drascusladies and gentleman the dumbest article I've ever read. I think I am now stupider for having read it. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/27/cia-ark-of-the-covenant-resurfaced/82686919007/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Jennifer C J RadtkeHuh. Apparently setting up a photo on gravatar has created and logged me in to a wordpress.com account. That is rather unexpected. I only found out after getting "User $generatedUsername Cannot Access the Dashboard Requested" instead of the login page to the admin dashboard of a site I'm helping out with...
Huh, that's weird...I found these weird "upcicles" growing out of chain link fence posts near Lechmere in #CambridgeMA! I've seen them a few times, and they're *super funky*.
How the heck do these form? Are they in fact a large version of the ice spikes that sometimes form on ice cubes?
See thread for more details.
Unfiltered gallery: https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/list?tt=Location=Bike%20path%20along%20western%20Morgan%20Ave,%20Cambridge,%20MA&tt=Content=ice&tt=Content=mystery&mode=raw
I was playing around with a diffraction grating (a child's toy, "rainbow glasses") and decided to look at some LEDs to see if I could tell how smooth or bumpy their spectral output was—I'd heard that cheaper white LEDs tend to have a sharp peak in the blue and a large, wide peak around green/red.
And that's what I saw: A dim region between blue and green. But it's also *narrower* there, which I didn't expect! Maybe there's some diffusion of the light transversely?
I want you to do an experiment, if you can.
Find a bright background (daytime sky, very brightly lit wall). Make a pinching motion right in front of your eye so you can just barely see the background past it—and focus your eye on the background.
Just as your fingers are a hairs-breadth apart... do you see a bridge of shadow between them?
- What does it look like?
- Does your camera see the same thing?
- Why the heck is it there?
🧠 That bike that passed us, playing music on a speaker—the pitch went from high to low! Doppler effect!
🧑🔬 Yeah, very good, self! Good noticing.
🧠 And when you slow music down, the pitch gets lower.
🧑🔬 Sure... where are you going with this?
🧠 Red shift from stars is Doppler shift too and it's from time dilation! Bikes must move at a significant fraction of light speed!
🧑🔬 why do you do this
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I *know* it's wrong, but now I need to go on a Wikipedia binge to figure out why. >_<
Somehow the stove can turn my kitchen scale on!
I had the scale powered off and sitting to one side, and when I turned on a different burner, the scale powered on. Is this inductive coupling?
(All the burners spark at the same, so it doesn't matter which knob I turn.)
What's even weirder is that this morning I *couldn't* reproduce it after cleaning the stove. It only worked again just now. Maybe it had to dry out.
When I press on this fidget spinner, the noise gets louder and higher pitched. But when I drag it across the surface, the opposite happens.
Seems to happen on any resonant surface, like a wooden desk top or (here) the lid of a washing machine.
Why does the sound change?
(May require headphones, but turn the volume down first!)