This video is a buddy film, or sorts: it shows CodyDon Reeder and his buddy sweeping dust from the side of a highway in the middle of the night, then working to chemically retrieve (from that dust) platinum bits — presumably shed from the catalytic converters of passing automobiles: (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our […]
Year: 2016
“A chicken is a Dirac limit of a tyrannosaur”
The cute-as-a-jingle phrase “a chicken is a Dirac limit of a tyrannosaur” emerges in the final section of a study called “Diagonalizing the genome II: toward possible applications,” by Satyan L. Devadoss and Jack Morava. Here’s the full passage in which that phrase crops up: “Branching in descent diagrams can be modeled by specialization in the […]
A Time/Cost Assessment of Toilet-Paper Folding, Worldwide
Three Swedish researchers spent time estimating the aggregate time spent folding the corners of toilet paper. They published this study (which tells only their estimate of how much time those other people spent folding, but does not disclose how much time the authors spent calculating and writing): “It is worth 10 million working hours a year […]
The world’s first “Pastarimeter” — lefty pasta and righty pasta
“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]