UPDATE Jan. 27, 2015: Physicist spells out a way to make footballs “shrivel to completely flat after cooling.” ORIGINAL POST The New England Patriots could have legally rigged footballs to wind up underinflated. Patriots head coach Bill Bellichick spelled out much of this scenario in a news conference much of the media apparently failed to understand. He Read More …
You know why pilot Frank didn’t see a wedding ring on the hand of the waterlogged pilot’s corpse? Because the body will turn out to be Frank’s. On Thursday’s show, the freighter captain shows Sayid and Desmond the black box flight recorder from the bottom-of-the-sea wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815 and says someone went to a lot of trouble to fill Read More …
See previous item. When there’s a way to search our own brains, it could be called the Noodle Google. or Google Noodle. Either that, or Google Noodle is a site where you search for pasta.
Everybody loves the color of autumn leaves. So why not bioengineer lawns that turn colors in the fall? Foliage Fescue. Rainbow Rye. Kentucky Red-White-and-Bluegrass.
Seriously. Today’s study is tomorrow’s refuted study. All too often. But how often? Still imagine these series of headlines: Study: 62.5 pct. of studies are later discredited Study that discredited studies ain’t true either Study that discredited discrediting study also discredited Gosh, just can’t believe anything you read anymore (including this).
Life used to be simpler. Forecasters told you the “relative humidity.” But, no. That’s no longer the best measure. Now it’s the “dew point.” Supposedly it tells how much total moisture’s in the air, which better correlates to mugginess. (You don’t feel muggy when it’s 100 percent humidity at 40 degrees. Supposedly. But I think Read More …
Wrote this long ago. Found it filed away. (Revised 7/9/07 … by adding a helpful title) A Day in the Not-So-Distant Future They resisted our every advance. They said, “Please do not take the chance!” But we used careful means To tamper with genes, And now the smartest “men” are plants!
What if … you had a very light spacecraft … OK, maybe it’s just a satellite with microchips … and suppose (yeah sure) they reallly could build a buckytube-walled space tube that’s 100 miles high … following me so far? … OK, we’ve got the outer part of our space elevator, but what’s to lift Read More …
Seriously. As image screen gets thinner and lighter, first newspapers and magazines will get replaced by e-paper, which folds and unfolds and presents images in infinite formats. Then people will say, cool! I want to wear this stuff, and they’ll make clothing that displays any image you want. Your hat can show the Mona Lisa Read More …
Either Something can be created from Nothing, or Everything always was. Even throw God into the mix: Either He was created himself, or He always was. (Or, as I suspect, we’re so stuck on this “time” illusion, we’re totally off the track, because there is only “is,” never was a “was.”) Here’s my point: Begin at the true Read More …
OK, OK, OK, maybe the physics here won’t work. And the scale might be impossible, too. But if sea levels will rise because of melting ice sheets, how about creating some new ones? Put snow machines all over Greenland, and maybe Alaska and Siberia, too. Maybe even on icebergs at the North Pole. Pile up Read More …
There’s a cocky title. As if an infinitesmal creature like me could know. But here’s my thought: The universe could never have been Nothing. Why? The law of opposites. You can’t have light without dark, hot without cold, good without evil. So can’t have Nothing without Something. Poof! And that’s how the universe was born. Read More …
This isn’t so much an idea as a testimonial. In high school, I had to give up golf because my knuckles would swell and my hands would hurt. Books and buzz suggested arthritis, or whatever I had, might be related to foods. After reading a book by a Dr. Marshall Mandel (searches aren’t turning up a title that Read More …
Big hubbub in astrononomy about how to define planets. Say Pluto’s just an iceball, and we know of only 8. Say a planet’s any solar-orbiting object big enough for its gravity to crunch it into a ball, and now Ceres, which would fit between Boston and Washington, D.C., would count, along with dozens of other farout Read More …
Ever use that algebra and calculus you learned in high school? Most people don’t, I’ll bet. But every day we make decisions or encounter information involving odds and numerical evidence. Play poker? Buy a lottery ticket? Decide to fly or drive? Read a story about how married people live longer? Or how a drug cuts the risk of a rare Read More …