xkcd zombie goodness
Daily Archives: May 9, 2011
They're All Named Bob
Here’s a pendulum demonstration that was part of an Exploratorium exhibit in the atrium of the Hyatt where I was attending a frequency & timing conference this past week. The bobs all start off in phase but since the period (or frequency) of a pendulum depends on \(sqrt{L} \) (or its inverse), the relative phases rapidly diverge. The bobs occasionally hit a condition that looks less chaotic, such as the slightly-out-of-phase S shape, and the condition where alternate bobs are 180ยบ out of phase. They then go back to the “S” before briefly all being in phase again. That occurs when they have all undergone an integral number of oscillations, with each one having undergone one more cycle as its neighbor as you move from the front to the back (long to short)
Here’s another video, via @JenLucPiquant with even more bobs.
I Don't Care What You Did Last Summer
All of your public school teachers have a history. Almost all of them have masturbated. Many of them have smoked marijuana. Almost all of them have dated; most of them have danced. Some of them are gay. Some of them are heterosexual. Almost all of them have private kinks which you don’t know about, because they don’t practice them in public, let alone when they’re doing their jobs. Some of them have been sex workers.
And you know what? All of them can be fired or blacklisted by local prudes on school boards or the school administration. Teachers: you don’t get to be human. This outrages me.