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Glad to learn these are myths. I've always wondered if my year in Peru was wasted just because I could never determine if the water swirled in the wrong direction in my basin. I still can't tell you which way it flows when I flush.
Although 1905 is remembered as Einstein's annus mirabilis, there were other scientists doing good work then, too. Tony Rothman gives a few of them a shout-out.
Turns out, it might reinforce a bad call rather than correct one. What works better? Maybe the pause button.
The BTP posits that it's possible to take a solid sphere, cut it into pieces, rearrange the pieces using nothing more than rotation and translation, and then re-assemble them into two identical copies of the original sphere. "In other words," www.kiro5hin.org explains, "you've doubled the volume of the original sphere."
And then my head explodes. Not my real head—just a mathematical model of my head.
JA captured the image: I watch as Michael Bishop works with a dirty pot. Robert Baird sits in the hotspot. Lukas Lipinski monitors the session.
***
There's a simple note taped to the glass door. In black magic marker, it tells you, RING BELL FOR AVATAR STUDIOS.
I had just finished my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. There was nothing left to do. And so:
I
rang
the bell.
I wondered if there was someone, somewhere, in front of a monitor, finger poised on a buzzer, watching me as I waited. I didn't have to wait very long at all…
Over at Popular Science, there's a post about a gargantuan "cruise blimp" that just seems too cool to ever get built. Check out the illustration of the observation deck—it's like an irony-free Bruce McCall illo, which is kind of disorienting.
Maybe just better run. Mark Thoma at Economist's View has some thoughts. So do his readers.