After getting himself all grumpy about the ways in which statistics are abused, Joshua Hall decided to relax with a little Carl Sagan.

Fun fact: the philosopher Poseidonios of Apameia (c. 135–51 BCE) repeated Eratosthenes’s experiment about a century and a half later. He observed that on the island of Rhodes, the bright star Canopus was just touching the horizon, while at the same time in Alexandria, the star was a few degrees above the horizon. Because the Earth curves between the two places, the star was seen from different vantage points, and thus the angle between Rhodes and Alexandria could be found. Poseidonios was luckier than he knew: both his figure for the distance between Rhodes and Alexandria and his measurement of Canopus’s position were wrong, but the two wrongnesses canceled each other out, giving a reasonable final answer.

(And yes, I employ BCE/CE dating just to irritate people.)

Still working on diagrams. . . Cairochemist, who has just recently started co-blogging at Skulls in the Stars, presents us a video showing hydrogen atoms migrating across a copper-palladium surface. Yes, understanding how catalysts work might help in arranging reactions for new energy sources, but even if it didn’t, being able to watch atoms move has a certain appeal of its own.

Oh, and Skulls in the Stars also points us to The Giant’s Shoulders, which we’re all hoping will become a new monthly event.

Drawing diagrams for my next post. . . I begin to procrastinate. . . and find that Dana is now embedding Tom Lehrer videos. Given my background, this one has particular resonance for me:

The Tom Lehrer songbook — yes, I own the Tom Lehrer songbook — has alternate lyrics which include the couplet, “Japan will have its own device / transistorized at half the price.”

MIT: when electrocuting one pickle is not enough.

Sometimes, all I can do is sigh and think, “Oh, Poseidon. These are my people.” If the caption is to be trusted, this was filmed during the 2007 Campus Preview Weekend, the occasion in the springtime when overachieving high-school students the world over come visit MIT to decide if they can make the Institvte their home. It’s rather Darwinian: the ones who can’t handle the idea of electrocuting pickles and detonating soda cans as a form of recreation go somewhere else. (Or at least they live in a sterile, prison-like West Campus dormitory where I never noticed them.)

I saw Neil Gaiman’s talk last night; it was good, but will take more time to write about intelligently. Until then, therefore, here is a capacitor bank being used to detonate a soda can:
Continue reading “Uh, It Should Not Catch Fire” →

My friend Brian just sent this video to his martial-arts class, with the comment, “This is why we don’t break bricks.”

(It’s nice to have friends. Without them, how would we ever find Internet video clips?)

I have serious stuff to talk about — honest! I mean, I’ve got, like, two book reviews in the pipeline, three essays addressing points that didn’t quite fit into those reviews, and the follow-ups to my “Physics and the Brain” post. But it’s the weekend, so instead of any of that, here’s “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats.”

Thanks to Mollishka.

Joshua pointed me to Tim Robbins’s keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters.

“In all seriousness folks, let’s face it: we are at an abyss, as an industry and as a country. And I know that saying we are at an abyss is not the stuff of keynote addresses, but all sarcasm and irony and rude pithiness aside, we are at a critical juncture in this nation’s history. This is a nation divided, and reeling from betrayal and economic hardship. . . .”