See the Music

Record grooves under an electron microscope

It has CD pips, too, for those of you too young to remember what a “record” is.

But if you put a needle in the groove and moved them relative to each other, the needle would wiggle back and forth. Use a transducer to convert it to an electrical signal, amplify it and send it to a speaker (which would essentially do the reverse). The groove is a composite of all the waveforms of the song, added together.

Mr. Smith Doesn't Go to Utah

13-year-old helps save daylight saving in Utah

I know this is supposed to be an uplifting story of how clever a teenager is, in a sort of afterschool special kinda way, but I’m more cynical than that. I see it as a bunch of blowhard politicians happily debating something they do not understand, have made no effort to understand, but are willing to make a decision about anyway, despite the fact that by not understanding the issue you have no hope of recognizing the ramifications of your decision. All this despite the fact that a teenager can understand and explain the concept, so it really wouldn’t have been all that difficult to have a staffer spend a few minutes Googling the information and summarizing it for you.