Doug's Sounding Board

I recently saw that a friend got a second yogurt maker. I hadn’t heard of such a device and I envisioned something like a bread maker where you put in all the ingredients and some time later you have yogurt. After some research I found that yogurt making is a simple process. Heat milk to […]

http://community.acs.org/nanotation/NanoTubePlayer/tabid/131/VideoId/106/The-Nano-Song.aspx

 I don’t have a picture because there are only camera phones in the office and none of them can get close enough to resolve the image. I would draw a picture but my poor drawing skills are more likely to mislead. It’s a bright red bug (6-legs), about 2.5-3mm long and probably about 1mm wide. […]

Saturday we went to the Computer History Museum to see the opening of Babbage’s Difference Engine exhibit. It’s the second one that’s been built and it’s impressive in person. After wandering through the rest of the museum we arrived at the difference engine in time to see them setting it up for calculation of an […]

Researchers have stored an entire image on a single photon (for a very short while).

When we were working on the Mpemba effect we needed to boil water. It wasn’t a full kitchen, just a sink, a refrigerator, and a microwave. We also had those 15.7fl.oz. bottles of water. First we dumped out a little and put it in the microwave with the top off and after a short time […]

I just found the experimental results from our testing of the Mpemba effect at my last job. I learned about the Mpemba Effect from Trivial Pursuit when the answer to “According to the MPemba Effect, what does hot water do faster than cold water?” was “Freeze”. Sure enough, after looking it up, hot water tends […]

Yay! The ozone layer is recovering! I think in general we don’t know enough to know the cycles of global patterns like temperature and weather and how things interact, but in this case it’s pretty clear our production of CFCs was the main cause. Now if we can just cut oil use and stop over-fishing […]

(I’m posting more today because I have nothing to do except wait for QA to find bugs for me to fix.) Last night I bought Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. It was made based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist. He found certain types of exercises stimulated blood flow to various areas of the […]

I’ve seen a number of studies and surveys that show women having a preference for a man who makes them laugh. I’ve also read about a study or two that showed that women tend to have a more advanced sense of humor than men. Advanced being more word based and less physical based. This leads […]