SCIENCE HOBBYIST:
new articles & updates

New addition to Childhood Brain: the Mosquito Aria, and trying to hit double high-C by humming very softly.

I hear that I'm now on your tee vee! The episode of Strange Evidence must have finally seen the light. About " levitating fishing line," apparently it's not that uncommon. It means you're about to die by lightning strike.

New electricity rants!

Why do people say "We don't really know what electricity is." ?

How did Tesla conceive the Induction Motor? What caused Tesla's
financial problems? WHY WAS TESLA DOOMED?!

If you don't like the year 2020 so much, then try a little bit'o the ol' 1976...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqcnJ68g4h8

Also, there's an entire Abba concert, by S. Mann on the Jardin Smith organ, in Manchester at the English Martyrs.

No new articles here? Try How do batteries determine their voltage? also How can I become as big a genius as N. Tesla?, or roughly eight hundred other new wbeaty articles posted over on the Q&A site Quora.com.

Some recommended books:

Heh, years ago I heard that fans created a "Bill Beaty" page on Wikipedia. Now trolls have deleted it again.

I am nemo.

- For example, a UHF "hairpin resonator," just a long U-shape rod, is a bifilar coil (and Nikola Tesla was driving these, getting weird overtone arcs.) If we pulse one end of the hairpin, it should launch high-power microwaves from its far end ...and if the hairpin is twisted, then we have the infamous "Smith Coil" which supposedly launches aether vortices. - Besides spiralled hairpin antennas, another "Bifilar" is the toroid coil if wound in two directions, to prevent any single-turn from existing around its equator. In other words, wind a toroid coil as usual ...then keep going as before, but advance each turn backwards, until you've wound an equal number of turns. The toroid will now have a "spiral hairpin" winding, with strong b-field in the core. Unlike normal toroid windings, there will be exactly zero magnetic field outside, since without the unwanted single turn around the axis, the coil is almost perfectly self-shielding. (The unwanted single turn goes around the equator, then goes back again to the beginning, for zero average current around the donut's equator.) But there is still A-field (and ac volts) in the space outside the coil.

Normally my 70's-era dosimeters reliably accumulate 35mR per year.
On two 2.5hr trips (Vegas,) one of these accumulated 2mR total. Five hours in the air, but maybe only ~4.5h total time up high in the natural cosmic ray-bath.

2mR per 4h is 4400mR per year, or 125X higher than sea-level background radiation

2mR per 4.5h is 3900mR per year, or 110X higher than background
So cross-country airline trips, (during no solar flares) give a rough cosmic-ray dose of at least 100X the background level.
Normal rads: 0.082mR/day (0.0034mR/hr) aircraft 0.4mR/hr, 120X above background. (so about 120 counts/sec on a big pancake detector, rather than the 1cps you get at sea level.)
Heh, I wonder what the value would be, up in the Space Shuttle, or the ISS? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense!

THE LOST SECRET OF THE PYRAMIDS
Building enormous ancient stone temples? Lifting multi-ton blocks on floating barges requires giant barges. However, if we can make a 1cm “water-film” under a giant stone block, and pressurize it with only a few PSI, the block will lift. That’s the air-film hovercraft trick for moving giant milling-machines. Inside a stone temple with a polished stone floor, this would be easy to do.

So …ancient Aegyptian air-hockey tables, with multi-ton stone blocks coasting around. A smooth sidewalk with lots of tiny holes, and horizontal pressure-channels underneath. If they used water, they’d only need a few ft. of “dam head,” in order to create the PSI for lifting multi-ton limestone. Use an Archimedes spiral-pump, run by small windmill, or a Conan-style 2-man spoke-wheel. Limestone is ~2x density of water, so to lift a square inch of limestone that’s 4ft tall, you’d need a bit more than 8ft head of water (from a quite small overhead water tank.)

Or, put each block upon a larger wood plate, to increase the area of footprint, and pressurize the plate-fislm with much lower PSI. No rolling logs used anywhere, instead one man could guide few-ton blocks w/finger pressure. Or, build your water-channel sidewalk with a very small tilt, and any block placed upon it would automatically glide downhill like magic. Heh, with a continuous chain of blocks in motion, the transport-sidewalk would only have very few open water-pores squirting upwards.

Ancient kids at the beach, with thin wood disks, can run and jump onto them, sliding 70ft on the water-film. Then kid grows up to be the master stonecutter of the Pharaoh, sliding hundred-ton granite blocks around. (Hey genius, but how do you make those blocks go uphill? Maybe hydraulic elevator, run by a few buckets full of water? Pump water to the top of the pyramid. When it flows down, limestone blocks rise up.)

Recent SSE conference, try the AATIP talk. (Terrible acoustics there. Try the transcript.)
Also see:
- Crown-flash magnetic analogy
- Crown-flash magnetic analogy, in sunlight

Wow, PDFs of rare books weird ones. Wood Library and Museum. They have The Odic Force 1926. The internet: grab personal copies before it goes away.

