Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California at Irvine. Along with Jorge Cham, the cartoonist behind PHD Comics, he hosts the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. This podcast makes the field of particle physics accessible to those of us who lack the necessary academic preparation.
On Twitter, Whiteson shares the journey of one of his younger fans who started her path into applied physics by listening to the podcast and is now ready for the next step in his classroom at UC Irvine.
One of the highest aspirations of a teacher is to make a difference to his students. It looks like Dr. Whiteson has succeeded.
Cow magnets are rather large and powerful magnets, and people use them for all sorts of things. But they are manufactured for cows to help prevent hardware disease. That may sound nonsensical, but it's a real condition formally known as bovine traumatic reticulopericarditis. See, cows are liable to hoover up nails and other metal parts when they eat grass, and sharp metal bits can perforate their digestive system and even pierce the heart.
At the age of one year, farmers will give a cow a magnet to ingest. The magnet settles in the rumen, where it attracts any stray metal the cow might ingest. It's an intentionally-introduced bezoar that stays with the cow for life, but keeps small metal objects from messing up the more delicate parts of a cow's anatomy. And now we know why UFOs are able to beam cows up into their spaceships- by the power of magnetism! Read about cow magnets at Stanford Magnets, and read about the fun kids can have playing with these magnets at Metafilter.
Sir Henry Bessemer was a British inventor who got seasick when he crossed the English Channel in 1868. Inventors are primarily problem-solvers, so Bessemer went to work trying to design a ship to accommodate those who suffered seasickness. What he came up with was the design you see above, in which a section of the ship could move to keep those inside level as the ship itself bounced about in the water. Right away, you can see that the saloon section could only move so far when the ship rolls. You also have to wonder how it would deal with the ship's pitch upward or downward. Yaw probably doesn't have that much to do with seasickness. But the real problem was that it did not depend on gravity or gyroscopes to right itself. It had to be moved manually by an operator working the machinery!
But that's not what doomed the SS Bessemer. The ship was apparently hard to control, and only had one public voyage. Read about the short life of the SS Bessemer and its grand swinging saloon at Amusing Planet.
Last Friday, a mild but rare earthquake hit the New York area. Just a slight tremor, but enough that everyone called around to make sure it wasn't their imagination. Justin Allen, on the other hand, was in the most delicate situation at the time- in the middle of his vasectomy. The doctor explained the procedure thoroughly, and that it would take around twenty minutes. But ten minutes in, the room started shaking. Allen thought it might be a nearby train, but then the doctor stopped and put his instruments down. The urologist mentioned an earthquake, and Allen thought he was joking, trying to lighten the mood. But it was a singular timing coincidence for Allen.
In an interview with Wired, Allen said that the doctor asked how long does an earthquake normally last. He waited several minutes before resuming the surgery. We are glad that that unnerving moment turned out all right in the end. -via Damn Interesting
Did you get to see the solar eclipse today? Millions of people traveled to the path of totality, but all across the contiguous US and northern Mexico, people stopped working, went outside, and stared at a partial eclipse. With protective glasses, of course. You can see it in the image above behind the Statue of Liberty in New York. In my neighborhood, the clouds opened up just in time for me to enjoy a 93% eclipse with my neighbors. It was that rarest of rare sights, a crescent sun. There are archives of livestreams and plenty of photos to come of the eclipse itself, but part of the fun is seeing how people celebrated the celestial event from coast to coast.
The Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) builds the largest webs of any spider on earth. There are several species, most of them found in Madagascar. This spider can shoot a web up to 25 meters (82 feet) across a river! Sure, she's taking advantage of the prevailing winds, but that's a lot of silk from a tiny arachnid. It pays off, though, because rivers are where the insects are. This particular spider has some competition in the form of another spider that wants to use her bridge to start a web. And can you blame her for wanting to save some energy? Anyone who has been pregnant or has breastfed can imagine the resources it takes to produce that much spider silk, much less the strong premium silk this spider produces. Luckily, it is recyclable. This segment, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is from the BBC nature documentary series The Hunt. -via Born in Space
I've been following the Twitter user and Substack writer Old Hollow Tree for a few months. He has an interesting life story about his return to the Vermont woods of his youth and writes about his quest to find meaning in family and a newfound rural lifestyle.
What is his authentic way to experience today's solar eclipse? With pie, of course. His mother prepared this Boston cream pie to show the path of the moon across the sun.
Randall Munroe gives us a generator to make a unique pinball machine, with more features than you can shake a stick at. You have yellow, blue, green, and red balls constantly entering, and you are supposed to direct each color to a different designated output. Balls will disappear after 30 seconds, so you can't fill up the screen. Click the wrench to see a toolbox of your device options, and scroll down because there are a lot of them. Just exploring what they do is a lot of fun, or you can find a handy guide at Explain xkcd. Yes, each ball color has different properties. What you see above is the mess I made after about ten minutes. It's nowhere near efficient- yet. I was having too much fun causing chaos with the fans!
But there's much more. Click the "view machine" button, and you'll be taken to a scrollable gallery of completed machines that are linked together, so that the outputs of those machines, or cells, feed the balls into each other. While the number varies, there have been as many as 528 cells! When you have successfully separated your balls by color, you can submit your machine to the gallery grid, although it must pass an inspection before it's included. Munroe took on this project for April Fool's Day, but it's so complicated that the launch was delayed. The machine works better on a desktop than on a phone or tablet. -via Metafilter
It's been 50 years since Stephen King's first novel was published. Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, and adapted for the big screen a couple of years later. But it almost wasn't written at all. In the early 1970s, King was teaching and taking on other part time jobs while writing short stories for magazines. His wife Tabby, also an aspiring writer, was taking care of a baby and working part time when she could. They were barely getting by. King's short stories were often rejected, but were most likely to be accepted by men's magazines, where science fiction and horror were sandwiched between pinups, leading to an accusation that King couldn't write a decent woman character. He took that as a challenge.
