Watch a pulse of light at a trillion frames per second

So, at MIT they made a high speed camera that can capture a trillion frames per second and that's fast enough to watch a pulse of light in slow motion. Crazy. How did they do this, you ask? They use a bunch of light sensors that are slow on their own, but are timed to take a picture one trillionth of a second apart. To reduce the number of sensors that they needed to use they took photos that were only about a pixel high and as wide as their scene. Then scanned the whole scene from top to bottom with the camera. Since the light pulse was a highly repeatable event, they could do a bunch of trials and then mesh all of the line videos together. I JUST SAW LIGHT! Yeah, whatever, I see light 16 hours a day.

My Unfounded Theories 2: Where does the time go?

So, how's the space-time continuum been treating you lately? This is my standard greeting when I'm feeling a little bit pompous. Well, time is pretty crazy when you think about it. It's the fourth dimension, it's the first non-spatial one (the second one is possibilities? Ah, who knows), but mathematically it can pretty much just be lumped with the spatial ones. People have pondered about what time is for all of humanity, so don't expect a definitive conclusion from this post. The problem seems to be that we really have no way of probing time. For probing space, we have things like the LHC and telescopes, but nothing of the like for time. We know it slows down as you move faster thanks to that Einstein, but not much else. Are we just moving along one time-path in a sea of infinite, or even finite, possible time paths? Do our decisions dictate our path, or is it predetermined? And this is the problem. Thinking about time gets speculative very quickly, and it is tough to reel back in.

Emulsions

Emulsions are pretty much everywhere. Some example are milk, mayonnaise, vinaigrettes, creams and lotions. So what exactly is an emulsion? Well, it is a mixture of two immiscible liquids. What are immiscible liquids? They are liquids that do not mix in all proportions. Huh, aren't those conflicting statements? Kind of, but no. Immiscible liquids don't mix on the molecular level, but they become dispersed in each other.Oil and water are the most common set of immiscible liquids, but there are many others. In fact, you can make multiphasic emulsions that are comprised of a set of more than two mutually immiscible liquids. For example, liquid silicone is immiscible with both oil and water. Neat stuff.

A good example of an emulsion is a vinaigrette. If you shake it up you see the little balls of vinegar in the oil. This is what happens in milk too, but the balls of fat are so small that you can't see them with your naked eye. But milk doesn't separate, so how can milk and vinaigrettes both be emulsions? A vinaigrette is an example of an unstable emulsion because it separates over time and milk is an example of a stable emulsion. Milk is not naturally stable, but it has been stabilized through the use of proteins that lie on the fat-water interface. Emulsions can also be stabilized with particles, in which case they are called Pickering emulsions (as are emulsions stabilized with proteins), or they can be stabilized with surfactants (e.g. soap).

Globules of dark matter in space

And now it's time for the crazy talk that will be forgotten to the sands of time, but I actually hope someone says, wow, that's not half bad. So, similar to my musing in my foam post, you could do the whole poppin' possibilities thing with emulsion coalescence (when to oil bubbles merge and form a larger bubble). But reeling it in a bit, but only a little bit, if you think of matter and  dark matter as a set of immiscible liquids...we live in an emulsion! Maybe even a multiphasic one with matter, antimatter and empty space all being immiscible? Above is a picture of a slice of the dark matter in the universe. Just something to think about.  

World's Lightest Material

The worlds lightest (ahem, least dense) material is about 100 times less dense than Styrofoam. That's just a little bit absurd. It consists of a microlattice of metallic tubes that are only about 100nm thick and the rest is just air. It is pretty tough, too. It can deform by 50% and still spring back to its original shape, unlike aerogels, which just shatter if you squeeze them too hard. I'm sure there will be many applications for this stuff, but super light electromagnetic shielding for is the first one that comes to mind.

Cobra Starship- You Make Me Feel

La la la la la. Stuck in my head. Will probably get stuck in your head too.

New Travel Pillow- The Arm Pillo

Edit -  The armpillo is no more. A competitor (the Nursie) has stuck with it over the last decade, while I have moved on to other projects. My current project is a micro-real estate marketplace, that is essentially a Zillow or Redfin-like website for electric vehicle chargers, vending machines, shipping container farms and other small pieces of hardware/machinery. 

