Pie Chart

Magic Pen

Next time you need some procrastination, check out the "crayon physics" -style java game Magic Pen. Your goal on every level is to get a circle (or sometimes a square) to move to touch a flag. You do this via drawing simple physics-type tools. The one thing it's lacking is a pause button, that would really help.

If you ever get stuck on a level, you can skip it via the menu, but you cannot submit your "score" (number of shapes used) until you beat all levels. Once you beat all 25 levels (took me a full day of procrastination), go back and see how many different ways you can solve the same level. After a bit you'll build up a mental "toolbox" of different techniques for each level, and you can go back and see how to force a square peg into a round hole.

Mythbusters

Oh man, this comic says it so well. :)



They're not science, and yet they are! And Zombie Feynman!

Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Stolen from a friend of mine, who stole it from elsewhere.

* 0. Stop spelling correctly before it's too late! | 03/04/2008 07:41:42 PM UTC


The Daye Aftur Tumurrow: Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Recently, I've seen many people on the internet trying to correct others' spelling. Unfortunately, in doing so, you are endangering the lives of every good person on earth.

As you all know, Earth rotates on its axis, giving us day and night and stopping any portion of earth from freezing or incinerating. What you may not know is that the primary driving force of this rotation is English teachers. More precisely, English teachers rolling in their graves. Thanks to conservation of angular momentum, for a teacher to spin one way forces Earth to spin the other way. Our ENTIRE EXISTANCE depends on these teachers! To clarify the point, here is a diagram:



But how, you ask, could this possibly be related to the internet? As it turns out, teacher grave-spinning is fueled by only two sources: 1st grade essays, and the Internet. Unfortunately for us, 1st grade spelling has rapidly improved in the last decade, leaving the internet as the only source of terrible spelling. For each idiot on the internet, one teacher spins, and this effect has increased over the past decade to become the only force keeping our planet alive. Misuses of there/they're/their and you're/your are especially potent, and account for over 90% of the Earth's rotational velocity.



Why do you care? Because your life depends on it. I put out as a call to all mankind, PROMOTE BAD SPELLING! It is the only thing between us and a horrible, barren world where everything good is dead. For example, consider the following image (it may be shocking to some, parental consent is advised for young children). The red areas are burnt to a crisp, the blue areas are at roughly -42 Kelvin, and only the yellow portions survive.



To prevent the horrific image just pictured, you must forget the grammar and spelling you have learned. Still, if you choose to continue in your rash action, please at least slow down the damage you cause by including the following in your signature. The repeated posting of such content should be enough to allow those truly willing to solve the problem to do so.

Q u o t e:
Their they're, an tey hav there lewt w/thm. Your so dum you're brane is leik a peenut.

Thank you for reading this, and please, consider the future of humanity when you post.

And because I'm who I am (physicist and daughter of an English teacher), I just had to reply...

For completeness, I must point out that there is actually a secondary source of angular momentum: living English teachers rolling their eyes. However, this is a second-order effect for two reasons. Firstly, angular momentum depends upon the mass and the radius of the object (L=mvr), and eyes are both less massive (m) and smaller (r) that entire bodies, so each individual eye will have less of an effect than each individual body.

Secondly, although it is wel known that teachers (of which English teachers are a subset) have eyes in the backs of their heads (resulting in 4-8 eyes per teacher, depending on whether they wear glasses on any of said eyes), there are stll many fewer living English-teacher eyes than dead English-teacher bodies.

Combining these two reasons, the angular momentum from living English teachers rolling their eyes is expected to be more than four orders of magnitude smaller than the angular momentum from dead English teachers rolling in their graves, and therefore can be safely ignored for the purposes of this argument.

Hey baby, wanna determine the spring constant of my mattress?

Inspired by this list of physicists' pickup lines and a comment by Allison, here's a few of my own.

• Physicists are Phun!
  
• Physicists do it with simple harmonic motion.
  
• Hey baby, what's your resonance frequency?
  
• Aw man, I wanna integrate those curves of yours...
  
• Astronomers do it in the dark, under the stars, all night long.
  
• Stargazing's so cold; let's keep warm together.
  
• Bigger is better - my tube's 6" around and 2 ft long.
  

More if I come up with more - or if you add some!

Geek quiz

Because I rarely post memes or quizzes here...

69% Geek

I need one of these

It's a spherical cow!



At $38 and more than a foot approximately 42 centimeters in diameter, that's approxmiately 0.7¢/cm³! A total bargain!

And now some people are laughing, and other people haven't taken physics.

Science Tatoos

Another science blogger asked his readers how many of them had science (or math or comp sci) related tattoos. This is the result. Now I'm tempted to get the below icon created by RoseFox upon my request as a tattoo. I just can't decide where...

Scientist Badges

If scientists earned Boy Scout badges, I'd have nearly a dozen.

Next time I'm bored

I'll check out Scientific American's Sci-Sudokus. They use letters instead of numbers, and there's a science clue along with them. I haven't yet done one so I don't know what the clue has to do with anything.