On Leaping Sundogs page, just uploaded the references and the three diagrams to Bernard Vonnegut's "leaping sundogs" research paper from 1965. Vonnegut discovered crownflash-sundog effect fifty years ago, but he had only his own observations, plus some eyewitnesses. No film footage, so the odd phenomenon and Vonnegut's discovery was ignored until now. Also: CrownFlash on Reddit.

The most beautiful phrase in the English language is "pressure door."

Recent rumor I've heard: safety flashers in the building will disrupt phone communication for hundreds of feet around.

Really? Well, it could make sense. Xenon strobe tubes. Risetime of electric arcs can be in tens of nanoseconds. If the discharge circuit on a fire-alarm warning strobe was loop-shaped, it could be emitting very brief microwave pulses of few hundred watts.

Time to experiment. Paint your xenon strobe opaque, so nobody figures it out. Maybe you'd need two or three resonant loops, to cover multiple bands. Maybe "phone jammers" need no transistors.

The best thing on TV ever. Reality fractured, your stance wanders loose, never quite restored.

I'm over there on Quora.com, answering questions.

Huh, just had another hyper-realistic dream, my fourth. These are the ones with incredible detail, like sitting through a 2hr movie, a movie backed up by man-years of scriptwriting and research. OK, what's my mind picking up during asleep? The undercurrents of the cosmic pop-culture? BURNING-MAN CROWDS and their highly focused Tibetan-Tulpa rays, centaur Real-doll scorpions, the art installations with haunted randomizers and discarnate memories stored in the zeropoint nonlocal foam. Pinocchio was built by Frankenstein and wants to become a real girl!

Repair your BD-10 "vacuum tester" Tesla Coil. Or Violetta Violet Wand. Or, buy up some dead Violet Ray tesla-coil quack-medical devices on eBay, then get them working for resale. (Or did you just want to cure your brain-fog, rather than zapping sensitive body parts?)

Sam Langley devised the Bolometer,
a wonderful type of thermometer;
it can measure the temp
of a Polar-bear's rump
at a distance of half a kilometer.

- science-joke collection: "A Random Walk in Science" 1973 RL Webber

Get plastered with the Golden Hoard?
Hey, yogurt-drink is Kumis! Kumis beer from fermented mares' milk fueled Ghengis' vast army. Store-bought Kefir liquid-yoghurt will swell up and explode if you leave it out of the fridge. It's full of yeast, and makes CO2. Also alcohol of course. The seller just didn't let it go long enough, like artisan carbonated grape juice actually being proto-wine. Igonna leave som Kefir out when weather warms up again, crack the cap a bit, maybe use a winemaking bubbler. See how much alcohol. If it works, next stage is buy a stable full of pregnant Mongolian war-ponies. Artisanal Kumiss, in horse-skin bags just like old country. Weaponized canteen

Everything's improved by f-holes!

Avoid giving away your alien origin: remember, real humans never say "Finger-Ends," always be sure to say say "fingertips."

In the USA, solvent-filled Xmas bubble lights are available, but not in many other countries. This is a shame, because the Methylene Chloride isn't necessary. Works fine with Ethylene Chloride (plexi solvent cement #3) The same effect also occurs with water. But, you must carefully exclude every bit of air, using a somewhat-hard vacuum and well-degassed water. Some smart supplier should start selling these things in the UK, using water in a vacuum, boiling at 40C deg or so. A bit of sand at the bottom to trap microbubbles for nucleation.

They'll only take away my
fractional-MeV kilowatt-scale proton beam generator
when they pry it out of my COLD DEAD TENTACLES!

Nikola Tesla FAQ. Debunking the myths. Did Tesla invent coaxial cable? And radio, speedometers, neon advertising signs, etc? Yes and no. Mostly yes.

But no, not the coax.

Do all squished spiders smell the same?
More important, to they all TASTE THE SAME?

My Livescribe pen is repaired, I replaced the display. Those custom OLED panels aren't available, so I bought a second pen and pulled one from there. So, DIY repair is possible. The displays and batteries for Echo smartpen are "no user servicable parts inside." Ahem. The main trick is taking the darned case apart.

In 2010 I was on a roll, cracking myself up, see Straight Dope Tesla and broadcast power theory

I've used up my 15min of fame, and now I'm using up yours! On the next season of "Outrageous Acts of Science" (in the UK called "You Have Been Warned,") I'll be melting some beer bottles in a microwave oven, as seen on my Youtube vid (plus perhaps some extra footage.) Season 3, episode #7. I originated this glass-melting trick back in 2003, as part of our monthly science/crackpot "salon" here in Seattle. Lots of microwave physics "unwise demonstrations" for the high school classroom. And previously on YHBW, extreme cavitation damage.

Oh FUDGE!
My grandfather would say "gol durn!" rather than god damn. My grandma would say "Oh fudge" rather than, ...well. Must remember this. When I'm 98 and in a nursing home, must say OH FUDGE, the fudging motherfudgers at the fudging SSI have lost my fudging monthy check! AGAIN! And who do I have to fudge to get some service around here? Fudging heck.
Stupid dillweeds."

