I never saw a purple cow;
I never hope to see one;
but I can tell you anyhow;
I’d rather see than be one!
I modified a webcam to allow IR photography, but didn’t think to take a picture like the one Matt has displayed, in which a stove’s heating element glows purple (when viewed with his camera), just as it starts becoming incandescent. I have a gas stove.
You correctly answered 11 out of the 12 possible questions, which means you did better on the quiz than 82% of the general public.
Couldn’t remember where the DJIA has been hanging out recently.
You can check out nationwide results by age, gender and education level.
We think of fundamental particles as being very small, but “relic” neutrinos left over from the big bang could be big. Really big. According to the 22 May Physical Review Letters, the quantum wave describing one could be billions of light-years across, a good fraction of the observable universe. Such a large wave raises questions about how a quantum particle interacts with gravity at the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters–questions that remain unresolved.
I meant to link to this before, but forgot until I ran across it again — 3 Quarks Daily is going to award prizes for good posts in the blogohedron
[I]n the interest of encouraging and rewarding good writing in the blogosphere, we have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields. Here’s how it’s going to work:
Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.
You can read the announcement and rules here
Feel free to nominate any post you like — mine or anybody else’s.
Voting is now open. Here’s the list of nominees.