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Marti

ATM hazards

By Pot Luck

I wonder what a few rocks could buy you back then? Rocks as currency is not such a silly idea, I mean our currency here in Australia is now plastic. It just flies out of the machine – if there’s enough money in it to begin with!

Nasty pink aliens

By Dinosaurs, Evil aliens

I promised last time I posted the first of the ‘Evil Aliens’, I’d come back sometime later to answer the question I posed – Can you guess 2 scientific errors in the making of this cartoon?  True to form, the smart readers out there not only came up with my answers, but also some of their own (see comments section on original post).

My two thoughts were:

  • hydrogen burns clear to slight blue (my planet is ablaze with yellow and orange flames)
  • to have a fire you need fuel (√ – hydrogen from the gas in Jupiter’s makeup), ignition source (√ -the nasty alien’s cigarette butt) and oxygen (× -not much taking place out there in space)

Bubbles of fun….and the May winner is

By Bill and Ben the little green alien men, Competitions

Congratulations to Hugh for winning the May Cartoon Caption Competition. 

Click here to see the runners up

Hugh was inspired by the following mathematical discovery, in the making of this winning caption above and this other entry ‘Bill and Ben didn’t really understand the Double Bubble Conjecture, but they did throw themselves wholeheartedly into a practical demonstration.’

“When two round soap bubbles come together, they form a double bubble as on the right in Figure 1. Unless the two bubbles are the same size, the surface between them bows a bit into the larger bubble. The separating surface meets each of the two bubbles at 120 degrees. This precise shape is now known to have less area than any other way to enclose and separate the same two volumes of air, even wild possibilities as on the left in Figure 1, in which the second bubble wraps around the first, and a tiny separate part of the first wraps around the second. Such wild possibilities are shown to be unstable by a new argument which involves rotating different portions of the bubble around a carefully chosen axis at different rates. The breakthrough came while Morgan was visiting Ritoré and Ros at the University of Granada last spring. Their work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spanish scientific research foundation DGICYT.” (Link) Got nothing to do tonight? Why not read the paper?

Captain Cook’s bath time

By Pot Luck

Captain Cook is famous for discovering Australia for England. They thought it would make a great gaol for the over flooding prisons back in the motherland…and so modern Australia was born.  A few facts about the Captain:

  • He mapped the Pacific on his travels to Australia. He also mapped almost all of Australia’s east coast and proved that New Zealand was its own land and not connected to Australia
  • Not realising Australia was the Great Southern land he was commissioned to search for, his ship continued south and almost hit Antarctica. He didn’t quite make it, as they had to turn north to resupply their diminishing stocks
  • He died in Hawaii in 1779. After a dispute with the local villagers he was stabbed to death by the chief – Kalanimanokahoowaha (according to Hawaiian records)

The hazard sign at the end of the universe

By Bill and Ben the little green alien men

I wonder if Ben stopped to dine in the restaurant just next door to this useful sign, and patiently awaited further expansion of the universe?  Ever read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe? I loved it. The second book in the trilogy of 5 books is ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’.

And for a bit of trivia. Fans of the Hitch Hikers story celebrate the author Douglas Adams on 25 May each year, by carrying the ‘Do not panic’ towel.  To find out more about the significance of the towel, check out Wiki.

Octo-tasking

By Animals

This is how physciatrist Edward Hallowell described multitasking

“[a] mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.

June 2012 Competition

By Competitions

The 3 click competition 

Especially for those who don’t want to think too hard in order to win a fantastic prize!

Yes, I have ulterior motives. Call it an engineers approach to marketing. Click here (that counts as #1 click) to find out more and enter.

Is your clicking finger up to the challenge?

Letting yourself go

By Animals

And now for some camel facts:

  • The hump is not a lump full of water, rather it’s fatty tissue. Having said that, due to the unique genes of the camel, they can convert the fat with air to produce about 1,111 gm water for every 1,000 gm of fat.  Wish I could do the same with my excess fat! I’d be rich.
  • Camels live for about 50-60 years
  • Arabian camels have one hump and Bactrian camels have two humps.