Improbable Research

In the ten-years-on spirit of our looks back at AIRhead Project 2000, here’s a predictive research study:

“An Assessment of Where People Will Witness the First Sunrise of the New Millennium,” Peter D. Lechtner, Philip A. Blain, Norris D. McWhirter, and Ingrid S. Kristament, Geographical Journal, vol. 163, no.3, July 1997, pp. 251-8.

Here are this month’s Railroads for Physicists links (thanks to investigator David Kessler for bringing them to our attention):

1. Info about train travel to the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

2. Info about: (A) the toy train inside the National Spherical Torus Experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab; and (B) the NY Times account of that toy train. Here’s a direct link to Princeton’s proud video of the device.

John Ptak points out that Father Time, though often portrayed during his end-of-year bald phase, was once seen as an unruly-haired fellow:

This image proves that even Time itself can have a bad hair day, from time to time. The woodcut image appears as the printer’s mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which was printed in Paris in 1540.

“Diarrhoea vaccine guinea pigs wanted for free holidays” is the headline on a BBC report that begins:

A US company is offering free holidays in Mexico and Guatemala for volunteers on a diarrhoea drug programme…. The trial is in a part of the world where travellers’ diarrhoea is rife. A total of 1,800 volunteers are needed. Intercell‘s clinical director, Nigel Thomas, told the UK’s Independent newspaper: “We are looking for people who have already planned to go to Mexico or Guatemala and think this would add another interesting aspect.

In this photo, three out of four Swiss physicists hold their faces.

Please join is in the sport of commemorative head-of-real-person teapot hunting. Several are pictured below. Click on each image to get to the web site where it originates. Here are Kim Jong Il, Winston Churchill, Hitler, and Lady Diana (it is not immediately clear to us where the tea emerges from Lady Diana — her nose? her hair?):