Nature never ceases to surprise us. Dennis Mersereau published this photo that was supposedly taken in the skies over Tunisia. It had been circulated widely in social media and Mersereau was rightly skeptical of photographs that go viral because they are often doctored.
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I am sure that all of us have misheard the lyrics of songs. My own favorite is the beginning of the Beach Boys song Help me Rhonda where I thought it sounded like they sang, “Well, since you put me down, there’ve been owls sleeping in my bed”. Of course, this was preposterous but that’s what it sounded like. (In my defense, the actual words are supposed to be “Well, since she put me down I ‘ve been out doin’ in my head” which does not make much more sense. For the longest time I also thought they were appealing to Wanda.) Each of us can give many examples of getting phrases or song words wrong.
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I like optical illusions because they remind us that seeing is not a passive experience of experiencing faithfully what is out there but involves a considerable amount of processing by the brain. Via Mark Frauenfelder here is another one that I found intriguing where just by placing pieces of paper in an arrangement, a regular checkerboard can be made to look as if it is bulging.
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Cheryl Eddy lists what she describes as the ten most notorious paranormal hoaxes in history. I was familiar with almost all of them. I had heard of the Amityville Horror but thought it was just a fictional film and did not know that it was based on a supposed real event. I had also not heard of the Ghostwatch.
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The Wall Street Journal has a chart of the rates of obesity by classes of professions. Kevin Drum looked at the chart and noted that the category that includes economists, scientists, and psychologists have the lowest rates of 14.2%, well below the national average of 27.7% and far, far below the highest category of police officers, firefighters, and security guards which is 40.7% He is puzzled why this should be so and asks why it might be that economists are so low in weight.
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It was thought that one source of the water that is found on Earth was that it arrived via comets. But the Rosetta probe that has been orbiting comet 67P since August (and whose lander Philae came to rest on the surface in November) had remote sensing devices and found signs of water there but scientists who studied the data say that this water seems to be from a different source than the water on Earth.
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I came across this nice demo that labels itself ‘the world’s simplest electric train’. It is very clever. I would never have thought of it. It is fun to think about the physics behind it.
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I remember well how when cell phone usage in the US was just at the beginning stages, taking a trip to Sri Lanka and seeing cell phones all over the place, with people from all walks of life like street vendors, taxi cab drivers, plumbers, electricians, and other small scale businesspeople all using them.
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In films, the star is often replaced by a double in many situations, either because the task involved is too dangerous to risk injury or the star simply cannot or will not do what the role requires. We in the audience almost never notice the switching back and forth. One might think that this is solely due to the care that the film makers take to make sure the double has the same build as the star and is made up to have the same exterior appearance in terms of clothes and hair, and by avoiding close ups of the face.
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Robert Adler has a nice article with the title Why is there something rather than nothing?explaining what our best theories say about why the universe exists at all and why it has the properties it does, such as being so flat and uniform.
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