Author: Sam Kornstein
What if…
The maker of xkcd, my favorite comic, started a new site, “what-if.xkcd.com,” where he answers absurd “what if…” questions posed to him by his comic fans. Judging by the first two, this new weekly series will be worth following. Here’s the first: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.: The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and
A Very Impressive Guitar Riff Compilation
Fireworks Mishaps
On the night of the fourth, while watching Boston’s fireworks from a friend’s roof deck on Beacon Hill, I told my girlfriend that I was curious to see it would be like if a city released an entire show worth of fireworks at once. Well, whoops. San Diego seems to have accidentally done just that. I call them fire geysers: What an awesome 30 seconds that must have been.
Color Perception
How do we know we all see the same colors? The short answer is that we don’t know, and according to some new research, there’s a good chance we don’t in fact all see the same colors. Via Marginal Revolution: Anyone with normal color vision agrees that blood is roughly the same color as strawberries, cardinals and the planet Mars. That is, they’re all red. But could it be that what you call “red” is someone else’s “blue”? Could people’s color wheels be rotated with respect to one another’s? “That is the question we have all asked since grade school,” said Jay Neitz, a color vision scientist at the University of Washington. In the past, most scientists would have answered
Warning!
What is success?
A great post from a good friend’s blog: A lot has been written lately about David McCullough Jr.’s “You are not special. You are not exceptional” speech recently at Wellesley High School’s graduation, most recently this NY Times Article and this blog post now going viral. I think this has really hit home with me as it’s something I’ve been slowly working my way through myself the past year or so as I’ve made some pivotal life decisions. As my 30th birthday quickly approaches, I’m realizing more and more that it’s the journey and not the destination. When you are younger, success was much easier to measure and attain. Make the honor roll, win a baseball game, do well on the SAT’s, get into college, etc..
Airplanes. Airplanes. Airplanes.
Line up. Wait. Take off. Repeat.
Las Islas del Maiz
Here are my final photos from Nicaragua, this batch taken on the Corn Islands, which are on the Caribbean side of the country.
Ometepe
Here’s my third batch of photos from Nicaragua. These are all from Ometepe, which is an island with two volcanoes in the middle of Lake Nicaragua.