Some interesting links (under construction)

• My advisee for the 2009 Intel Science Talent Search, Anissa Mak, makes the top 40 finalists nationwide

• 3-D optical illusions made from sidewalk drawings and a special camera perspective

• Water slide

  followup

• Rube Goldberg Honda

  followup

• Cats know how to use angular momentum to stay right side up when falling. Click here to see what one does in weightlessness, where there is no such thing as "right side up."

• In 2004, a political activist, Andy Bichlbaum, embarrassed Dow Chemical over its handling of the Bhopal chemical disaster by impersonating a Dow spokesman in a BBC television interview. He announced that Dow had decided to "own up to its responsibilities" to compensate the victims, take care of their medical needs, clean up the site, and publish a list of the toxic chemicals that were released there. This immediately became international news, and the market value of Dow stock dropped by $2 billion before the hoax was uncovered. It put Dow executives in the awkward position of publicly acknowleging their unwillingness to take the steps the Bichlbaum described in the interview. Click here to see the BBC interview

• I think I recall seeing actual instances of the now-famous Monty Hall Problem arising on the '70s game show Let's Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall. I went looking for actual clips on YouTube. I didn't find one, but I found the following interesting items.

  • Cool Hollywood mathematician solves the Monty Hall Problem

  • Here's another one.

  • Matt Damon plays a genius janitor who takes some breaks from buffing the floor at MIT to solve "important problems" in graph theory. The scene comes from the movie Good Will Hunting.

    • Interesting followup

  • The movie Catch Me If You Can is based on the life of the famed impostor Frank Abagnale Jr, who is played by Leonard DiCaprio. The opening scene of the movie shows him appearing on the corny '70s game show What's my line? I wondered if that was true. Here's a clip from the original show.

• DAMN INTERESTING

  • Clever Hans, the Math Horse

  • Travel tip: Don't pee in the Amazon, because of the dreaded Toothpick Fish.

  • Ruthless scientist who brought us much of the lead in our brains and the ozone hole meets horrible end in his own contraption; oil companies, lobbyists, and regulators fare better

• Why cops should be cautioned against entering the MRI room with their guns drawn. For related pictures, including some janitorial surprises and a movie of technicians extracting a chair from an MRI machine (one of the thumbnails), click here.

• Largest dropping ever recorded from any carnivore, fossil or living. It likely came from a Tyrannosaurus, and contains the crushed bones of a juvenile dynosaur the size of a cow.

• Tank rampage

• Mountain biker

• Great white sharks ambush seals

• Surfer surfs an enormous wave. (Slow motion, but otherwise authentic.) One of the many hazards surfers of such big waves face is getting caught in a large volume of water full of air bubbles that take time to rise to the surface, even after the wave has passed. Because water with bubbles in it has less density, it has less buoyancy, which can make you sink.

• Motorcycling in the Chernobyl Dead Zone gives an insight what would happen after a nuclear war.

• Conversation with a Slow Student

• Saturday-Morning Science -- weightless fun with blobs of water, Alka-Seltzer, CD-player gyroscopes and snacks on the International Space Station (47 minutes) Go to minute 14:45 to see how to blow smoke rings in a blob of water. Go to minute 18 of the video for an especially interesting segment on blobs within bubbles within blobs of water. Go to minute 40 to see the challenges of fixing a watch in microgravity.

• Here's a picture of the world altitude record for skydives, taken from a weather balloon at 103,000 feet (31 km). The jumper, Joe Kitinger, wore a space suit, and because there is virtually no air or air resistance at that altitude, he became the first person to reach the speed of sound without being propelled by an airplane or rocket. Though he made his jump in 1960, his record remains unbroken. Click here to see a movie he took on the way down.