The Equivalence Principle enunciated by Albert Einstein says that any two objects in a uniform gravity field will fall at the same rate if dropped from a height. Of course, if we drop a feather and a bowling ball, that is not what we see and we explain that by saying it is because the air resistance slows down the feather much more than it does the bowling ball. But if you could drop the two items in a vacuum, they should fall at the same rate.
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While US infrastructure continues its slow but steady degeneration as politicians stay fixated on richer people paying less taxes and thus starving the government and making it unable to maintain even what we have now let alone make ambitious plans for improvements in the future, we have to look to other countries for the nice things that we cannot have.
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Research results in applied psychology often have a big impact on the general public because those works address questions that people can directly relate to. Who isn’t interested in what we are like and how we relate to others? Sometimes the research results cause great controversy and can even lead to rapid changes in public policy.
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If I were a religious person looking for something to prove the existence of god, I would not waste my time with things like the bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting mechanism or other esoteric phenomena that few other than biologists really understand. I would instead point to the properties of water.
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Off and on, depending upon whether it coincides with my eating dinner, I listen to the daily CBC-produced radio program Q with Jian Ghomeshi that is broadcast by my local NPR station. It is a reasonably good program, more heavy on longer interviews with arts and cultural figures than the CBC show it replaced that was called As It Happens.
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I have had mild lactose intolerance since childhood. This means that I have no problems with butter or ice cream or milk in my coffee and tea and cereal and in other foods but cannot drink a full glass of milk with getting an upset stomach. It turns out that what I thought of as a limitation and even a minor health hazard (milk is good for you, right?) may actually be a positive thing. While butter and eggs got the green light some years ago, switching from being bad for you to being either good or neutral, a new study suggests that milk may go the other way, switching from being an unalloyed good to health hazard.
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The motorized unicycle that is featured in the OK Go video that I showed yesterday is made by Honda and called the UNI-CUB and you can see it put through its paces in the video below.
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