Taking A (Possibly Explosive) Page Out of Nature's Book


There's this Cold War story I heard. It's said that at the beginning of the Space Race, both the Americans and the Russians bumped into a bit of a nuisance. You can't use pens in Space. They depend on ink flowing downwards. So the Americans comissioned a research team to invent a pen that would work even in 0G, and soon enough they had built a clever system for pumping the ink and, after some effort, created a working prototype.

The Russians used a pencil.

What is the Colour of an Atom? - And the Galaxies Going Faster Than Light



A short film exploring the dual nature of light, spectroscopy, perception and the sad truth about astronomy. May or may not contain a pun. (It does.) 

What it certainly doesn't contain is an unexpected fact about rainbows, the truth about the empty floating bit of nothing between the wood and the fire itself and the story of the galaxies travelling faster than light. Because they are in this here blog post.

Why are T-Shirts so boring? - Study on T-shirt design diversity



The list of things that bug me is practically unending, but if it's narrow, lazy or plain stupid, it probably fits the bill. However, the list of things that bug me so much I've made an actual study on them, collecting primary data myself and stuff, contains, for now, one.

Is Silicon Valley on the verge of disaster... again?


(map by Jay Simons)
It is traditional for moments of epiphany to involve bathtubs and evrikas, even though it doesn't happen all that often. Mine happened during an especially boring lecture. I was tempted to run around naked, evrika-ing at people, but I decided to keep the revelation in my pants err... self. To myself.

I had been reading news at random, a habit I had been keeping for boring courses for longer than I care to admit, and it struck me. Because sometimes, if you follow enough strands aimlessly, you start reaching the same miserable node, where they get hopelessly tangled. Eventually, enough jigsaw pieces you had no idea fit together become an image you weren't even intending to build, and, just for a few golden moments, the world presents itself on a platter with all the inevitability of a freight train. And you know you've just noticed something almost nobody else has, or, if they have, they're keeping it to themselves. 

My own version of evrika went something on the lines of: "Oh... shit. It's happening again, isn't it?"

Messing around with dry ice




I am told such things do not casually just happen, but a week ago I found myself suddenly in opportunistic posession of around 10 kilos of free dry ice. So, I thought, hell fucking yeah, let's see what we can do with it. We did science! *

*screwed around with it

The more interesting experiments, such as a bunch of fog and dry ice-propelled rockets, are in a neat little montage above, for your viewing pleasure.