I love working for a company that makes so many clever products. If you think about Clarke's third law, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic., you realize that engineers are the ones creating magic by advancing technology.

There are two particularly awesome 3M products with which I have been impressed recently: ( Read more... )

I was recently pointed at the web site of K&J Magnetics which has magnets for sale. Very strong magnets. From this tiny one with 0.20 lbs pull force at $6/100:


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On 29 January, NASA and WHIO orchestrated a phone conversation between an astronaut on the International Space Station and a marine biologist in the deep-submergence vehicle Alvin 200 miles above and 2 miles below sea level, respectively. While technical parlor tricks like this don't directly contribute to science, it certainly captures the ( Read more... )

My parents got a bunch of compact fluorescent bulbs for the house. In general CF bulbs are great, but a bunch of these looked terrible. They looked too blue. For years I've seen claims of "daylight" bulbs that always look blue to me. I wondered: Is the manufacturer lying? Certainly they actually were doing something close to what they claimed ( Read more... )

Superstitions aren't necessarily unfounded. Apparently one explanation for house haunting is carbon monoxide poisoning. In low concentrations carbon monoxide can trigger depression, panic, and hallucination. In higher concentrations, of course, it can mysteriously kill a house full of otherwise healthy people. Combine this with a house that is in ( Read more... )

Bode pointed me to the below YouTube video of the Kaye effect. I remember noticing this in high school, pouring liquid detergent into the top of our front-loading washing machine. Every now and then the flow would bounce off as though there were no friction.

It turns out detergent is thixotropic, or shear-thinning. That is, once it gets flowing, ( Read more... )

In fluid-dynamics lab today we played with flow visualization around a model Cessna 182. I brought my camera, and after figuring out the right exposure settings (way over-exposed according to the light meter), I got this nice shot of wingtip vortices.


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As reported by various news outlets (e.g.), a recent article in The Lancet discusses the actual risks that various drugs pose. According to one summary article:
The new scientifically-based ranking places alcohol and tobacco amongst the most damaging of substances. These socially accepted drugs were judged to be more harmful than cannabis, and more ( Read more... )

[ previously]

With mew0422's help on the study design, she, her mother, and I all did a three-way double-blind taste test among Coke, Passover Coke, and Coke Zero.

Protocol

To double-blind ourselves, one of us affixed labels, A, B, and C, to the bottom of three identical glasses. Another filled each glass, noting which was labeled as which, and the third ( Read more... )

I found the mythical Passover Coke (Coke made with sucrose rather than with HFCS) I mentioned previously.

As advertised, it is marked by its yellow cap:

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