It’s Square Root Day! – March 03, 2009
If you’re tempted to suppress your inner geek, just remember that Square Root Day only happens nine times a century. The last one was Feb. 2, 2004, and the next one won’t be until April 4, 2016.
And it doesn’t matter which calendar convention you use.
Ultrageekily speaking, the last square (root) day was 12/12/144, but I guess we’re suppressing the leading digits here.
Horrific beetle sex described at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
The duo studied beetles taken from 13 countries across the tropics, from Brazil to the USA, and from Nigeria to Oman. The genitals of these different populations are very varied and to study them under a microscope, Hotzy and Arnqvist first had to fluff their subjects. They anaesthetised the males with carbon dioxide, and erected their penises with an “artificial inflater” – a microscopic plastic tip connected to a pump. Under a microscope, they measured the length of the longest spines and the size of the entire spine-bearing area.
Probably NSFW if you happen to be employed by Coleopt-R-Us
Susy Higgs
The marriage of Susy and Higgs has lasted for more than 30 years. Susy provides stabilization to Higgs, keeping its mass small enough. Sadly enough, bad tongues and the LEP experiment have left deep scars on this relationship. The problem is that the minimal supersymmetric model ties the Higgs boson mass to the Z boson mass.
Getting around: Fuel Use of various modes of transportation
At the bottom, note that the fuel use of a bicycle is shown as a fraction of the energy of a gallon of gas, or 16 Whopper-equivalents. But that’s only looking at the “caloric conversion,” i.e. the energy content of the fuel. But we don’t mine Whoppers out of the ground — that’s the advantage of fossil fuels: the energy is stored in them, and it’s energetically advantageous to recover them. This analysis doesn’t take into account the energy used to raise the beef, wheat and vegetables and deliver them in finished form. A Whopper costs at least as much as a gallon of gas (currently). Comparing food to gasoline is a tad more complicated than counting calories.