So, I would consider myself a sleeping expert. I get a lot of practice, probably far more than I should. Therefore, I would like to introduce my foray in to the fray that is the travel pillow marketplace. No doubt you've seen the neck pillows that look like a toilet seat. Do you want a toilet seat around your neck? Do you want a toddler mistaking it for a potty in the airport? That's what I thought. Then there's the total pillow which bends and twists and lasts for about five minutes. Another neck pillow, shaped like a dog bone, a few seat belt pillows, yaddah, yaddah, nothing interesting.
Heretofore and forevermore, I humbly present to you the Arm Pillo. Developed and perfected over a time period of twenty-three years, it allows you to sleep anywhere. It also prevents your arm from falling asleep when you lie with your arm over your head (see picture 4). Sleep at a desk (napping has been shown to improve productivity), in a car, on a plane, cuddle with you significant other (your arm/arm pillow under their head), wear it to parties for when you inevitably pass out, etc, etc. Take a gander at its glory below or get one of your own at the amazon.com product page or from www.armpillo.com

Sleep at a table like this or...

like this.

Napping in the car

After a long day (prevents your arm from falling asleep)

Payphones

Payphones are pretty much extinct. The remaining few reside in large cities, while most that were once in the suburbs have been ripped out. Cellphones dominate our lives and theretofore we have no more need of payphones. The only sad part about this is that collect calling commercials have also gone extinct. Here are a few of my favorites from a distant past.

Yes, they are pretty stupid, but they are also nostalgic.

L.O.V.E cover by Nat King Cole

It's almost Halloween, which means it's getting cold, which means it's time to snuggle. Love is in the air, along with all the ghouls and ghosts. Existentialistcat does a pretty darn good cover of a classic.

PSY-YUNG

Do you ever wonder what to get people for their birthdays? I'm not really a fan of buying gifts, I would much rather make something. So, it's PSY-YUNG's birthday today so I decided to make him some fan art. I used a Taijitu (a.k.a. yin yang), because it looks cool and because it shows up a lot more often than people think. I also immediately thought yin yang yung. There were Roman infantry shields in 430 A.D. that used the symbol. Bet you didn't know that, huh. Don't feel bad, I didn't either before I started writing this post. I decided to make a blending thing in the middle, just because I thought it would be cool and I couldn't find any images like it. Ummm... Music below, fan art below-er. All Dat Azz by PSY-YUNG World's greatest sinner mix by PSY-YUNG

My Unfounded Theories: Top 5 Ways That Skynet Will Form

5. The Internet- So many connections sending information around, too bad the connections are fleeting
4. Google's hard drives- Tons of connections sending information, but the connections are still fleeting
3. Facebook-Connections between people, sending messages is not constant enough though
2.Twitter- Lots of connections (Justin Bieber has 12 million followers), lots of tweets between people and tweets reverberate by retweeting
1. Quantum Computing- I am convinced our brains act as quantum computers, so when we make a quantum computer it may act as a brain.

Steve Harvey is Hilarious

I never used to think him/his show were very funny, maybe I was too young to understand, or maybe he's just a lot funnier live. Family Feud seems to be the perfect venue for him to unleash his sass on unsuspecting contestants. 

Quantum Levitation - Superconducting Material

The interaction between a superconductor and a permanent magnet produces levitation because the superconductor will reject the magnetic field. This is called the Meissner effect. The videos showcase work from the Superconductivity Group at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.  The first video shows a demo of this quantum locking and levitation in action, but the second video gives a better explanation of what is going on and shows a few very cool demos not shown in the first video. Both are pretty mind blowing and well worth watching.

Latte Art Printer

Ink jet printers can do a lot of things beyond printing paper. These day they can print vascular networks and organic solar cells. Now, they can even print on top of your grande latte! Using caramel as an ink it generates the logo of a coffee giant. A little frivolous, but for anyone who dislikes frivolities, just know that they still tend to advance the state of the art.

Super Mario Levels Designed to Mimic Songs

Oh my god. Super Mario paint song remakes are cool (click here for a thriller remake), but this takes it to a whole 'nuther level. Through a few levels actually. Making levels in which the sounds follow that of another song. Cool, but it makes me feel that there is so much of youtube that I cannot really explore.

Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Designed by Jonas Pfeil, this ball has 36 cell phone camera sensors that allow it to take pictures a full 360 degrees (or 4*pi steradians for the nerds out there) around the entirety of the sphere. Meaning from ground to sky and everything in between. Pretty impressive. Just throw it in the air and it has a built in accelerometer that it uses to sense the when it's at it's highest point and then snaps the picture. It makes for some pretty neat shots that software can mesh together so you can fly through the area you took a picture of. And it foam padded so you don't have to worry about dropping it.

My KEEPING IT REAL Resume

!!WILL PERFORM MENIAL TASKS FOR A DECENT WAGE!!

Name: The Fecht
Hometown: P-ton
Education: MIT is the Georgia Tech of the North minus good football/basketball teams, Majored in Overthinking, Minored in Party Dynamics

Job Experience:
-Can keep a group of 10 six year olds alive for at least eight weeks
-Can Macgyver a complex machine out of just about anything
-Can perform highly repetitive tasks that require minimal brain activity
-Cannooot schpell nethink correkly

Skillz:
-Can distinguish between Coors, Miller Lite, Bud Lite, Natty, and Kieth Stone
-Indecisive, especially among indecisive groups
-Ability to stay awake at all hours of the night
-Can brew beer in tight spaces
-Procrastination has yet to fail me
-Music (Noise) production on a computadora
-I know more about computer programming than my job will ever require
-Seeexxxyyynneeesssss

!HIRE ME! GIVE ME MONEY!!!

Never Stop Learning

This book sounds like fun. I really need to make a reading list, so many books, so little time. Never stop learning.

"How heavy is that cloud? Why can you see farther in rain than in fog? Why are the droplets on that spider web spaced apart so evenly? If you have ever asked questions like these while outdoors, and wondered how you might figure out the answers, this is a book for you. An entertaining and informative collection of fascinating puzzles from the natural world around us, A Mathematical Nature Walk will delight anyone who loves nature or math or both."

Imma just leave this here...

Ke$ha meets Sophistication

Walking Table

I kind of really like furniture, but not the normal kind. Of course, I like all the collapsible stuff, because, well, I'm a little bit obsessed with things that collapse, except buildings that do so, especially if I'm in it. I digress. This is a pretty cool table that can walk on four legs when you push it. Wheels? Nah, that's to simple.

Sophistication Luxury Tap Water

Everybody wishes they invested in bottled water, but when it first came out, the question on everybody's mind was, "Who on earth would buy bottled water? How silly." Now it pervades our society and even the Coca-Cola Company has its own bottled water brand (Dasani, in case you didn't know). The bottled water industry is extremely wasteful, producing tons and tons of plastic that ends up in a lot of land fills. There is also a large amount of fuel wasted by transporting water around in trucks (water is very heavy, so heavy in fact, if you were to fill an entire tractor trailer car with it, the suspension wouldn't be able to handle it).

Sophistication Luxury Tap Water sets its satirical cross hairs on the bottled water industry by branding good ol' tap water and adds a filter just in case there's anything nasty in your local tap, though that's unlikely because tap water is more regulated than the bottled kind. Visit www.luxurytapwater.com for more info.

Flying Car

A flying car? Huh? Nope, it's just a balloon, but it looks super realistic. And it's full scale. I just wish I knew how they made it look so real.

BMW Kinetic Sculpture

I generally like abstract sculptures, but kinetic abstract sculptures are even better. Its also nice to see a company that puts a lot of effort into engineering put some effort into art. Art and science/engineering are really not all that different, though the people that study them might be. Well, this video gets pretty neat after about a minute. Its a bunch of metal balls suspended on wires from the ceiling making 3D sculptures.

Foam/Poppin' Possibilities

 This is quite the amazing video if you like patterns. My favorite part: thinking about the quantum length scale as a foam. Interesting because I had been thinking about this for the past couple of years and I'm glad to hear others may have thought of it too. My theory: Poppin' Possibilities. Infinite possibilities are arranged in a foam structure, and you can pop each of those possibility bubble just by thinking of that possibility. The world around you is the result of popping all other possibilities. Crazy? Probably...pop.

