Daily Archives: May 8, 2010

There Are Oedipal Snakes on this Oedipal Plane!

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The Deadliest Snakes on Land, Sea and Air

Until recently, the only time we’d heard of airborne snakes was in the Samuel L Jackson cult classic, Snakes on a Plane, but snakes don’t need human help to fly. They can do it all by themselves. Actually, Flying Tree Snakes are technically able to glide rather than fly, but even so these South and Southeast Asian jungle denizens can make some serious headway as they sail through the air – traveling distances as far as 328 feet before landing. After first slithering up towards the top of the canopy, the snake hurls itself into the ether, twisting and propelling itself away from its launch pad before landing on another tree or the forest floor.

(How do they get 328 feet? It’s 100 meters. That’s some MoFo false precision from the MoFo unit conversion!)

A Peek in the Closet

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Instruments for Natural Philosophy

In February 1975, Deborah Jean Warner, a Curator of Physical Science at the National Museum of American History, called me to ask if Kenyon had any historical physics teaching apparatus. I looked around my office, and reeled off the names of four or five good pieces of apparatus that I was using in my lectures. The next month I was at the Smithsonian, exploring the collection and photographing some of it in black and white and in color. Since then, I have visited and photographed nearly seventy collections of early physics apparatus. This web site displays pictures of about 1850 pieces of apparatus, along with text and references.