Just about finished updating 300-400 pages here, making them squishable for phone, to avoid the Google Mobile-geddon.

For example, the Good Stuff page now will smash down its jpegs when you narrow your browser window. And DIY Simple Telescope will even squash it's fixed-width ASCII diagrams! (And, this here News page is finally viewable on mobile, except for some leftover Courier-font <PRE> stuff found way way down below 1999.

Idea: buy a pair of retroreflector-pants so beloved of the contemporary hiphop community ...then paint them with lime-green transparent spray paint. Wear a black sweater, black ski mask, and go out and dance in front of headlights.
Ah, then, then

There I was! Caught in the Snide!
And in the dreadful place,
those spooky scary Pants and I were standing face to face!
I yelled for help. I screamed. I shrieked.
I howled, I yowled, I cried:
"O SAVE ME FROM THESE PALE GREEN PANTS WITH
NOBODY INSIDE!"

SITE METER TURNED EVIL?

Sometimes I see mysterious pageload errors from vindicosuite.com, also pages appearing only slowly while a hitcounter is loading. More recently I get occasional malware popup ads "A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS", they're these big gray windows seemingly served by ebay, youtube, etc.

I started getting them at work, and tracked it down. Consensus is that "Site Meter" sitemeter.com aka vindicosuite.com is behind all this. If you visit any site with a tiny Sitemeter hit counter, it supposedly loads a script/cookies which wait for you to visit eBay etc., then display the obtrusive screen-wide ad *only* if you're on eBay, otherwise it lurks hidden. Sometimes it plays music. And it's been going on since 2007.

Greeaat. Site meter is the hitcounter at the bottom of nearly all of my pages!

For your ref, here are warnings etc. about Sitemeter

• https:// www. stopthehacker. com/ 2009/11/24/ whats-up-with- sitemeter/
• http:// blog.statcounter. com/2007/03/ statcounter- says-no/
• http:// languagelog.ldc. upenn.edu/ nll/?p=16345
• http:// mostlyexchange. blogspot.com/ 2014/06/ goodbye- sitemeter.html
• https:// windypundit.com/ 2014/07/ site-meter-wtf/
• https:// productforums .google .com/ forum/#!topic/ blogger/ 2gUl_F6t2TY
• https:// wordpress .org/support/ topic/ unwanted- redirection- to-ad-site
• Associated with dg specificclick net malware, also adverstitial com

"The joule in the heart of the LC resonance!"

On google maps, streetview, here's a local Eastside good image of the Google Car and bike trailer, also the GoogleBike-rider's girlfriend bored and perturbed. (Note that you can Streetview-drive all over the sidewalks in that park, go out to the end of the dock, even climb stairs.)

Added some to Ultra-simple Generator, GOING FURTHER: HEAVY-DUTY VERSIONS. No, there is no need to stamp out hundreds of iron sheet laminations. We can use the same idea that Edison used for his first industrial products: the Gramme Dynamo. Its "laminated" rotor is actually a ring wound from iron wire. DIY becomes possible again.

My favorite book when I was nine: review from magazine Radio-TV Experimenter 1967

"Start 'em Young.
"Here's a grabber for junior scientists; Arco's new Junior Science Projects by the editors of SCIENCE EXPERIMENTER, a Davis Publication. There are scores of fascinating step-by-step experiments and projects in electronics, physics, optics, chemistry, magnetism and astronomy packed into a hard cover book. Fully illustrated with hundreds of photographs, drawings and charts, the text not only shows how to construct the many projects but explains by means of experiments what scientific theory and principles apply. Included in its jammed-packed contents are details on building an infra-red detector, electronic stethoscope, electric slide rule, parabolic mike, ion-exchange fuel cell, projector scope, Tesla coil and many other marvelous and fascinating projects.

"Some of the "you-too-can-do-handily" experiments include glow sischarges, Schlieren optics, black light, adsorption chromatography, chemi-luminescence, among others. You are even shown how to make your own plastic lab equipment saving many dollars.

"All the projects are imaginatively conceived, educational, and promise hours and hours of rewarding fun. Junior Science Projects is a veritable gold mine of ideas for science fair projects and is guaranteed to stimulate the experimenter's inventive genius by opening new avenues of scientific knowledge. Want a copy? See your local bookstore dealer or write to Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 219 Park Ave. South, New York. N.Y. 10003 Jan. 1967
Hard cover 175 pages, price $3.95

ThunderfOOt and Veritasium fighting over Kelvin Thunderstorm? Hmmm, synchronicity, I just worked on a commercial design for a giant one. The issue of water-resistance came up. Here's a bit on that, Salt water and that "Kelvin's Plasticstorm" device.

PIKA-SHOES is back! Yes, Electronics Goldmine stopped selling those useful little -8,000-volt power supplies back in 2003 or so. And even the 120VAC types vanished from All Electronics. But suddenly some Chinese company has them again, and they're all over eBay for about $5 each! (They say 6 kilovolts, but they actually run at 8KV unloaded. Crank them up to 10KV using higher DC input.)

	Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't
	done anything that I want, or
	I'm still alive, and there's
	nothing I wanna do.

SF SHORT STORIES

Science fiction writers on "free energy" or PM machines: RA Heinlein's famous "Brown Shoe," about a hippy who discovers an OU magnet-motor, and has to turn himself into a Normal, a Straight, in order to get it out into the world. Another is Poul Anderson's "Snowball," cars powered by the billion-coulomb battery, "capaci-tite" which anyone can create with a mixer and an oven.

Discussions with John White, about a possible UFO/MIB museum in Burien, WA. The DISCOVER BURIEN flying-saucer cultural center and 50s-themed Men-in-Black burger joint. The "Museum of the Mysteries" may contribute a UFO library. I might be building some science exihibits. Like my wall which is opaque from one side, transparent from the other (just like flying saucer pilot's viewing-dome.)

I heard from John that A.P.E, American Power Equipment corp, is based upon Nikola Tesla's earthquake machine. John built one. Multi-horsepower hydraulic loudspeaker! Hook it to a metal structure. Vibrate the heck out of it (no need to even tune for resonance.) WHAT HAPPENS? No, it's not destroyed by magical resonance effects. Instead, the entire structure sinks into the Earth! Tesla's earthquake machine produces soil liquification (just like I always thought.) But it doesn't destory buildings by damaging the metal. Instead, it acts as a "silent pile driver." Hook it to a huge vertical support-beam, and the beam will sink right into the ground. (Well, it will if it was never originally driven down to a bedrock layer.) Any large building with hundreds-feet vertical support beams, if they're not sitting on deep bedrock, can be "pile driven" by using a fairly small resonant device. Find a lengthwise-resonance of the beam, and only the tips of the beam will be violently wiggling. Or, use a big device, driven by tens of horsepower of hydraulic pump.

So, what did Tesla actually observe? He didn't vibrate his lab after all! Instead, his central support column started eating its way downwards. The entire floor tilted, and his lathes, drillpress, etc., started sliding downhill! Heh, Tesla never actually said this. (Or, he TRIED to explain, but we've always heard the words wrong.) His secret device is a silent pile driver. Just a slight hum.

What does APE Corp sell? Silent pile drivers, based on industrial vibrator heads, "vibros." If you have a 20ft-wide sheet of inch-thick steel, just stand it on edge, and APE devices can sink it right into the earth. They need not even push. The soil-liquification effect lets the steel slab move down under its own weight.

So yes, if you hook it to a downtown skyscraper, and cause one of the main supports to sink downwards by a couple of yards, you might topple the entire building. Yet another 'lost Tesla secret.' But someone in Burien is getting rich selling them!

My recipe for mideastern party dip, Baba Ganouj, 2005.
Restaurant style, not the stuff resembling peanut butter you find in stores. You're supposed to broil the eggplant like Gyros: cook it on a stick over a fire, while carving off the charred layers as it broils. My version comes close: carbon-y goodness. And if you make it from scratch, you can also do some Garlic Overkill, and destroy any vampires downwind!

MYTHBUSTERS: THE GREAT MENTOS ERROR

Everyone seems convinced that the 'explosions' of cola and Mentos(tm) are caused by chemicals, and by solid nucleation sites. Wrong. It's actually microbubbles.

The outer layer of Mentos is an air/sugar foam, not a white pigment. The dissolving Mentos-ees will release billions of microbubbles to seed the carbonation froth. But how to prove this? After all, liquids which contain a cloud of invisible bubbles are not so different than liquids full of "nucleation" chemicals. (And Mythbusters says it's chemical-based. We know that Mythbusters is always right.) <grin> Well, we could scrape/polish the candy surface to eliminate the supposed "roughness," and see if the explosion still occurs. Melt the surface with a flame? Or try the experiment with high-sugar carbonated drink, where, if the Mentos can't dissolve, even the roughest Mentos won't provoke any frothing.

BRAINSTORM!!!! Water with a bubble-cloud is compressible, and the acoustic velocity falls lower when compared to water without any bubble-plume. So, just do the "hot chocolate effect" acoustic demo, but rather than dumping powder into hot water, instead dump Mentos(tm) into cold. Also, the pitch of the clinking sound should progressively descend as the Mentos release increasing numbers of microbubbles.

Here's other tests besides flame polishing: with the Mentos in water, rapidly lower the air pressure by about 50%, and note that the invisibly small bubbles suddenly grow large enough to easily be seen as a white plume. (Works well by using a "wine bottle pump" vacuum plunger thingie.) The candy surface spews out invisible "smoke," and we can make it become visible. Then break the vacuum seal on your pressure chamber and the white plume winks out. Or another: dump some Mentos into some water which has a bit of dish detergent. Later a white froth of un-popped microbubbles is found on the surface. Or, wet some mentos and let it drip into cola to see violent fizzing without any rough surface touching the cola. Then instead if we save up some mentos-drippings and wait an hour to let any microbubbles in the mentoswater dissolve (or rise and burst,) then that same mentoswater becomes inert, no longer provokes fizzing of cola. Or, with submerged Mentos in tap water, pass extremely bright light beam through the water adjacent to Mentos to search for microscopic bubbles. (Video projector lamp? Scanned 5Watt violet laser?) With enough light, scattering should make the released plume of invisible microbubbles appear as an invisible "smoke." Finally: watch the fluid flow around Mentos in water. Dissolving sugar should make a descending current, but if there's enough microbubbles present, their low density may create a rising plume instead.

