The Aqueous Aragorn Effect

Water Striders. Filmed in slow-motion, of course.

There’s actually a bit of physics here, starting with the obvious, the reason they don’t sink: surface tension. Water is polar, so the molecules tend to attract each other, making the surface act like a series of springs and able to support small masses, up to the point that the attraction is overpowered.

Once the strider starts moving, we can see some more physics in action:

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The water strider is actually hard to see in this picture — it’s a little above and the the left of center. The black dots are a shadow of sorts. The insect would not cast much of a visible shadow if it were on a flat surface; it’s small and light will tend to diffract around the legs. But what’s happening here is that the feet make an indentation in the water and it turns the now-curved surface of the water into a lens. And the lens is concave, so the light diverges and leaves a dark spot because light has been directed away.

The water strider has been moving, and this disturbs the water. We see the waves from this disturbance and the interference as two separate waves pass through each other.

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Once again, you’re seeing the effects displayed on the creek bed, rather than the surface.

Here Now, Not the News

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get

(1): The longstanding facts

In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites.

An interesting piece with which I basically agree; I’v noticed the problem of he absence of basic facts numerous times, especially on the 24-hour news shows. I’ve had the misfortune of tuning in a few hours after the breaking news was fist reported, and all I was fed was what had happened or come to light in the last hour or two, as if I was watching the whole time. Surely if you can repeat the same story every 15 minutes, you can give some background and context to it.