Stretching
the boundaries of the quantum world: in the famous double-slit
diffraction experiment, a single photon offered the choice between
two slits in a barrier can go through both, producing interference
patterns, because light is a wave as well as a particle.
Now some researchers have gotten similar
interference
behavior from buckyballs.
The latest
Onion includes some
amusing
comments on the Reagan biography. I'm fond of
"First of all, he was American, not Dutch."
Quite useful,
and surprisingly fun to play with:
ThisToThat gives advice
on how to glue different things together. [via
Honeyguide]
A long article on
the child
soldiers of Columbia, part of a series of the recruiting and
use of children
in warfare. [link probably good only through October 18th]
The
North
American Dragonfly Migration Project so far has more questions
than answers, and would like help from anyone interested in
observing dragonfly migrations. Not all dragonflies migrate,
and the migration hasn't gotten the attention given to birds or
to monarch butterflies; one key question is Where are they
migrating to? In addition to the scientific questions and answers,
this Web site has some gorgeous photographs.
Molly Ivins
points out that politics, as presented in the press, may seem
like an irrelevant game for a few insiders, but
government still matters.
A bit of
good news: tigers are still endangered, but the situation is
less dire than it was, or than most conservationists
had predicted. This is not just luck--it's the result of lots of
hard work, everything from setting aside reserves for the tigers' prey
to finding alternatives to tiger bone in Chinese medicine.
[registration required]
My thoughts on
teaching
evolution in Kansas, published in
Salon.
Unexpected
benefits: passengers who fell or jumped in front of London
Underground trains were more likely to survive if they fell in
stations with
drainagepits under the tracks. The authors of the study note that
"the mechanics of the interaction of the human body with a train
are poorly studied."
Someone probably
made a couple of million dollars for this renaming, but it makes
my brain hurt:
"let it be thus"
contains such delightful sentences as "Thus is a new kind of
telecommunications company"--presumably one run by people who can't
tell an adverb from a noun. Warning: This site crashes
Netscape; it seems to behave under IE.
[via Need to Know]
Chaos theory
and
natural
disasters: either there are more of these floods than there
used to be, or our measurements of a "100-year" or "500-year"
storm have been off all along.
I've suspected something like this ever since the winter we had
two"hundred-year storms," one a blizzard and one a
nor'easter, within a few months. [via
Rebecca's pocket]
Scented and
ceremonial candles may be bad for you: many have
lead or lead-alloy wicks
that release dangerous amounts of lead into the air. Even if the lead
settles out quickly, it does so as household dust, which can poison
children.
Planet X? A
British astronomer studying the motions of long-period comets thinks
he has found a
very
distant, very large planet.
Murray estimates that the planet is 30,000 astronomical
units--or about half a
light-year--away from the Sun, in a retrograde orbit with a
period of six million years. More details will be published next week.
Another researcher working on a similar model calls the perturbing body a "brown dwarf" and estimates its distance at 25,000 AU. A preprint of his Icarus paper is on this Web site.
"God's
Judgment on Heterosexuality and the Church's Caring Response"
is buttressed by numerous quotes from the Bible.
How to
recreate
the solar eclipse experience in a Manhattan apartment.
More
unintended consequences:
trade on the Danube is blocked by the wreckage of bridges
destroyed in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Estimates are that
the problem will take four years to solve--once the various
nations involved agree on who has to pay for it. In the meantime,
the economies of Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine are suffering.
There's a small bypass canal in Novi Sad, but Yugoslavia won't let the
Romanians use it because Romania backed NATO,
so the Romanians aren't letting Yugoslav traffic
through further downriver.
New research
tries to explain
why
people like carbonated drinks. Apparently it's not the bubbles
so much as the carbonic acid they create when interacting with
the drinker's saliva.
The dangers
of
assuming that
there are precisely two sides to every issue and that each
deserves equal time. Block also comments on how the political
dialogue can be manipulated by carefully choosing two people who
are basically on the same side of an issue to debate it.
Monsanto
says that it has decided
not
to develop "terminator gene"
technology--at least for the moment. The company is making no
promises about the future, however, except that it will look at all
the issues before doing anything.
Nothing comes
for free anymore: a
Zorb is an
inflatable ball-within-a-ball for rolling downhill in. But you
can't buy just one--they want to sell you a franchise. Signs of
the Apocalypse, anyone? [via
Eatonweb.]
The timing of
extinctions: it takes
about
a century for all the bird species affected by habitat loss in
a forest to die out.
How to
dunk a biscuit (cookie)--and why we do it. This research has won an
IgNobel
prize for physics.
The BBC News
Online asked its readers to name
the
greatest thinker of the millennium and they chose Karl Marx by
a clear majority over Albert Einstein. Rounding out the top ten, in
order: Newton, Darwin, Aquinas, Hawking, Kant, Descartes, Maxwell, and
Nietzsche. There is hope for the world.
How many
feet make up a pound? JPL thinks the reason for the loss of the
Mars Climate Orbiter was
a
confusion between metric and English units.
"Of
the making of silly surveys there is no end." The problem is
our unfortunate tendency to take them seriously. [registration
required]
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course. Stale links are in the nature of such a project, but please let me know if any new links appear broken. Note: dates given here are when I add an item to the log; items are added when I notice them, not necessarily when they first reach the Web.
YAWL is updated most weekdays (sometimes more than once a day) and occasionally on weekends. (For some reason, less of the material I'm interested in is posted on weekends.) However, this is purely an amateur project. If there are no updates for a few days, that might mean I'm traveling or otherwise busy, and not surfing the Web, or just that I haven't come across anything that seems to belong here.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.