Soft Body Physics- Ripples in a Water Baloon

This video shows the way waves are transferred through a soft body. I used to poke my dad's belly in the swimming pool and I would see the same thing. Some parts of the video look almost like they were computer generated. Freaky how similar real life and virtual life are becoming. And that's one tough water balloon.

Panspermia and Exogenesis

Panspermia translated from Greek as "all seed" (Pan = all, spermia = seed), is the theory that forms of life exist throughout the universe and are just floating around waiting to hit something that provides the right conditions for them to grow on. Generally, it's thought that this would happen in the form of dormant bacteria on asteroids that hit planets that allow the bacteria to wake up and multiply. This is where exogenesis comes into play. Exogenesis is the theory that life on earth was started somewhere else in the universe and was brought here either randomly or on purpose by aliens. Neither of these theories are supposed to explain how life started, just how it might have spread/will spread.

Today there was some evidence found on a meteorite that two of the four nucleic acids that make up DNA might have come from space along with some related molecules that are not used by life on earth. Neato, I want some synthetic space DNA.

Magnetic "Micro-robots"

These magnetic particles are manipulated by magnetic fields to open and close their pincers and pick up a glass bead to move it around. The particles lie at the interface between layers of oil and water. A magnetic field perpendicular to the interface causes the particles to form the clumps/"micro-robots" and a magnetic field parallel to the interface causes them to swim. So the next step is obviously to filter different beads from a mixed bag of them. And then, world domination.

Nerdy Jokes

Make the world go 'round.

Acrylic/PMMA

Acrylic a.k.a. PMMA a.k.a. poly(methyl methacrylate) a.k.a. that plastic that disguises itself as silica glass. It's just as clear as glass but doesn't shatter when you drop it (from a reasonable height). It's easier to machine than glass, so it's used for more complicated designs. That's not to say it's easy to machine, because it's not, but it is a lot tougher than glass.

A little bit of history: developed in 1928 and commercialized in 1933 it was hailed as a shatter proof replacement for silica glass. It was first branded as Plexiglas by the Rohm and Haas Company and has since been sold under names such as Lucite and Perspex. Its chemical structure is shown below.  

Why is PMMA so cool? Well, it can be easily cast to make basically any shape you want. And its clear, and you can add dyes to make sweet translucent objects, and you can embed stuff in in (kind of like how amber embeds bugs).

Turntable.fm

DJ TOGETHER WITH YOUR FRIENDS at turntable.fm. Probably the coolest new website that I've seen in a while, it lets 5 DJs take turns playing songs, and you get points when people like your selections. With the points you can get progressively cooler and larger avatars. There are a bunch of different rooms for different types of music and you can also create your own room. And there's a chat feature. This thing is amazing. All you need is a facebook account, and one of your friends already has to be registered. To keep out all the lame kids, duh. Nah, I think its just to make me feel cool for once in my life.

Topology Meets Art

Topology and art definitely go hand in hand, though it may not seem obvious at first. Mathematical patterns underlie our universe, so it should be no surprise that they underlie our art as well. I found this awesome site with many unique abstract sculptures derived from areas of math including knot theory and surface geometry. The intricate abstract art below is a small sample from from Carlo H. Séquin.

Torus Knot 5-3

Poincaré Double Lace

Annual Eurographics Awards

Knot 7-7

Quad Rose

Scherk-Tower

Giant Bubbles

This video is just awesome. No two ways about. Science stuff: 1) the bubbles are multicolored due to the different film thicknesses scattering the different wavelengths of light to different degrees like a prism and 2) you can see when the bubbles pop that the film is trying to minimize is surface area to volume ratio. A bubble has a very large surface area to volume ratio, while a droplet has a very low surface area to volume ratio.

Tractor Pulling

Though this may seem kind of pointless and bad for the environment, it's still really cool. And racing in all forms is essentially just R&D, just a really cool form of R&D. There are some neat engines toward the end of the video, including a quad-turbine tractor and a tractor that has a 42 cylinder 10,000hp radial engine. If that's not a feat of engineering, I don't know what is.

