Bold and Italicize Your Way to a Better Memory

By: | December 9, 2010

Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read.

What if I didn’t care about the ease with which you flipped through my book, but with the amount of information you retained from it? In that case, the fourth option is actually the worst choice, according to a new study.
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AG: End Times for a Scientist’s Career

By: | December 8, 2010

This happens.  An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing.  But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, kind of mysterious.  And the reporter wrote an article for the New York Times (8/17/99), “Rarely Bested Astronomers Are Stumped by a Tiny Light,” and then the Weekly World News picked it up: “New York Times Story Sends Shock Waves Through Governments: Mystery Light in Northern Sky Baffles Scientists,” and began the story, ” . . . political and religious leaders around the world are terrified that the bizarre phenomenon is another sign from God that that the End Times are near.”

Luckily the scientist and his career both survived.

Credit:

http://abstrusegoose.com/321

Sticky Business

By: | December 7, 2010

Amateur beekeeper Gita Nandan began to suspect something wasn’t right about mid-summer. That’s when her bees’ honey, normally amber, turned the color of cherry cough syrup. After a day of foraging, her bees would return to their Brooklyn hives, their distended bellies glowing bright red.

She posted photos on the Facebook page of the New York City Beekeepers Association hoping someone would be able to come up with an explanation. One person suggested that the bees had been supping off hummingbird feeders. Another said they might have ingested antifreeze. Continue reading →

Small Problems for Astronomers

By: | December 6, 2010

Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below.

An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his 14.5 inch Starmaster Dobsonian at the horizontal position, put a towel over the eyepiece, and called it a night. The next morning, the wind first blew the towel off, then blew the telescope out of gear so it bobbed up into a vertical position and looked at the sky. As the morning passed, the sun hit the mirror, the mirror focused the sunlight, the eyepiece caught fire, the telescope exploded into flame, the whole back porch caught fire. The amateur wasn’t entirely dismayed: he was insured and besides, it was only the 14.5 inch Starmaster that exploded, not the 20-inch.

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The Truth Is Out There: The Planet X Files

By: | December 3, 2010

Did you know there’s a tenth planet—well, ninth, if you don’t count Pluto—that’s on a collision course with Earth, and the government has built a telescope in Antarctica to monitor its movements, only they don’t want the public to know about this impending doomsday because they don’t want to cause a worldwide panic? It’s true! But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just Google “South Pole Telescope collision planet Earth” and you’ll find all the evidence you need.

Okay, maybe not you, since you’ve presumably come to this site with a greater fondness for physics theories than for conspiracy theories. But a lot of people. And they’re not afraid to make their opinions known to the people they will most need to convince, if the truth is ever to see the light of day: scientists.

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Bad Things Happen

By: | December 2, 2010


This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection.  That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides:  a cell of convection.  This convective cell is called a supercell and it’s rare but is the worst kind of thunderstorm; the other kinds are single cell and multicells, and they’re bad enough.  Supercells not only have a super-strong updraft, the updraft is rotating.  They can stay formed-up like this for hours and they’re miles across; they’re over-sized, steady-state tornadoes.  They’re mean and ugly and cause havoc.   As it happens, this one didn’t.  It sat in Glasgow, Montana – supercells are most common in the Great Plains – for a while, looking like your worst fear, and then moved on.  I’ll bet it blew out that bushy little tree to the right though.  The photographer has a lot of these pictures and if you’re complacent about nothing bad ever happening to you, you’ll want to look at them.

Photo credit:  used with the kind permission of Sean Heavey

All I want for Christmas . . .

By: | December 1, 2010

Would I lie to you, honey? (Notice the pyrex says 66 degrees and the Taylor says 62. Hmmmm.)

Each year my mother asks for my Christmas list. No, I’m not eight. I’m more than two decades older than that. Yet she still asks. And I still send one. (I also cc Santa just to be on the safe side.)

This year, I’m inclined to ask for a kitchen thermometer. It’s not that I don’t have a thermometer. I do. In fact, I have three of them — two dial thermometers and a digital thermometer with a removable probe on a cable (pictured above). But I don’t trust them. One was too cheap (“You get what you pay for,” says the voice in my head). One got wet (and now may or may not be accurate). And the other rapidly flashes between Celsius and Fahrenheit. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. And none of them agree. What I’m after is the Cadillac of thermometers: ThermoWorks New Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen. The drawback is the shock-inducing cost. Are you sitting down? The Thermapen is $96. Most other kitchen thermometers are in the $15-$20 range. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose, Stardust, & Entropy

By: | November 30, 2010

Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?”  None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am.  But I did get the astronomy/physics references.

The stardust one:  maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, gold in our rings, carbon in our own selves — was made in the last drastic moments of those supernoved stars I was telling you about, and then flung out into space to be made into more stars and their planets and whatever the planets come up with in the way of life.   So literally, actually stardust.

The worldline in space/time:  make a graph, time on one axis, space or location on the other,  put a little particle down in the bottom left corner, and set it loose.   As it moves from location to location through space, it inevitably moves forward in time, and the little line connecting its locations and times is called its worldline.  The universe has a worldline, and so do we.  That word is a piece of physics poetry.

The increasing entropy/thermodynamic equilibrium one:  that’s the heat death of the universe.  I already told you about that too. So in simple gratitude, you ought to at least explain the pop references to me.

http://abstrusegoose.com/317