For those of you pondering the eternal Monty Python-posed question, may I present Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow, an exhaustive study of the problem involving avian kinematic data, Strouhal numbers, and altogether far too much math for such a simple question.
via The Daily Illuminator
It’s always fascinating to compare the modern day with predictions of futurists from days of yore. A Space Age Christmas is an article from the Dr. Who Annual 1974, and it has a great mix of hits and misses about Christmas in 2003.
Microwave cooking is indeed very popular, though not nearly as automated a process [...]
Now there’s something that’s been missing from NASA‘s spacecraft: uranium fission power plants. The planned Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) is a nuclear-powered monster, around 18 to 30 meters long.
Jimo also would bristle with fins to dissipate the intense heat from its reactor.
Yeah, I’ll bet it would. You could also set up a Jovian espresso [...]
Britney Spears is a pop and softcore pr0n sensation, and simply by including her name in a blog entry, I’m guaranteed to get hits in my referrer log from the more pathetic population of the net. However, most people don’t realize that she’s also a brilliant physicist. Need proof? Have a look at the britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm.
The [...]
The Gender Genie is a fascinating Web tool/toy that uses an algorithm to determine the gender of an author, based on a sample of that author’s writing. So far, it’s been spot on in detecting that I’m male.
It’s interesting to note that there is more statistical “maleness” in samples I plugged in from my book [...]
The Chandra X-ray observatory has detected sound waves coming from a black hole in the Perseus cluster. It’s a constant B flat, 57 octaves lower than middle-C, which has been sounding for around 2.5 billion years.
Black holes sing. Simple things like this just make me happy. Today has been worth living, simply because it brought [...]
I’ve been looking a decent handheld periodic table of the elements for a while. I’ve seen a few in the last couple of years, but nothing I’d be willing to shell out more than $20 for. I just discovered ChemTable, which not only contains far more information than the others I’ve looked at, it’s also [...]
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