Electret: The electric field equivelent of a magnet

So, magnets have permanent magnetic fields and electrets have a permanent electric field. Note that this is completely different than an electromagnet that generates a magnetic field due to an electric current. It seems like the main uses for these things are as sensors in microphones and dust collectors in air filters, but I think they have more potential, they just don't get the same attention that their magnetic counterparts do. They are made in an analogous way to ceramic magnets. A highly dielectric material melt is cooled and solidified in a strong electric field which aligns the molecules in the solid creating a permanent electric field.

Granular Materials

Sand. Table Salt. Powders of any kind. These are classified as granular materials and this subject has been studied intensely by scientists and engineers in many fields (mechanical, chemical, materials, etc). From the perspective of a new researcher, this field has been beaten to death. The compaction of powders under pressure (aka jamming) is what differentiates the flow of powder from the flow of liquids. There are some other unique flow properties of powders such as the "Brazilian nut effect" where larger grained materials (Brazilian nuts) can flow to the top of a vibrating container that contains multiple grain sizes in it. So here is a very dorky powder simulation game. I spent more time playing around with it than I expected to.

http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

Superhydrophobicity

A hydrophobic material is one that repels water and a hydrophilic material is one that likes water. Pretty obvious. It's not so obvious how to go about testing where a material falls on the hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity scale. This is where something called the contact angle comes into play. It's the angle made at the interface of a water droplet with air at the surface of a solid material. Here's a picture that will clarify.

This test can be done with any two fluids (air and water are the most common) at a solid surface to compare surface tensions of different materials. When the contact angle is less than 90 degrees the surface is considered hydrophilic and if the contact angle is more than 90 degrees it is considered hydrophobic. If the contact angle is greater than 150 degrees then the surface is considered super-hydrophobic. There's not too much work on superhydrophilicity but a contact angle of nearly 0 degrees is the general consensus.
So why are super-hydrophobic surfaces worth writing a blog post about? Well, they can be used to reduce drag anywhere that a surface is pulled against water (hulls of ships, inside of pipes, etc). They can also be used as a self cleaning surface coating, so anytime it rains, dirt will be easily swept away. Imagine cleaning your car (well) by leaving it out in the rain.

Gucci Mane X Mother 3

Let's just say a little birdie told me about this video/song. Gucci Mane and anime seem to go pretty well together. Whodathunk it.

Magnetohydrodynamic Drive

Actually, a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drive uses some electrohydrodynamics as well. Generally salt water flows though the poles of a magnet while a current is run through the salt water. The interaction of the current and the magnetic field cause a force that pushes the ions. The ions drag the water with them creating a jet and propelling the craft in the opposite direction. Get all that? No? Well you're in luck because there's a picture that explains everything, just replace the plasma with salt water.

Deep in the Amazon (.com that is)

I would just like to share a review of The Total Pillow that I found on Amazon.com. Based on this review, I can only suspect that unemployed Creative Writing majors spend their free time trying to write witty feedback to relive their glory days. I must say that I found it to be pretty funny. Thank you TriSaratoppps for making the Amazon just a little bit funnier.

"I walked in the store with my head held high, proud that I'd be buying a magnificent product such as one that I'd seen on the television. I was probably wearing a wolf shirt, because nothing is more majestic than a wolf, and I wanted to be worthy to carry this donut filled with tiny balls of Styrofoam.

As I drew near the packaging called out to me, "I can be twisted in any so many ways!" "Come to me!" "Come on, sucker!" I thought it was weird that a blue pillow was talking to me, but I figured that it was just because of the awesomeness.

I picked up the pillow and held it up in the air, shaking it gloriously. People around me stared in fright, I stared at them in contempt. They weren't touching this glorious bagel.
I looked at the pillow one more time, it looked at me like one of those cookies that were made by those old cookie press machines. After more than twenty minutes of uninterrupted eye contact, I walked to the check out, nonchalant. I wasn't there to make a scene at the Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I walked out and took my prize out of the package and slid it behind my neck, folded in half, the way of the kings and travelers. We had five minutes pure summer love, then something happened. My precious, magnificent friend turned away from me. My stuffed onion ring started ripping, its immortal beads spilling around my shoulders. "Too soon!" I cried as I pulled the traitor from behind my neck. I was rattled to the bone as I through the pillow out the door.

This isn't the way it was supposed to end. But it did."

