Category Archives: Fun

Eye Candy

Take a look at these animated MRIs of a pineapple, an orange, and a bushel of bananas:
Animated MRI Scans of Fruits are Hypnotic, High in Fiber.
Update: Many more of these can be found at Insideinsides.

Monterey Bay Aquarium: Anthology of Deep Sea Squids. Amazing foootage!

Luke Jerram’s Glass Microbiology:

“These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks’ beauty, what they represent and their impact on humanity.”

Links via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

It all started with the Big BANG!

Just when I felt I had watched my Friends DVDs one time too often, a fellow physics teacher told me about a TV series about physicists that apparently is on TV in Germany right now. She always watches it with her husband, another physics teacher, and said she thought I might like it. I watched a few scenes of The Big Bang Theory on Youtube and decided to order the first two seasons on DVD from the UK (no, we still don’t own a TV set). I was hooked after the first few episodes!
I have since finished both seasons and am eagerly awaiting the release of the third season on DVD.

Today, the New York Times had an article about the sitcom: Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs. The show’s physics advisor, David Saltzberg, who is a professor at UCLA, has a weblog called, of course, The Big Blog Theory.

Your daily dose of science

Chad Orzel is a physics professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and has written How To Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published later this month. He’s also the author of a weblog called Uncertain Principles, where he published an 18 minute long video called The Bohr-Einstein debates, with Puppets. It’s well worth watching and really entertaining, although I have to agree with Orzel that the fake German accent of Albert Einstein really is atrocious (compare to the real Albert Einstein‘s accent). I’m sure I could fake a German accent better than Chad Orzel. ;-)

H2G2

There’s interesting posting on MetaFilter about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Do you realize that robot can hum like Pink Floyd?

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (originally) a radio series, broadcast on BBC Radio during March and April 1978. It was a success. […] However, subsequent releases of the original radio series were edited (in part for copyright reasons), and the original broadcasts have been unavailable, until now. A software engineer and H2G2 fan has now tracked down the recordings of the original broadcasts, analyzed the differences between them and the official CD releases, and provided patches and instructions to update the CD release to match the original broadcast. Not only that, but he has written software to automate the process.“

Optical illusion

I found a link to this paper dragon that seems to follow you if you move a couple of days ago and downloaded the PDF (the dragon in the PDF file is blue instead of green, by the way). I just printed, cut and assembled it – and it works! You have to close one eye to really make the illusion work, but once you’ve convinced your brain that the head moves, it really looks like it does!