… and I’ll push this little red button
To be fair, the “house” of bricks is more like a wall, and without mortar. Pigs may make houses out of straw and sticks, but they follow building codes, dammit.
Puts my Airzooka to shame, though.
I Have to Issue You a Ticket
For violating the laws of physics
Violations of conservation of energy
Count #1: The ball is traveling much faster at the top of the first loop than when it rolls down the ramp just above it
Count #2: The ball comes off the green elastic faster than when it hit
Count #3: The ball come to rest just below the rubber band, and
Count #4: again on the left on the second ramp from the bottom,
yet has enough energy to launch the next ball all the way to the top
The launching device should be a cannon triggered by a pushbutton, to plausibly add energy to the system.
(updated to add #2 and renumber other violations)
… And Then a Hockey Game Broke Out
The Onion: South African Vuvuzela Philharmonic Angered By Soccer Games Breaking Out During Concerts
Spontaneous high-caliber soccer games have thus far plagued every orchestral vuvuzela performance of the season, which opened June 11 at Cape Town Stadium. As musicians took their places in the stands and began warming up for the evening’s performance of lighter pieces by post-minimalist composers, they noticed the audience was not sitting in its traditional place in the stadium’s central area.
As the Philharmonic learned later, its only spectators were the national football sides of France and Uruguay, who played to a 0-0 tie as the frustrated vuvuzela virtuosi played a full program of concerti written for the distinctive straight plastic horn.
——
I can’t wait for the next Austin Powers movie, with Vuvu Zela as the annoying Jar-Jar-Binksian sidekick who drones on and on in a loud abrasive monotone, not really talking.
Dr. Evil: Vuvu, what do you think of my evil plan?
Vuvu: Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Weeeeeeeeeellllllllll, uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh …
The Thing Ted Stevens Wasn't Talking about
A series of tubes: A live map of the London Underground (which is not a political movement; I checked)
This map shows all trains on the London Underground network in approximately real time. The yellow pins are stations (click for a local map of that station), the red pins trains.
TYAGFITI (Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet)
Too Much Time on My Hands
Iconic photos and paintings recreated in LEGO, with links to the original works as well.
I Can Do the Can Can
The topic of discussion a few days ago was vacuum chambers, because we want to eventually trap ions, and these can be made to be pretty compact — you don’t need a very large vacuum chamber. In fact, you can get away with no external pump at all in the final configuration; after the initial pumpdown you pinch off the connection tube you activate a getter material inside the vacuum chamber (remembering, of course to put Bedevere, Lancelot and Galahad inside the rabbit beforehand, in order to take the French by surprise. Not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!)
How compact? Well, basically the size of a soda can. Which, of course, prompted a discussion of using an actual soda can. We ignored the problems of the hole in the can and the completely inadequate strength of a can, and instead focused on the problem of whether cans had a liner that would cause a problem with a vacuum. Something easily checked by a visit to Google, but we’re experimentalists, and a hacksaw blade was closer than the internet. We empirically determined the presence of the liner. It was only later on that one of us confirmed that a liner called Vinylite was introduced in 1934; the problem that prompted the invention was that beer in cans tasted just awful. (i.e. much worse than beer in cans currently taste)
The major problem the early researchers were confronted with, however, was not strength, but the can’s liner. Several years and most of the early research funds were spent to solve this perplexing problem. Beer has a strong affinity for metal, causing precipitated salts and a foul taste. The brewers called the condition “metal turbidity”.
Though I would not have been surprised if it read “causing precipitated salts and a foul taste. The brewers called the condition Genesee Cream Ale”
Along with that tidbit is a recipe for dissolving the aluminum to leave only the liner. It involved 6M KOH, so this is not something you want to try at home.
Where There's Smoke, There's a Video
Get Your, er, Buns to Mars
Seventh Graders Find a Cave on Mars
On their two targeted images the students found lava tubes, as they had hoped. And on the backup image, they also found a small, round black spot. Many Martian lava tubes are marked by aligned chains of collapse pits, which typically have flat floors and sloping sides. The spot they [sic] students found, however, appears to have vertical sides.
…
The students have submitted their site as a candidate for imaging by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRISE can image the surface at about 30 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel, which may allow a look inside the hole in the ground.
Falling Down on the Job
It’s an ingenious plan with two major problems: first, the super-cold atom clouds are extraordinarily hard to make. Second, the best way to test gravity is to make sure that no other forces are acting on an experiment. Short of launching it into orbit, the best way to do that is to drop the whole experimental apparatus so that it goes into free fall.
Incredibly, Rasel and his team have now licked both problems. They devised a special self-contained canister that can automatically generate a BEC. They then dropped the canister from the 146-metre-high drop tower at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity in Bremen, Germany.
This is one of the experiments I mentioned in a discussion of chip-scale atomic physics a while back. And while it’s hard, I don’t know that it’s extraordinarily hard — the workshop I summarized was part of a push to move this type of technology forward. You get a lot of smart people thinking about the problem, trying different things, and you find solutions. But it is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great.
here’s another story on the topic: Scientists Drop Theory of Everything Down Elevator Shaft
Just a Bit Outside
If sports got reported like science..
HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland.
INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon?
HOST: It’s just what’s in the script. All I did was read it – I’ve got no idea what it’s really on about.
INTERCOM: Nobody without a PhD in football’s going to understand that. Who wrote this crap? It’s elitist rubbish, people will just turn off when they hear it. “Late equaliser”? “Offside”? We’ve got to get this rewritten so it’s more accessible.
They need to work in how the early goal by Sunderland violated or has rewritten some rule, except that it didn’t, in order to parallel all of those science stories that claim that relativity has been violated or evolutionary theory has been upset by some discovery, only to find that (of course) nothing of the sort actually happened.