Rayleigh Air Bearing

Air moving at high speeds can cause some neat effects. Jet engines, for example, basically just throw a lot of air really fast in one direction, which causes the plane to move in the opposite direction, because of Newton's second law of motion. Air can also be used as a cushion, like in a hovercraft. Air bearings put that air cushion to work to reduce the friction between two spinning shafts by inducing a levitation effect. The video below shows a demonstration of an old air bearing. Yay!

Wire Clothes Hanger Machine

So, clothes hangers are pretty boring, right? To most people yes, they are extremely boring. They haven't really changed much since they were invented and they are commonplace more useful for unclogging drains than for their intended purpose. I, however, have what some might call a fascination with them. There are well over 150 patents for clothes hangers (mostly of the collapsible type), but the vast majority of them have failed. And that is the mark of a good design, something that stands the test of time. To quote one of the most not-so-poetic bands of the 80's, "only time will tell if we stand the test of time". Oh, Van Halen, you should have just stuck with David Lee Roth, he may have been an alcoholic but at least he could write. But I digress, here's TWO machines that make wire coat hangers. Enjoy!

Gears Are Really Awesome and Complicated

You bet they are. Gears that are practical have to withstand pretty large forces, like the gears in a car transmission. Gears in power generation stations have to withstand even larger forces. In these applications simplicity is key, but what about applications that can benefit from some complicated gear shapes? Well, there aren't any (at least not yet), but there is always art. Check out the videos below of a cube gear and a heart gear.

Omnidirectional Printing of Vascular Networks

One of the biggest challenges of growing organs in a laboratory is keeping them alive. They need nutrients, and the way organs get nutrients in nature is through veins. Professor Jennifer Lewis' group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a method of omnidirectional printing that allows microvascular networks to be brought to life. A needle deposits a polymer in a gel and the polymer is suspended in the gel. Then the gel can be hardened, and then the polymer can be heated to to its melting point (which is lower than that of the gel) and it can be vacuumed out. What remains is a 3D network of microchannels that mimic veins. This is the most advanced 3D microchannel fabrication that I've seen, but it requires many specialized materials and printers. Hopefully this process can be scaled up or a simpler process comes along.

Hot Stuff

Lava is molten rock that is expelled from volcanoes and as it flows it solidifies. It's temperature varies from 700 °C to 1,200 °C (1,300 °F to 2,200 °F). Lava flows occur in non-explosive effusive eruptions, whereas explosive eruptions tend to cause volcanic ash. That's all well and good, but there is so much more to lava than it's hotness, it's what's on the inside that counts. Lava is generally broken up into four different types based on its chemical  composition. Felsic lava has a high silica and aluminum content with small amounts of iron and magnesium. Intermediate lava has a higher iron and magnesium content. Mafic lava has an even higher iron and magnesium content, and ultramafic has the highest magnesium content, but the earth has cooled down too much to even produce this kind of lava anymore. Crazy. And now a sweet video.

Friction Welding

Friction can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If you're trying to make a efficient engine, plane, boat, car, or basically anything with moving parts, friction is not your friend. However, if you want that car to move, friction on the tires is what allows that to happen. Also, if you don't like to slip and fall, then friction is your friend. But if you do fall, friction is what gives you a cut. But if there weren't any friction you'd still get a bruise. Blah blah blah.

In the case of friction welding, friction is what gets the job done. It heats up two cylinders that are in contact and spinning very fast relative to each other. Pressure makes sure they stay in contact to form a good weld. It's most often used to weld pipes, but like it the video, it can also weld solid cylinders. I think it could do rods of a non-circular cross section, but the corners would probably get pretty funky.

Top Ten Ways To Not Get Your Blog Not Noticed, Not

I see a lot of sites that have lists of how to get your blog noticed, but not many lists for those of us who don't ever want to make any money or have anyone read what we have to say. Strange, maybe I need to look harder.

1. Don't write anything because if you do, then someone might find your blog.
2. Don't tell any of your friends or colleagues about it because if they find you interesting, they might find your blog interesting.
3. Don't try to exchange links with other bloggers because that might increase traffic to your site.
4. Do write nonsensical and grammatically dreadful blog entries that might generate high paying ads that no one will ever click on.
5. Do not update regularly as that may cause people to check your blog frequently.
6. Do not hold a contest of any sort.
7. Do not pass go.
8. Do not collect $200.
9. Do have a top ten list with only nine entries, but don't admit to it.
10. Do add filler entries to any and all lists to make them seem more impressive, even if the ideas are common sense, and especially if they don't make sense.

