45-foot paper airplane glides over Arizona desert
The plane, dubbed Arturo’s Desert Eagle, was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds.
It was built as part of the museum’s Giant Paper Airplane Project, designed to get kids psyched about aviation and engineering.
After a few false starts, the plane was towed into the sky above the Sonoran desert on Wednesday afternoon by a Sikorsky S58T helicopter.
I’ve had trouble getting decent shots of woodpeckers before — they’ve had a tendency to move around to the other side of the tree or move along if I got close. This time I maxed out the optical zoom on my camera (advertised as 20X) and used the “digital zoom” (trading resolution for additional closeup) for about an extra factor of two and steadied myself against a tree. The bird wasn’t always in the frame for the whole shot as a result, but there’s a bit of footage from which to choose; at 210 fps, this clip represents only about 4 seconds of elapsed time.
Central Tendency in Skewed Distributions: A Lesson in Social Justice
Implications of our skewed distribution of income.
This has nothing to do with the earth rotation and the Coriolis force. It’s purely for the suckers.
Here’s the trick: notice how he pours the water into the basin on each attempt. You don’t see it for the original one; it’s been sitting there for a while and has settled while he does the little demo with the compass and probably some more lecture. But he pours the water off-center for the next two experiments, so there is already some rotation of the water, and the result is exactly the direction you’d expect from the pour. When he pours on the left side of center, it drains clockwise, and when he pours on the right side, it drains counter-clockwise.
One, of course, should do this with both pour techniques in the same location to be a real experiment.
If you let your eyes trace a circle, you may freak out a bit at this illusion.
THIS is why we invest in science. This.
There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.
This is true of all science. There is no way to know, ahead of time, what discoveries will be made in basic research, whether applied research will yield a useable result, or what other applications other smart people will find from such discoveries. The principle of unintended consequences isn’t always a negative.
Science research is an investment. Short-changing is short-sighted.
Why Magicians Are a Scientist’s Best Friend
[I]t is long overdue that my peers in the conjuring profession try to take a more active role in the elimination of nonsense science by joining forces with scientists, and that scientists be open to the proposition.
Please bear with me while I offer you a peek behind the curtain, a cursory glance at what we magicians are — and aren’t. First, we’re entertainers, actors, showbiz people who have as our primary objective the delight of our audiences. We’re deceivers, yes, taking on roles and characters to express our art, just as any actor does.
How do I find Waldo with Mathematica?
This was bugging me over the weekend: What is a good way to solve those Where’s Waldo? [‘Wally‘ outside of North America] puzzles, using Mathematica (image-processing and other functionality)?
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I’ve found Waldo!
Witness Anonymity Legal Defense Operation
Justices Back Mayo Clinic Argument on Patents
In his opinion for the court in the case, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, No. 10-1150, Justice Breyer started with first principles.
“Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2[sic]; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity,” he wrote.
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In general, Justice Breyer wrote, an inventor must do more than “recite a law of nature and then add the instruction ‘apply the law.’ ”“Einstein, we assume, could not have patented his famous law by claiming a process consisting of simply telling linear accelerator operators to refer to the law to determine how much energy an amount of mass has produced (or vice versa),” he wrote.
I wonder if some savvy lawyer would interpret the specific mention of linear accelerators to mean that cyclotrons are to be treated differently…
An article claimed — in its headline — that a ~5ºC (~10ºF) increase in temperature was an increase of 18.7 percent, by calculating using the relative temperature scale. Which is wrong, of course; e.g. 2ºC does not represent twice as much thermal energy as 1ºC. The site has since made a correction.
If you really want to do a percentage based comparison, you need to convert to an absolute temperature scale like Kelvin, which shows you that it’s actually a 1.8 percent increase in temperature (306.75 / 301.45). This is middle school science.
Sadly, I don’t think that this is generally taught in middle school. Or possibly even high school, except to a few students.
