I’m incredibly busy and buried in work right now, but what physics teacher could pass up such a wonderful link? Crayon Physics Kloonigames (“Monthly Experimental Games”). There is a ball and a star, and the goal is to get the ball to the star – by drawing physical objects that fall down, rotate or do other things. I watched the videoclip, and I really have to try it out once I’ve got time.
Link via Lehrerzimmer. Danke, Herr Rau!
Lots of great links to films, articles etc. on my favourite physicist Richard Feynman in this MeFi thread: A Map of the Cat.
A little over a week ago I realized that the last Harry Potter book was going to be released soon. It’s been a while since I read the sixth book, let alone the previous five, so I decided I would use my free time (of which I’ve got quite a bit at the moment because I’m on holiday but André istn’t) to re-read all the Harry Potter books. I started on Saturday last week but didn’t quite make it in time for the last book which was delivered on Saturday morning (8:45 am!), but finished the sixth book Saturday evening and read the final book yesterday.
I quite enjoyed reading the books back to back because whenever previous occurences were referenced they were still fresh in my memory. Every book starts during the summer holidays of one year and ends with the beginning of the next, so they cover a time-span of seven years and reading them one after the other was a different experience from reading them separately over the course of six years (I started reading them in 2000, not when the first one came out).
I won’t post any spoilers here because I know that some people prefer not to read any, but I think that the last book is a good conclusion of the series, tying up a lot of loose ends. I don’t quite agree with some reviews that there are Tolkien-esque monsters in it or that the author has created a fantasy world as complex as Tolkies (have you ever only seen the movies, but not read the books?), but it’s still a lot of fun to enter Rowlings’s world of wizards and muggles.
My sister and I played with Lego a lot when we were kids. We had a small playroom, and my dad built a table for our Lego train and roads etc. that took up one whole end of the room.
Brickfactory has got scans of all (?) the Lego sets and the building instructions, starting about 1958. Link via MetaFilter, of course.
I found some of the sets my sister and I had: my favourite house (another photo), because it has hinges in the middle. That way, it was one whole house or two halves in which you could play. We also owned a motor, a police boat (the set is from the seventies, back when the minifigs didn’t have movable arms and legs yet!), a petrol station, a doctor’s car and quite a few sets from the Fabuland series.
We often played with this train, complete with transformator and points (ours were manual though).
We also inherited a lot of bricks from my father. Of course I don’t know the complete sets because his parts came in one big box, but I’m sure he had the letters and numbers and probably some of these houses – left, middle, right – because I remember the plates used for the roofs and the windows and doors. These sets apparently came out in 1958, when my dad was ten years old. It looks like the bricks back then only came in white, red or clear.
Ah, those were fun times… :-)
… that a trilogy of articles about Douglas Adams really consists of four parts.
Darker Matter: Douglas Adams: The First and Last Tapes, Part Four.
Link via MetaFilter, again.
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