http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress Interesting Science, Research, and a bit of off the wall humor Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:48:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In order to celebrate my birthday tomorrow DARPA is offering a $40,000 prize to the first person or group of people that can find 10 red balloons. DARPA, aka the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is not just looking for any ten red balloons, but ten specific red weather ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/12/04/darpa_celebrates_my Spinal Tap Engineering. Today's XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems. [caption id="attachment_278" align="aligncenter" width="592" caption="Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)"][/caption] Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary. http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/12/02/engineering_problems_vs_marketing_problems For the Thanksgiving feast this year I was responsible for the turkey, so I had the opportunity to brine a turkey again. [caption id="attachment_263" align="aligncenter" width="415" caption="Turkey. Representative of typical results."][/caption] I was thinking about the whole process this year, and was wondering if osmotic pressure had much of a role in ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/11/27/turkey-brining-and-osmotic-pressure One of my favorite places on the internet is a photo blog hosted by the Boston Globe called The Big Picture. Each post is a set of related images, usually something timely, often high resolution, and always breathtaking. Yesterday the collection was a series of images from Cassini, ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/10/20/saturn-on-the-big-picture Uranium ore for sale on Amazon. Stock up for the winter! Now I just need that processing plant. The funniest part of this is the comments. You really should go read them. Great Product, Poor Packaging I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/10/14/uranium-ore-on-amazon Interesting plot of caffeine vs. calories showed up in my RSS feed. A large mocha frappucino is the same calories as a big mac? Wow. Give me my Americano any day. [caption id="attachment_248" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Caffeine vs. Calories (click image for full size at source)"][/caption] How can you tell if you ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/08/19/caffeine-vs-calories A little bit of applied mathematics for your next "number of M&M's in the jar" contest. From Make http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/07/27/guess-the-number-of-mms-in-the-jar Has it been a month already? If it wasn't for Twitter, you guys would be wondering if I was still alive! But just to make it up to you, here is an anamated short about young Oxygen on the playground of the Periodic Table. Oxygen from Christopher Hendryx on Vimeo. http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/05/07/oxygen-on-the-playground Things that bother me about some of my favorite TV shows all wrapped up in a four frames from PhD Comics http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/04/08/what-youre-telling-me-tv-isnt-real Over at Swans on Tea there was this gem today The comments on the YouTube video got me thinking: So if the density of Mercury is 13.5 g/cm3 and we assume Jesus weighed something around 80 kg, then he would be able to walk across a pool of Mercury with less than ... http://www.arlenward.com/wordpress/2009/03/30/row-row-row-your-boat