Dallas Stars @ Vancouver Canucks || 16 March 2017

Who needs expensive equipment, when you have good friends

A little girl in my 4th grade class came up to me after recess and said, “I got married at recess!” and I said “Oh? I didn’t know anyone was ordained under the age of twelve.” and she asked me what ordained meant and I explained and then she said “Oh, well, no, my wife and I were married by the slide, but we’ll be happy together anyway.”

So apparently on school playgrounds, slides are already legalizing same-sex marriage.

The Worlds of our Solar System

Hidden Portraits: Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was an inventor, engineer, physicist and futurist. He arrived in the U.S. in 1884 and quickly catapulted his career by working with Thomas Edison, creating more than 700 patents and making major breakthroughs in modern alternating current (AC) electricity.

He’s featured in the Art with Watson series, Hidden Portraits. 15 artists teamed up with Watson to discover and illuminate the unknown essence of seven of history’s greatest thinkers using data. 

What Watson thinks: Watson’s analysis of Tesla’s works revealed a new side of the famed inventor – as an artist at heart.

About the artwork: The Artist Inside was inspired by Tesla’s conflicted, dual personas: the scientist and the artist. The mirrored cube represents Tesla’s mind, with the inner electric grid representing his fame as a well-known scientist. The generative art that come alive inside the cube speaks to Tesla’s lesser-known artistic side, uncovered with Watson.

Explore Tesla’s Hidden Portrait ->

this is from a real diary by a 13-year-old girl in 1870. teenage girls are awesome and they’ve always been that way.

Tyler Hoechlin @ emeraldcitycomicon 2015, Seattle

So, our physics teacher has the strange idea of motivating his students by letting each of us present a physical phenomenal we find interesting to our classmates in a 5-minutes-presentation. And now I need something that is interesting for everyone - even people that usually don't care for physics -, but has interesting facts for someone who's interested in it, too (preferably with an easy experiment). You don't happen to have any ideas, do you?

First of all, your professor is awesome for taking the time to do this. Of the top of my mind, the best one I have is Chladni figures.

Basically take a flat metal plate, fix it at the center and spray some fine sand particles on it.

Using a violin bow, gently excite any edge of the plate to magically witness these beautiful normal mode patterns ( known as Chladni patterns/figures ) forming on the plate.

Also notice that by pinching the plate at different points, the pattern obtained changes.

There is a whole lot of physics that goes behind such a simple phenomenon and I dare say we understand it completely. There are lots of questions on these figures that we have no answer for!

Hope this helps with your presentation. Have a good one!

Gif source video: Steve Mould

Landscape Photography Matches Its Environment by  Toshio Shibata

On August 2, 1971, Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin is working near the lunar module. The Moon is small compared to some celestial objects, but it’s seemingly vast compared to that speck in the distance. Photo by Dave Scott. 

(NASA)

So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history. 

Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.