Nearly finished that old WHAT IS COHERENT LIGHT? article. As a student I'd never really understood lasers, despite optics courses and later realizing the classic misconceptions that plague this whole topic. But defeat the misconception, and everything suddenly makes sense. No, a photon doesn't look like a little sine-wave drawn by a wiggling pencil.

LUNAR INVERSE SUBSUN?

I've occasionally heard reports of two moons seen in the sky. Quite a few reports, but no photos. Yet this effect might not be totally impossible. It might be an inverse subsun phenomenon, closely related to light pillars or "moon pillar." For example, during a plane trip over desert, if there is a layer of cirrostratus or cirrus below you, and if the sun is near the horizon, sometimes you see a sharply focused second sun below the first. It looks just like a sun reflection on flat water peeking from below the clouds, as if there's a big lake hidden down there. But under the clouds is desert and mountains. The "water" is actually a layer of suspended ice crystals, all of them slowly settling horizontally like tiny dinnerplates. Even turbulence won't disturb this if irrotational (and it usually is.) Together the flat crystals form a crude mirror. So instead, what if you were BELOW this mirror in the sky? If the moon was out at night, and if it was very, very low in the sky, then maybe you'd see a "subsun," a clear sharp moon reflection. But it would be upside-down from a normal subsun. An inverse subsun. The real moon would have a (perhaps dimmer) false moon hanging in the sky directly above it. (But if the apparent second moon was to the side of the first, or if the two moons were seen high in the sky, then the phenomenon still remains unexplained.)

I made it to NPR! Go listen+add comments to "An Engineer Beats the Physics of Traffic," http://goo.gl/9oXl0C (the NPR page for my brief interview on Weekend Edition) Added lots more finds to Full length SF movies from Youtube. Piles of stuff there to watch. Also lots of anime and indie animations, and always more odd physics on Physvids archive

Added lots more finds to Full length SF movies from Youtube. Piles of stuff there to watch. Also lots of anime and indie animations, and always more odd physics on Physvids archive

Added a Business Cards page, typed in a very old sheet of ideas for science teacher's givaway cards.

Just a few days left in the Let's Build A Goddamn Tesla Museum funding drive. Help get the word out. The perk at the $200 donor level is a micro tesla coil!

Recurring (recursiving!) late night self-referential philosophical musings: anyone who has been caught using the fallacy of Poisoning the Well is no longer trustworthy, all their further arguments are suspect, and anything they say is merely a dishonest attempt to delude us! :)

Famous once again. Randall linked to my Cavitation Bottle Smash video from his XKCD WHAT IF: Glass Half Empty. 75K extra views, lots of comments.

Updated the UNUSUAL PHENOMENA REPORTS section, hundreds of new stories, vanishing toilet paper, people teleporting out of lethal accidents, many electric humans and Ball Lightnings. Even some twice-arriving dopplegangers

Pressure of unopened cola

A coke bottle. When you shake it, does the pressure rise? Well, there's an easy way to detect pressure changes. Hold a plastic bottle by the cap, then whack it by whipping your knuckles across the side in a glancing blow. It rings like a bell. The pitch is determined by fluid mass and tautness of the plastic: by gas pressure. If the pressure rises, the pitch will rise. I go and get a sealed warm soda. Whack it a few times to remember the pitch of the bell-tone. Now shake it a bit, let the bubbles clear, then whack it again. The tone doesn't change. Shaking it didn't alter the pressure. Next, if I put it in the fridge for 15min, then whack/shake/whack, I hear the pitch go down. Shaking it DECREASED the pressure. As expected! After all, opening a warm soda releases a big burst of pressure, but not with cold soda ...so a soda bottle cooling in the fridge is in the process of dissolving its high-pressure CO2 pocket. Shaking it up will provide a large surface area, so the gas can suddenly go into solution. Pressure falls, bell-tone goes lower. (And if you test an hour-chilled bottle that's been warming on the counter for a few minutes, you should find the opposite result.)

Plasma w/injected carbon

When the multiple Tesla coils were set up at Hackerbot, I brought my argon tank and filled roundbottom flasks. Placed on a topload, arcs went capacitively through the flask and through the argon. Amazingly we got some ball-lightning effects as arcs passed through the "stopper" made of paper towel in the neck of the flask, extended out into the air, and set the paper on fire. Plasma w/carbon doping, doncha know. The streamers in the air had all sorts of glowing beads moving along them (a bit hard to see in this photo.) Aha, here's some video showing the mixture of flames and plasma streamers. Argon flasks are a convenient way to position some stable fire+carbon in the center of a tesla coil streamer.

