A physicist is allowed about five minutes to explain why some things are transparent to visible light: The basic idea is that when a photon is absorbed by a substance, an electron in the substance jumps from one energy level … Continue reading
In New Zealand the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has been promoting pet adoptions by training rescued dogs to drive cars. They go very slowly, the cars are specially equipped, and they get a lot of human … Continue reading
Two days in a row I left out the dang video… by … Continue reading
(I initially somehow managed to leave out the clip, which resulted in what was probably a funnier post than I’d intended…) by … Continue reading
Here’s another surprisingly interesting little micro-documentary from YouTube, this one about the U.S. one-cent coin, or penny: An aside: The coins of most countries clearly show their value in numbers. American coins give the value in English words: one cent, … Continue reading
by … Continue reading
Or given that failures are called “fails” on the Internet, maybe successes should be called “succeeds.” Either way, here, for a change, is a compilation of things that actually went right. There’s even a successful cat in it. by … Continue reading
A nicely done, occasionally funny rundown of 8 commonplace misconceptions about animals: When viewing this I noticed one semi-mistake and was going to mention it here in keeping with my usual tendency toward obsessive pedantry, but then I happened to … Continue reading
As André Schiffrin pointed out in a short article in the December 17 issue The Nation magazine, the absorption of Penguin into the Bertelsmann publishing empire will create a single company that will publish about a fourth of all books … Continue reading
Back in 1997 I read a very thought-provoking article in The Atlantic Monthly magazine by physicist Freeman Dyson in which he discussed some novel ideas for thinking about space exploration. Among other things, he note that a place where life … Continue reading