Millionaire's Salad

Palm trees are well known for the fruit that they bear, and their large pointy leaves. Palm trees can bear a variety of fruits such as coconuts, multiple types of drupes (a class of fleshy fruit that surrounds a hard pit, think peach) and acai berries. The center of the tree itself is also edible, but cultivating it generally kills the tree. The center of the tree is called the "heart of palm" and when used in a salad, the salad is called a millionaire's salad due to the expense of killing a palm tree. It's obviously not a million dollar endeavor, but its relatively expensive to regrow a new palm tree. In recent years there have been a few palm tree species bred to grow multiple trunks and will not die when one of the trunks is cut. A millionaire's salad recipe can be found here. 

Power Point Geometric Patterns

PowerPoint is a pretty awesome program in general, but I've recently been using it to make geometric patterns. There are tools for just about any shape you can think of, and layering shapes is a breeze. Below are a few examples of some patterns that I made.

Vyrus

Blobs

Squircle

Trap Ninja

A Lesson in Microscopes

Microscopes are nuts. I got a lesson in microscopes today from a specialty microscope setup engineer from Olympus. He was setting up a IX71 inverted microscope in a lab, and showed me some of it's features. First of all, the optical cables that brought the light from the external light source were filled with a clear liquid, not the normal fiber optic cables. Cool, I never thought about doing that, but it makes sense. Second, it has two light sources, one regular white light, and the other is a UV light to use on fluorescing samples. Ahh, so that's how they do it. I always imagined a UV lamp was used externally. And then he showed me all the apertures, levers, a do-hickeys to get a image into focus. And then there's phase-contrast, which uses the shift in the phase of the light as it passes through an object to impart a higher contrast ratio to the image. Which makes cells look super crisp.

Genetic Engineering

I'm a pretty big fan of genetic engineering of plants when it is in the form of selective breeding. Gene splicing and recombination is quite a bit trickier and could potentially cause some sleeping-beauty-esque disasters (poisonous apples anyone?). Richard Espley from a Plant and Food Research company in New Zealand shows red fleshed apples and selective breeding enhanced by gene research.

Google Trends

Google tracks basically everything anyone does on the internet. It's pretty amazing, and Google Trends lets you search through their mountains of search and site visit data. You can find out a whole bunch of curious things with this data, for instance, most of blogger.com's traffic comes from the US (which is true for most big sites), but the region with the second most traffic? Indonesia. That's pretty random. The daily unique visitors chart for blogger.com is show below.

Now on to everybody's favorite subject: Facebook.

Girl Walks Into A Bar

I saw just about half an hour of this movie, but I do plan on watching the rest. I just have trouble setting aside an hour and a half for a movie that is free and easily accessible. It's kind of strange, because even though I want to watch it, I'm not really in a hurry to. I think many people feel that this movie is probably not worth their time (as evidenced by heavy promotion garnering only 500,000 views), but it's a murder scheme with quite a few famous people (Danny DeVito, Josh Hartnett, Zachary Quinto who is the guy that played Sylar in Heroes, and Carla Gugino who was the Silk Spectre in the Watchmen). I was kind of hoping that more free feature length videos would premier on the internet, but judging from the lack of success that this movie is having, I don't think there will be another one anytime soon. The trailer is below.

Kobe or Frobe?

Neither seem very happy.

created using the animated gifs maker at MakeAGif

Epic Rap Battles Of History - Einstein Vs. Stephen Hawking

I know everyone has seen this, but it's soooooooooo good. Stephen Hawking and Einstein entangled in rap battle of cosmic proportions. 'Nuff said.

Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth Yet?

Click here to find out
I suggest continually refreshing, so when it happens you'll be the first to know. There's also this live webcam of the LHC that you could watch constantly and is actually not even close to as boring as watching paint dry. So how might the LHC destroy the world? It could create mini-black holes that gobble everything up. What do I want to see happen? Giant Pokemon coming out of a tear in the space-time continuum.