PS, OT, if I use yellow-green fluorescent highlighter to draw some anatomically correct bones on my hand, they're almost invisible in normal lightning. Then a high-power ultraviolet LED flashlight freaks people out even under bright room lighting. (safety note: a small percentage of people are allergic to fluorescein dye in these markers, so test first before you cover your entire body with fluorescent ink!)

TURN AIRPLANE VIDEOS INTO 3D HYPERSTEREO: II

While flying down to a conference I was wondering if cosmic ray bombardment of brain tissue will again stimulate hypercreativity like it has in the past. Nope. Nope, no weird ideas spontaneously appearing. As soon as I thought this, immediately a simple and astounding idea flashed into my head. You know hyperstereo trick mentioned below? A stereo screen playing two delayed versions of footage shot from a moving vehicle? Well, why not just open two browser windows and play the same video of slowly crawling landscape, but play/pause them to give just the right delay. Then view them with crossed eyes for 3D. DOH!!!! Try it right now, NO CUSTOM SOFTWARE NEEDED! I'd been looking right at this idea for months, but the simple trick didn't occur to me until my head was being penetrated by naturally-occurring ionizing radiation. Pretty cool, eh?

PS
I wonder how many of us invented "Portal" back when we were kids? I doubt I'm the only one. Imagining bracelets where you stick your hand in, and your hand comes out through a different bracelet? Put a pair around your neck, then take your head off and place it on the table. Two big ones on the floor would create a "zero-G bed," and one on the ceiling would make an infinite hole. Would you die of thirst while falling, or would you tend to wander to the side and get beat to death by hitting the edges? Throw a small one in mile-deep ocean, use the other as an energy source, or a weapon, ...or a reaction engine to propel a bunch of similar bracelets to the moon. Make a vacuum chamber with really clean 'high orbit vacuum.' Don't drop one in the sun, or soon the sun will be half its size, with a second sun orbiting 93M miles away.

MOTOR CHALLENGE: making fake O/U motors
All these "Mylow Motor"-style hoax videos. But never an interesting fake. It's always just a blurred thread, or an air jet with the sound turned off. Last year on SED I was thinking about this and wondered, could I build a magnet-powered spinner? Or perhaps a magnet-pendulum? A real one, where the magnets got weaker, but the "motor" ran for a couple of minutes? I don't think anyone has tried doing this. Two possible methods come to mind:

Method 1:

1. Let two or more magnets N and S poles attract towards each other.
2. While the gap between is narrow, slightly demagnetize one or both poles.
3. Let them coast apart by inertia, then repeat.
4. They speed up, driven by a small average force. Magnets lose energy.

1. Let the alike-poles of two or more magnets repel progressively apart.
2. While the gap is wide, slightly demagnetize one or both poles.
3. Let them coast together again by inertia, then repeat.
4. They speed up, driven by a small average force. Magnets lose energy.

Got picked up by Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, then by APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day on my idea that Leaping Sundogs might be caused by thunderstorm electrostatics.

TURN AIRPLANE VIDEOS INTO 3D HYPERSTEREO

Got picked up by FORGETOMORI.COM on my idea that Leaping Sundogs might be caused by thunderstorm electrostatics. Certain types of UFOs are explained. Foster & Hallett found that suspended ice micro crystals respond to .5V/mm electrostatic fields, and become totally aligned at only 10V/cm field strength. Ice crystals coming near a 9V battery cannot help but line up like iron filings! Also picked up by The Anomalist

Usta be you'd get slashdotted or MeFi'd. Nowadays you get Cracked.comded! Trafficwaves vid just saw 145K hits in a couple of days because of one extremely brief mention buried on the second page of this one on Cracked below. It also spread to reddit, i-am-bored, facebook. Wow, what would that have traffic number been if it was an obvious link at the top of the Cracked article? Cockbite!
    6 things that daily annoy you explained by science (p2)

Braaaaaaaaainstorm: ant-trail engineering.
I once interfered with an ant trail by placing a couple feet of masking tape right along the trail location (after blowing the ants off to the side.) Hours later the trail had reconnected, and ants were flowing along the tape strip. DOH! That's a portable ant trail! What would have happened if I thought to peel it off and put it back reversed? The "direction to food" and "direction home" scent codes would be all screwy. Or I could form a square of the tape, pour some captured ants onto it, and they'd rush in circles as they look for food that's always just ahead. Make more of the "trail tape" and write my name in ant patterns.

CRAZY EYES

Scott Adams is talking about "crazy eyes" over on Dilbert blog. I've done that! Often when I'm working for long periods under polyphasic sleep schedule, and getting into that hypomanic idea-spewing region, I'll scare myself by looking in the mirror: my eyes are WIDE. Eyelids not touching iris, I can see the scelera above and below. Crap, is that how everyone sees me?! Yep. But my eyes feel normal at the time, if a bit cold. Crazy Eyes is automatic. wtf.

