Schrödinger's Kitten
Irreverent Science for Everyone
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Ways to Electrocute Yourself Around the Home
I had a very bourgeois accident last week — while gaily opening a bottle of bubbly, fully half the bottle cascaded all over the gas hob, leaving me distraught and the hob sparking continuously for the next hour or so. In my wisdom, I decided to disassemble the hob, for ease of drying, using for protection the tea towel I used to sop up the wine. Who can tell me why this is a bad idea?
Dark Matter - Dark Cop-out
Dark matter is Magic. Not only is it undetectable (hence the name dark), it's also incredibly common — 10 times more so than ordinary matter — and miraculously solves any equations it's faced with. Why is this?
Because we made it up. Dark matter, and its even more slippery counterpart, dark energy, is a big plaster on some massive gaps between our theories and our observations of the universe.
Kitten Approved Technology
What better use for the interwebs and podcasting than to broadcast soothing purrs around the world? This is not purely ear candy: purring is officially productive.
The purr is used as a social communication to indicate 'all is cool' — kittens purr to their mother from a day old, and cats may purr when approaching strange felines to signal their peaceful intent. Purring also indicates the cats' emotional state; but while the most common instance of purring is to indicate contentment, cats also purr when injured, stressed, or giving birth. In a stressed situation or when an animal is hurt, where is the motivation to purr? Using precious energy to hum to oneself would seem to be a bit of a useless evolutionary strategy.
The Importance of Being Polycrystalline
Whether or not it's got anything to do with global warming, it's gloriously sunny here in the United (snigger implicit) Kingdom. And since it's impossible to buy coconut icecream, I am attempting to make it With Science.
The naïve way to make icecream is to take cream and freeze it. However, this gives you a solid block of milky ice. You can try and catch it when it's only partially frozen, but that relies on precise timing and will usually just produce slush. The key to making tasty icecream lies in how the molecules inside it are arranged. When a liquid freezes, the molecules slowly lose their kinetic energy and form bonds with each other, holding them together in a regular fashion. This regimented pattern spreads out to the other molecules, and hey presto, you have a state change from liquid to solid. If the liquid's left undisturbed while this happens, you end up with just one big crystal of ice — structurally sound and impossible to break into.
How The Universe Is
I apologise for the overuse of really, lots and very in this piece. Anyone wishing to buy me a thesaurus may.
The universe is mostly nothing. On a galactic scale, it is, indeed, very big. And the lumps of planets and stars in it — even though these are indeed mind-bogglingly big, even when compared to things like Westminster Cathedral, frinstance — are very very rare and very very tiny, relative to the massive amounts of nothing in here. This is the same no matter what direction you look in: just light-years of nothing punctuated by the occasional fiery ball of gas, or a speck of rock. It’s all rushing away from us (maybe Earth smells, or something), spreading out in every direction, so the amount of empty space versus the amount of actual stuff is even increasing. Even if you just look at one of the rocky bits; my favourite rock, our rock, the Earth, really closely... it’s still mostly nothing.