The centrifuge is a vital tool in medical diagnostics because it enables laboratories to separate different components that are mixed in a sample. It works by spinning the sample around at very high rotational frequencies and the differential centrifugal forces on the different masses results in the separation. But centrifuges are bulky and expensive and require electricity to operate and that makes them not easily available to medical personnel in remote areas.
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Details have been sketchy and varying so far about the wall with Mexico that Donald Trump has repeatedly talked about building. Stephen Colbert looked at what Trump has said about it and then assembled a panel of experts (architect, engineer, concrete supplier, and designer) to estimate how much it would cost to carry out that vision.
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I will be visiting with my grandson for the coming week and am finding him so fascinating that it is hard to find the time to blog. It turns out that being a new grandfather is all that it is cracked up to be. So blogging will be sporadic for the next week.

But what I can report is that even though he is just one month old, he acts more rationally than the current president of the USA.

It is pretty interesting how something that seems so simple requires a complicated engineering process to make because of the design constraints involved.

Are you, like me, somewhat of a grammar pedant and struggling to find gifts to give certain friends and relatives of yours who consistently say things that annoy you? Mark Frauenfelder has found just the thing. If the recipients spot the typo on the mug, they get a pardon. That error, he tells me, is an example of something called Skitt’s Law that says that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”
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Sergey Karjakin stunned the chess world by beating champion Magnus Carlsen in the eighth game of their 12-game series, following seven consecutive draws. He thus takes a 4.5-3.5 lead. The fact that he did this while playing black adds to the surprise. Oliver Roeder describes what happened.
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We know that people can act irrationally out of anger, reacting completely out of proportion to some real or imagined slight and doing dangerous and threatening things as a result. The most obvious examples are of road rage, but we also have cases of people harming and even killing others in domestic or neighborhood disputes. But in most of those cases, people are acting out of anger.
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The Olympic games are currently underway and I am ignoring it for many of the reasons Marcus Ranum writes about. In addition, I hate the fact that the TV presenters will endless hype some marquee event by saying it is “coming up shortly” when in fact they will string out the anticipation for an hour or more, using that time to inundate you with commercials.
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