If I next watch the mirror and squint my eyes on purpose; forcing them to look like a normal person's eyes, then they feel warm and half-closed as if I'm sleepy. But in the mirror, the crazy eyes are now gone. HEY that's it! While I'm in high creativity "flow mode," I'm really really awake, and my perceptual world is embedded in my entire peripheral visual field, and not just staring narrowly with central vision. Perhaps it's akin to looking frightened. Fear does the same. (In order to detect approaching dangers, fear makes us pull our eyelids back so they don't block peripheral vision as much.) When terrified you don't necessarily roll your eyes, but when your eyelids are that wide open, any glancing to the side will expose the whites of your eyes. VERY noticeable to onlookers. (So when I then go out in public, I have to make sure to intentionally squint and pretend to look sleepy!)

Also, I've noticed that if I can manage to adopt "crazy eyes" for a considerable period, sometimes it kicks in and pushes me into the high-creativity mental state. This seems to be akin to the "frowning makes you angry" phenomenon. Even better than simply widening your eyes, is to walk outdoors with fixed gaze at the horizon, while "staring" at objects all throughout your peripheral vision. You put yourself into the Omnimax Steady-cam visual world. Then you don't have to attempt to think outside the box, since you *are* outside the box. So just start jabbering ideas into your mp3 recorder while walking down the sidewalk ...and watch all the oncoming pedestrians crossing the street to avoid you. crazy eyes!

Sheer speculation: ancient tribes might survive better if their members had evolved to display certain unconscious instinctual facial expressions.

For example, the look of feverish sickness says "stay away, infection danger." If instead all the sick tribal members looked perfectly normal, your whole tribe might get infected. They couldn't avoid the sick one. So also the wide-eyed crazed/fearful expression warns your community to all back off and avoid any unexpected behavior from Crazy Eyes person. The automatic facial sign would evolve, but also our visual sensitivity to those signs would increase. Rolling whites-of-eyes look "scary," but at the same time, the genuine scary people become instinctually programmed to automatically display the whites-of-eyes expression.

Imagine what might happen if ancient heavily-armed and mentally unstable humans didn't display any outward sign that they'd consumed large quantities of alkaloid plants or mushrooms or alcohol? ...or they'd just gone without any sleep for two weeks?! Could be bad. When I've put myself into an extreme creative state, I'll notice that my eyes feel cold. Wide open lids are exposing more eye surface. Nowadays I always notice this, and I think to myself "Yep, automatic tribe member craziness-warning system been activated again."

Polyphasic Sleep: it's the Ayahuasca version of "getting demented from staying up all night working." Known probable users: Edison, Picasso, Tesla.

I WATCH YOU LOOKING

Early last century William James noted that whenever two people meet, there are really six people present.

There is each as he sees himself, each as the other person sees him, and each as he really is. Times two.

James stopped too early though! :) There is also the false facade-self we each try to present to the other person (rather than the ones we really are, or the ones we believe we are.) So eight people total. RD Laing then discovered: since there is the version of you that the other person sees when they look at you, therefore if you can predict accurately how their perceptions of you differ from your desired facade, this knowledge lets you take appropriate small actions to tweak their viewpoint into perceiving the facade-self you wish to project. The actual facade is an imperfect version of the desired facade. So... ten people!

Then we have the RD Laing spiral: you imagine that the other person is noticing you perceive a warped version of themselves, but the other person is smart enough to realize that you're trying to predict what you're seeing them see you see, so next they try to predict what you think they think you think they think you think that they're seeing. That way they can use this prediction and try to fool you into thinking that you've successfully fooled them into seeing you in the way that you wish, when in reality the fooler is being led on a merry chase by a devious opponent who correctly guessed their thinking. But also you suspect that this is happening! So you let them go on thinking that they've fooled you into imagining that you've fooled them.

HUH?!

In other words ...once the human brain has evolved mirror-neurons, you can point them at each other to form an infinite tunnel of repeated reflections.

• Making empty spaces will slow everyone down!
• Slowpokes should just get out of the fast lane.

INVISIBILITY CLOAK
When negative-index materials first were announced, I realized that I could make a cool optics exhibit for a science museum ...without using any (non-existent) negative-refraction materials. The key idea is to embed a low-refraction material within a sea of high-refraction material. Don't use exotic photonic crystals ...instead just do it under water, using bubbles. Or use water blobs placed witin heavy syrup, or in jello. A blob of water in some thick gelatin will have a lower I.R. than its surroundings. So try this:

Coat a small model of "stealth" aircraft with a layer of weak gelatin. Immerse it in a small tank of very dense gelatin, and allow it to harden. Now when viewed against a white background the aircraft should appear much smaller than it really is. That's the "cloaking" effect: where the axial rays still strike the hidden object, but off-axis rays are bent away, causing the object to optically shrink in size. If the effect is strong enough, the "un-magnifying glass" becomes very strong, and a fairly huge object can appear as a tiny dust speck.