King developed the character Carrie from two women he knew in school who were badly treated by their peers. But he didn't like what he wrote, and tossed page after page in the trash. Tabby discovered those pages and offered her help in fleshing out the character. The story ended up being too long for a magazine, so it went to a book publisher. Carrie changed the family's fortunes and set King on a 50-year career trajectory. Read how Carrie came about at Mental Floss.
What an electric performance! Franzoli Electronics synchronized four singing Tesla coils together to form a band. These plasma speakers generate tones by changing their spark output. Hook them through a MIDI and you've got a concert! Here the quartet plays AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." The coils play guitar and vocals, while the percussion and bass are added from elsewhere. This quartet's latest video is a performance of "Billie Jean," but I happen to like "Thunderstruck better. It's such a classic and recognizable song (not to mention rockin') that we've seen it performed on cellos, gayageum, guzheng, tubulum, slapophone, household devices, and baby babbles. It's fun to dance to, as well.
The Drinker’s Dictionary, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, contains a substantial list of synonyms and phrases that mean alcohol intoxication. Drunkenness is seen as a vice, but is also so common throughout human history that using other terms is to be expected. These synonyms, called drunkonyms, can come and go or could have a long life, and the list is being added to daily as new generations produce their own slang, so we have counted thousands of them. You can find a very long list of drunkonyms in the appendix of this paper.
Most of these drunkonyms began as words meaning something else. Can any English word be turned into a drunkonym? Some believe that's possible, although the context would have to be right for others to understand how a new word is being used. There are obvious exceptions. Consider the phrase "I got laid last night." The context is there, but the word "laid" already means something different even in context, which would be understood by most of the people you know. Antonyms are a problem, too, because if you said "I got sober last night," no one would perceive that you are saying you got drunk. Cultural context matters as well, as in the word "pissed," which means drunk in British English and "angry" in American English. But if you know the speaker's language, it can be understood. -via Metafilter
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will forever be known for the painting The Scream, even though he produced a large body of work over his lifetime. His paintings often conveyed melancholy, angst, and downright depression, which Munch knew all about because of his troubled childhood in a family plagued with health problems and mental illness. But The Scream stood out as a particularly overt symbol of dispair and existential dread. The scene itself was inspired by a meteorological event that colored the sky, and Munch heard, or maybe felt, a scream pass through nature. The face that Munch painted (several times) is not the one screaming, but rather a person reacting to the scream he heard. This TED-Ed lesson looks into the life of Edvard Munch and his inspiration for an enduring painting that speaks to the fear and anxiety in all of us. -via Damn Interesting
Back in January, we looked at the rise of celebrity culture in the 18th century by way of Casanova, who became a celebrity for no other reason than being a celebrity. He had a counterpart in England named Kitty Fisher. Fisher's entry into high society and wealth came not from her family, but from the succession of high society lovers she charmed in the 1750s, plus her instinct for self-promotion. Kitty was a master at sparking rumors, and wasn't above staging a publicity stunt, like that time she was thrown from her horse and accidentally exposed her body to rescuers and onlookers. In other words, she became famous for being famous. Portrait artists found her both irresistible and lucrative, as people would buy prints of etchings of Kitty, making her the original pin-up girl. She was even connected to Casanova, although there was no chemistry between them. Or maybe it was celebrity rivalry. Read about the 18th-century celebrity Kitty Fisher at Messy Nessy Chic.
As customer service shifts rapidly to the customer, the most common place you'll find this new system is at the self-serve payment kiosk. Cashiers, if there are any, don't want to handle your germ-laden card, so it's up to you. But interacting with a machine doesn't get you out of the customary upselling. After you pay for what you've bought, do you want to give us more money? You might think it would be easier to say "no" to a machine, but this guy finds that it's anything but.
And now we have self-serve kiosks asking for tips. A tip for what? No one served me; it's a self-serve kiosk. There's no one around except for the business owner staring at you from a seat ten feet away. You can't tell me he's making a sub-minimum wage. But that's the thing about payment machines- you can't ask questions. You can only answer questions. And you can't refuse to answer questions, or the transaction is liable to be canceled. -via reddit
Millions of people will be converging on towns in the path of the total solar eclipse that will work its way across the US on Monday. If you can't go, hey, the rest of the America will get a partial eclipse. You'll want to look up and see how much of the sun will be blotted out where you live in this chart from NASA- just enter your zip code to find out how much of the sun will be covered and when. I could see 92% coverage, but it also could be obscured by clouds.
But you don't have to miss the totality, since it will available online. Different organizations will be offering livestreams of the total eclipse on Monday. NASA will offer several, with commentary in English or Spanish, or without commentary. The University of Maine is sending a balloon to the stratosphere to broadcast the eclipse. You can find livestreams geared toward children, or even a feed from Torreón, Mexico, where totality will last four and a half minutes. You can select a feed and time your viewing so you can watch a livestream and also go outside to check out the eclipse in your part of the world -although you will need eclipse glasses if you can find them. Check out the schedule of eclipse livestreams at Smithsonian.
