Everyday mysteries.
Things out in the world that made me go "huh... that's weird". (Especially things that violate my understanding of how the world works!)
If you post to the #HuhThatsWeird hashtag, I might boost it! ❤️
| Profile pic | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Question_mark_in_Esbjerg_(327122302).jpg |
The posts in this chain link fence are 4 foot long steel tubes, with walls about 1/8 inch thick. Pretty sturdy.
...except they filled with water, which froze to ice, and that ice has about 10% more volume than the water, and ice apparently don't care overly much about how the steel feels about the matter.
I feel like this might have some bearing on why I've been seeing the weird ice spikes growing out of these posts. Lotta pressure.
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?
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!)
