’s a link to the director’s cut in which she says a few nice things about me, and has several links, and links to links (but AFAICT no links to links about links, [...]

Will it Go ‘Round in Circles?
Building The Amazing Steam Candle
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This is a variant of the pop-pop engine — if you point the tubes parallel rater than in opposite directions, you’ll get linear propulsion.
At first glance you might think this couldn’t work. Once you [...]

Molecular Plasma is Cooler Than You Think
Plasma inside the sun blazes at millions of degrees, but much of the matter between the stars is also plasma, in a colder form. In the lab, cold plasmas have always been made from ionized atoms, but a team reports in the 14 November Physical Review Letters that molecules [...]

How to make water bounce.
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Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, GE scientists captured details of water droplets dancing on amazing superhydrophobic surfaces developed in GE Global Research’s Nanotechnology lab.