By adding a ferrous component to an already wacky toy we can keep all characteristics of the original putty, but now have the additional dimension of magnetism! I’ve seen magnetic thinking putty for sale on other websites, but I’ll show you how you can make your own for a fraction of the price and in about 20 minutes.
Monthly Archives: May 2012
No Use Crying Over This, Either
“I cannot say for sure if coffee spilling has been detrimental to scientific research to any significant extent,” says study author Rouslan Krechetnikov, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But it can certainly be disruptive for a train of thought.”
Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer decided to investigate coffee spilling at a fluid dynamics conference last year when they watched overburdened participants trying to carry their drinks to and fro. They quickly realized that the physics wasn’t simple. Aside from the mechanics of human walking, which depends on a person’s age, health, and gender, there is the highly involved science of liquid sloshing, which depends on a complex interplay of accelerations, torques, and forces.
I have a vague recollection of this being studied years ago, looking at walking resonances.
However, physicist Andrzej Herczynski at Boston College thinks Krechetnikov and Mayer’s study didn’t go far enough. “I was personally a bit disappointed that the study is limited to cylindrical mugs … leaving out the very common curved or conical cups, such as those used for cappuccinos and lattes in Italy,” he says. “Still, the paper seems at minimum destined for the Ig Nobel Prize.”
The conical spill-resistant mugs were popular with my seagoing shipmates back in the day.
You Had Me at "Waffle-Iron Brownies"
Common Appliances, Uncommon Uses
Imagine our delight at seeing a soufflé rise up in the slow cooker, a frozen mixed drink take shape in the ice cream maker. Our late-night snack cravings found succor with a waffle iron. And if you don’t have these appliances, or don’t understand why anyone would veer from the standard, there are conventional instructions for most of the recipes too.
Not sure I agree with the criterion that it has to be faster than the conventional way; if it’s better or somehow more convenient but takes longer (e.g. a novel use for a crock-pot), then I would have included it.
Doctor Obvious Meets Abbie Normal
Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’
For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what’s known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good, a few people to be very bad and most people to be average.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found that someone is shocked, shocked to find that you have non-normal distributions after you’ve run your sample through some kind of discriminator. Managers don’t tend to hire the unqualified. Students that aren’t college material tend not to go to college, or drop out. If you aren’t good enough to be competitive at a sport you won’t be on the team. Once you have limited your sample in a way that introduces a bias, don’t automatically expect the distribution to be normal.
Nobody Saw This Coming
How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone
For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster — the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant.
But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive — but their impact is striking.
The Diversity of Particle Accelerators
The diversity of particle accelerators
Postoc Daniel Bowring showed me a display, seemingly set up in the corner of a random hallway, where LBNL keeps a collection of segments from different types of particle accelerators.
Portable Hot Fudge
Chocolate Candle Pours Hot Syrup Over Chocolate Cake
I’d totally burn that at both ends, if you know what I mean.
It Doesn't Even Matter if They are Ill-Tempered!
Marine biologist-cum-TV personality Luke Tipple attached a 50-milliwatt green laser to a lemon shark off the coast of the Bahamas in late April.
OK, 50 milliWatts isn’t going to melt a city or anything. But it’s a start. (Though wasn’t this accomplished in one of the sequels?)
The Basketball Kama Sutra
Analytics Reveal 13 New Basketball Positions
For as long as basketball has been played, it’s been played with five positions. Today they are point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward and center. A California data geek sees 13 more hidden among them, with the power to help even the Charlotte Bobcats improve their lineup and win more games.
I think it has been long recognized that within any position you can have more of an offensive/defensive prowess, and that there are hybrid positions, regardless of what label you put on them. I’m also not close to being sold on NBA 1st team/2nd team, role-player or one-of-a-kind being a position. (Hey, I’m won the starting job at NBA All-Star on my team!) I think these are ways of categorizing the productivity of players, i.e their roles, rather than defining the position they play. You need a player or players with ball-handling skills, you need ball distribution, you need rebounding, you need scoring ability (interior and perimeter and also free throws), you need defense. How you divvy up those needed skills isn’t fixed, though some pairings might work better than others. This breakdown seems to imply that good players excel at a couple of skills (and the best at even more), or are somewhat less adept at each but possess a wider range of skills, and those pairings/groupings are given.
Now what would be really interesting would be looking at the depth and breadth of coverage of these roles as a function of the teams’ success. The diversity and output of the Mavericks that is shown — does that represent their success as well? Would a cellar-dwellar have the same breadth but simply be at a lower level of achievement, or do they suffer from not having some skill-set combination (e.g. single-skill players, rather than dual-skill), or both?
Oh, That Pesky Factor of Two
Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event
On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Other than the fact that Venus made a transit in 2004; I got to see it and even got to see it with a telescope used in the 1874 and/or 1882 transit expeditions. So this is (for many of us; some people have been born since 2004) a twice-in-a-lifetime experience. However, if you missed the last one, this is it — you won’t get another chance until 2117. In the US, the sunset will interrupt the transit. For much of South America or western Africa (or anywhere in Antarctica), you’ll miss out if you stay where you are. Looks like Iceland has a unique situation of having sunset interrupt the middle of the transit, but will see at again at sunrise.
More information at Transit of Venus dot org.