Google “turned the lights out” for earth hour.
But if you have an LCD screen, a black pixel draws more current than a white one, because you have to energize the pixel. The low-energy state is “clear,” which lets the backlight through, and gives you white. So this thinking is very CRT, very yesterday. Not Google-y at all.
The engagement ring that floated away.
A $12,000 lesson in buoyancy. If only he’d paid attention in school.
Accelerator in a Bowl
I was poking around the blogdom — with the rise of science-y, i.e. non-diary (and, I suppose non-dairy) blogs, surfing the web has become interesting again — and ran across a link to How to Build a Cloud Chamber, and that reminded of the person that built the cloud chamber using a Starbucks cup. (Not sure if he was so vain, however.)
And that reminded me of the question I had back then — TRIUMF had a large, continuously-running chamber in the lobby of the visitors’ entrance last time I was there, and though nobody does it better, I’m sure there are other facilities with similar setups. Why not run a webcam showing it? I haven’t found one.
Second-best is video. Here’s one that shows the construction steps of a good one, and some tracks. That’s at the end, so there will be some anticipation.
The many-tentacled PZ over at Pharyngula explains why we need academic freedom…to question Newtonism
We’ve been lofting people into the sky for well over a hundred years, and quite often, they’ve fallen down. How many have died due to the tyranny of the gravity Newton put into the hands of conscienceless materialist scientists?
Oh, crap, he found out about the conspiracy. Things go up all the time, and yet no Newtonist will accept this evidence as against the existence of gravity! We always explain it away, hands a-waving, using buzzwords like “lift” and “buoyancy” to avoid admitting that gravity isn’t solidly established. We thought we were safe by declaring all these Newtonian things to be “laws” so they wouldn’t be questioned.
Time to make relativity and quantum mechanics even more incomprehensible.
It took me more than a few seconds to be convinced that it wasn’t just two people with a box over their torsos.
Much less time to figure this one out
(’twas the feet that gave it away)
Hat tip to Patrick
Physics conspiracy: LHC could kill us all
Conspiracy nuts have suggested that it might also inadvertently destroy the Earth (or maybe even the entire Universe)
…
[B]asically the cranks think that the collider will also cook up either an exotic particle or a tiny black hole that will suck up everything around it. It’s pretty much bunk, as others smarter than I have said (here for example).But that hasn’t stopped Walter L. Wagner, a botanist and self-proclaimed nuclear physicist, from filing suit in US District Court in Hawaii to stop the LHC before it destroys all we hold dear. Wagner wants a “full-scale safety analysis” to be conducted of the collider before its start up, hopefully later this year.
If we’re really lucky, the LHC cook up an exotic particle that will “inadvertently” destroy the crackpots (and maybe take a few lawyers down, too). Not that anybody’s planning this, mind you …
The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You
Pay special heed to #5.
10 effects you should have heard of, over at Backreaction.
Full disclosure: I don’t recall hearing of #10, and I didn’t know #9 by its “formal” name.
snark: But I have heard of the ending-your-sentence-with-a-preposition effect. (it’s a weakly forbidden phenomenon)