Liquid splashes that look like flowers.
I created the liquid Vase in the autumn of 2011. I worked on creating the floral forms and leaves through the winter and put it all together Spring 2012. All of my images, unless otherwise noted are single capture events. I do not use photoshop to create composited images. What you see is what occurred in that single exposure.
Plus the upcoming transit of Venus.
A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story
The former Manhattan Project scientists who founded what would eventually become the Federation of American Scientists were adamantly opposed to keeping nuclear technology a closed field. From early on they argued that there was, as they put it, “no secret to be kept.” Attempting to control the spread of nuclear weapons by controlling scientific information would be fruitless: Soviet scientists were just as capable as US scientists when it came to discovering the truths of the physical world. The best that secrecy could hope to do would be to slightly impede the work of another nuclear power. Whatever time was bought by such impediment, they argued, would come at a steep price in US scientific productivity, because science required open lines of communication to flourish.
At the University of Pennsylvania were nine scientists sympathetic to that message. All had been involved with wartime work, but in the area of radar, not the bomb. Because they had not been part of the Manhattan Project in any way, they were under no legal obligation to maintain secrecy; they were simply informed private citizens. In the fall of 1945, they tried to figure out the technical details behind the bomb.
This basic problem hasn’t gone away. The conflict between the desire for secrecy and progress’s need for communication is still there.
I wrote about the KOH etch of Silicon some time ago. Lots of things are made of Silicon.
I gained a niece and a nephew in the last few weeks. They were about the normal size for babies, which is about 8 pounds plus a few shillings. I know this is roughly what babies often weigh. But I do not know why we weigh babies in currency.
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What really grates is that I can’t get some imperial measures out of my head. Like the baby thing. What does an average baby weigh in kilogrammes? (About three and a half, but I had to look it up, even though one of my kids was born in Germany.)
The US gets a lot of flack for not having gone metric, but it seems that places that have gone metric still haven’t fully gone metric.
The pub is a mile (about 19,296 yards, or three times as many feet) down the road and they are served beer in pints (about 78 and three eighths fluid ounces). It’s just not fair.
Not sure of the reference here. A mile is 1760 yards on this side of the pond.
This one is a tad unsettling.
Shouldn’t it be a lubrican rather than a lubrican’t?
MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing
When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.
There are two ways to go with the idea of waste, I think. With the coating there will be less condiment thrown away when it is “empty”, but for a traditional bottle, not having the same effective viscosity means pouring a lot faster, which may mean more waste as you accidentally drown your food. With squirt bottles, I think you’re OK. But less consumer waste means you purchase less, so a bold prediction of mine is that the product cost will rise to compensate.
The “validation” here is that they got some money for further development, and this is reported on a business site. Getting backers does not preclude them being, as Bob Park has put it, “investors with deep pockets and shallow brains”. The purported mechanism is the formation of Hydrinos, which is a state in Hydrogen below the ground state. Which is, needless to say, at odds with basic quantum mechanics.
BlackLight’s continuously operating, power-producing system converts ubiquitous H2O (water) vapor directly into electricity, oxygen, and a new, more stable form of Hydrogen called Hydrino, which releases 200 times more energy than directly burning hydrogen
If it’s “more stable” than regular Hydrogen, one has to wonder why we don’t see it everywhere. Oh, wait, we apparently do:
The identity of the dark matter of the universe as Hydrinos is supported by BlackLight’s spectroscopic and analytical results as well as astrophysical observations.
Except, of course, that spectroscopy means photons, and dark matter doesn’t interact electromagnetically, because if it did, we’d see it. If you can get to this Hydrino state electromagnetically, why doesn’t it happen spontaneously? We should be up to our armpits in Hydrinos.
Willfull Ignorance about Statistics in Government
The survey isn’t cost effective, the data gathered isn’t genuinely useful according to Representative Webster, because it’s not a scientific survey. Why isn’t it a scientific survey? Because it’s random.