Stephen Hawking encounters a stag-do in Cambridge: From The Telegraph: Chris Hallam, 29, and ten friends…turned a corner and bumped into Stephen Hawking getting out of his car. And they were stunned when the Brief History of Time author agreed to pose with them for a souvenir photo. Mr Hallam, […]
Physics
Polarity. It’s a useful concept
I’m on a bus, ploughing its way through an excessive headwind as yet another Atlantic storm blasts us to colour-coded distress (we are Code Red now; there are no more colours left). But even in distress, we have clever scientifically literate headlines. Fair play to RTE’s news website people for […]
Reverse the Earth’s rotation? I’d want to get off
Here is the spinning globe atop the University of São Paulo’s international webpage. Tut, tut, tut: I know what you’re thinking: “That’s the wrong direction of rotation! Why, if the Earth rotated in that direction, we’d all be killed!” Or something. Well, as well as messing up time zones so that […]
Evidence for time travel on Twitter is not there, unsurprisingly
More news from the crazy world of time travelling: it’s still impossible. A team of intrepid researchers have trawled the Internet looking for references to Pope Francis that preceded his becoming a pope (i.e., the Catholic one; there are others) or to Comet ISON prior to its being named “Comet ISON.” Both […]
Reading this can damage your health
Remember, folks, if (a) it’s new, (b) it’s popular, and (c) it’s invisible, then you know what it is. That’s right. It’s a cancer-causing death ray inflicted by lazy-minded bureaucrats who wilfully want to kill your kids. Or “WiFi”, to you and me. Yes, WiFi causes cancer now. And that’s […]
Trajectory of poop and wee is non-random. I knew it!
It’s official. Dogs poop and wee in non-random directions, taking their cue from the Earth’s magnetic field: