Swans on Tea

… about the new camera. It’s not just a (high speed) video camera, it also takes stills, though it doesn’t do all the things that an SLR does.

This is a damselfly, which are related to dragonflies. The main difference to my eye (not being a biologist) is wings open vs. closed when resting. [...]

Smart cars get Dutch dunking
Dutch pranksters in Amsterdam have dumped dozens of the tiny two-seater cars into the city’s waterways.
The old VW bugs floated. Are these cars smart enough to do that?

Myth of raindrop formation exploded
“Myth” may be overstating it, which is par for the course. But someone actually observed what happens to large raindrops, to see why we get the distribution of raindrop sizes.
The pair got the idea from the unusual but well known transformations of fuel droplets travelling at high speed in diesel [...]

I buy things for the lab (which may not be a true statement in the near future; we shall see), and some vendors like to thank me for my business by throwing in some item that I didn’t buy but might find useful or enticing. I have gotten t-shirts, beanbags for juggling (or possibly [...]

I’ve been having way too much fun with my new camera, and (as any regular reader knows) have posted several videos. Many more are still unedited and unuploaded (is that a word?), and even more will just sit as a collection of magnetic orientations on my hard drive because they ended up being not [...]

Movie Trivia: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Daniel Radcliffe’s voice changed while they were filming, but the movie was shot in sequence so it just gradually gets deeper throughout the film instead of being at different octaves here and there.

Invisible flash takes photos without the glare
Although the dark flash gives a crisp image without disturbing those in the picture, the results have an odd colour balance that looks like a view through a night-vision scope.
To give the pictures more normal hues, Krishnan and Fergus used colour information from a brief, flash-free photograph of the [...]

flickr: Tapecraft
Crafts constructed from simple invisible tape and colored with permanent markers.

Outsmarting the Facebook Lobster Trap: Three Worries, One Guideline, Seven Principles
Facebook is basically designed like a lobster trap with your friends as bait
I am on facebook. I find I don’t use it a lot.

Mix Master Magnets
A rotating magnetic field can induce tiny beads in a fluid to link up into spinning strings, researchers report in the July Physical Review E. The team measured the effects of different field configurations to find the most efficient way to use the beads to stir the fluid. These “self-assembled stir bars” could [...]

Hummingbirds move fast!
On my list of the things to do this week is film a hummingbird in slo-mo.