Pokemon are real??

Beyond Monopoly

When I think of boardgames I generally only think of Monopoly, Candy-land, Chutes and Ladders, Yahtzee, Clue, Dungeons & Dragons , and Scattergories. But I recently found that there is a underground boardgame culture hosted on sites like boardgame designers forum and boardgame geek. The most popular type of game is of the D&D variety (hardcore nerds play D&D, super hardcore nerds make a D&D variant), but there are way more games than I ever imagined. I guess the videogame designers of yesteryear were boardgame designers and these websites keep that culture alive. The images below are from a game called Nih'ki : The Crystal Core War.

Radio Controlled Jetpack

Sweet. This video only shows hovering on the ground, but hopefully this wacky Australian can get Ken to fly soon. As cool as this thing is, the real deal is sooooooooo much cooler. The Martin Jetpack, as its called, is supposed to cost about $100,000, but I imagine that it will be available to fly at resorts and the like, as a much cooler alternative to a jet ski.

Sesquipedalian Grammatical Entity of the Lunation: Armamentarium

An armamentarium is a collection of resources available for a certain purpose. This is often applied to a doctor's toolkit of knowledge and medical devices. However, the root word, armament, suggests that an armamentarium is a collection of available weapons. So what's the best weapon ever? Nuke? Stealth Fighter Jet? Nah. I think this thing and a few beers could turn the tide of any war.

Everything Should Be Collapsible

Cars. Bridges. Buildings. Humans. Dogs. Clothes Hangers. You get the idea, no exceptions. I firmly believe this, and I cannot be reasoned with. Won't the people in the buildings get crushed? Not if its done right. Duh. Why does my clothes hanger need to be collapsible? So that the necks of your T-shirts don't stretch, fray or bacon. MJ doesn't wear bacon necked T-shirts, so neither should you. But the real point of this post is that there exists a park bench that unfolds into a picnic table! CollapSIRs rejoice! And collapMADAMs too, I guess.

And metaphysically speaking, we're all constantly collapsing probabilities of potential futures into the reality we perceive :)

Poison Spoon

Gallium is a metal that has a melting point just above room temperature (about 86F) so it can be easily cast into a bunch of different objects. However, those objects wouldn't last very long, because unlike M&M's, gallium will melt in your hand. Over the ages people have found that a gallium teaspoon makes for a nice parlor trick, as shown below.

On a morbid note, there have apparently been instances of people being poisoned by trick spoons like this, but if you're dumb enough to drink something that melted your spoon, you might just deserve it.

Hamburger Robot

I had an interesting thought today: if fast food is supposed to be fast, why are humans making it? Couldn't a robot do it faster and more precisely? Could there McDonald's vending machines where I can customize my order? Then I could isolate myself further and not have to talk to anyone but still get my freshly thawed Mickey D's.
Well, someone else, nango17 on youtube, had the same thought in 2009, but he/she actually used Lego mindstorms to create a hamburger robot. It's kinda slow and imprecise, but it's still exactly what I was looking for.

Crowd Simulation

These are just some cool simulations of crowd flow. The narrator is pretty good, so I'm not going to attempt to reiterate what he says. But it basically shows models for the behavior of dense crowds of people. The campsite simulation of 100,000 people looks astoundingly like Bonnaroo. An it's really cool to see people flowing like a fluid.

Cute Dimples

This video is kind of ridiculous (supercomputers have better things to solve), but it shows hows science permeates through just about every aspect of society.

Simply put, golf balls have dimples to decrease the drag on them as they fly through the air. This allows them to go further. YAY! More technically, the air next to the ball stays connected the ball for longer, so air is shed from the back of the ball rather than the top of the ball. The vacuum that is created behind the ball is therefore reduced. So, essentially, the ball is being sucked backward less. Also, because the ball has backspin, lift is generated because of an increase of pressure underneath the ball and a decrease of pressure above the ball.

Sadly, asymmetric golf balls like the Polara (shown below) have been banned from tournament play (but graphite-shaft-gigantic-titanium-alloy-head clubs haven't been?) which I think should be considered aggression against golfer-aerodynamicists. And I want to make a happy face golf ball with cute dimpled cheeks.