RUSSIAN WOODPECKER

I always wondered what the transmitter antenna looked like for OTH megawatt broadband shortwave radar. It's HAARP, but built on a gigantic vertical wall! See photos of the defunct rusting 'Steelyard' Duga3 transmitter in Russia

Years ago I was explaining rainbow optics ...and also explaining thunderstorm dynamics. I stumbled across a strange idea: shouldn't the electrostatic fields in thunderstorms have a visible effect on rainbows? E-fields should slightly distort falling raindrops, causing the light distribution of a rainbow to change slightly. We should notice that a rainbow suddenly "flicks" during a lightning bolt, then slowly changes to its initial pattern as the e-fields build before another strike.

I just heard from LH and JB on youtube about three videos apparently showing this in action! But it's not rainbows. Instead it's suspended ice crystals or mist droplets condensing just above a rising thunderhead, brightly back-lit by the sun. Take a look:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAGE9f0K1Q large leap
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z_-uK5Btik small 'object'
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc9Ks6H3coY Malaysia
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUcH3VClzUI
  

Rather than distortions of droplets, perhaps these are " sundogs" or parhelia light patterns caused by aligned ice crystals. A changing e-field could rotate all the ice plates or columns, causing the sundog to suddenly change shape and position. Or less likely, perhaps some condensing droplets are changing size under e-field influence (condensation rate of small droplets is known to be altered by strong electrostatic fields.)

I just heard that relatively tiny e-field of 10V/mm will totally align suspended ice crystals. Storm fields are far stronger, so "leaping sundogs" should be quite common. See foster/hallett paper via Google Scholar search.

Brainstorm! The year 2012 ...it's the Mayan Y2K disaster!
We think it's something special when our car odometer goes from 99,999 to 100,000. But the Mayans weren't using base ten. "Just one 30-ton calender stone should be all anyone ever needs?" Yeah, right. They forgot that we gotta carve a new one every 5125 years. And all of the small local governments need copies of heiroglyphic codex notices and string-knot memos to make it official. What a pain. Worst case, the whole civilization comes to a stop because nobody can figure out how to write dates on new legal documents! Better buy a lot of beef jerky and obsidian, then move way up into the hills until the disaster is over.

TESLA'S RAY
You've heard of Nikola Tesla's "Death Ray?" Well actually that was one of his later, more unimportant inventions. There was another very different Ray which came first. It was birthed before 1892, and it formed the basis of many of his fantastic claims. It was an invention on par with the transistor, or the laser, or perhaps the wheel. But Tesla decided that it might destroy society, like "giving knives to infants" in his words. The secret is now mostly lost, but fortunately he left many clues behind. Look at the art accompanying his 1899-era articles. Those may not be searchlights.

Video: Evil Santa's Workshop '08

Dorkbot's mutant toys workshop, making give-aways for Santarchy's Santacon 2009. Barbies need octopus heads.

Video: Dry ice music

Dry ice CO2 gas pushes it instantly away from warm metal. Place it against a metal plate, and it howls. But the metal cools down and it stops. Here's a mechanical solution.

I KICK MYSELF!!! You know the physics-demo where you cause a thin mylar ring to fly by electrostatic repulsion? Rub a balloon on your head, then the mylar strip hovers high in the air? Well someone figured it out: build a wand-shaped VandeGraaff generator. Probably the charged rubber band is enough. I was looking right at it, but didn't see it. That thing's now toy of the year, sold at Educational Innovations, Thinkgeek and elsewhere. Arrrrg.

TESLA-EXPERIMENTAL
I was tired of seeing interesting Tesla science topics be thrown off the coilers' forums. I've finally got ambitious and started a new email forum: tesla-experimental

EXAMPLE:
How did Wardenclyffe broadcast a 100Hz Schumann frequency using a tens-KHz resonant transmitter? A 100Hz resonant coil would be far,far larger than the Wardenclyffe tower. Brainstorm: use a Tesla Coil as if the entire device were a HVDC power supply! "Discharge" your TC through a spark-gap to excite an external low-freq tank circuit.
IT WORKS! I used a spark gap to step an 800KHz coil down by 20x to give 40KHz output. The output is a slow spike of alternating polarity which produces a square-wave output, while the output resonator changes the spike into a sine wave. The two coils locked together coherently; a Victorian Phase-Locked-Loop. So if the Earth is our output resonator, and we place a spark-gap in series with the output of the huge Extra coil, we've created a 100Hz square wave transmitter which automatically locks on to a Schumann absorption line. Or change the spark gap's width to select most any other Schumann line.

ZINC NEGATIVE-RESISTANCE OSCILLATORS
I haven't heard of others succeeding with Nyle Steiner's discovery of home-built semiconductor devices. I tried it myself last year and it worked the first time. Maybe I was lucky to grab the right parts? Also, I inspected the V/I graph using a curve-tracer, so I could see which resistor values might work. For my version I hooked these parts in series:

1. 9V battery
2. Resistor, try 680ohm to 2K
3. 25mH toroid coil, 5 ohms
4. 0.1uF capacitor
5. cheap stereo headphone (one side)

The LC resonance is around 2KHz. I hooked the "burned zinc" device between the 680ohm resistor and the far end of the loudspeaker. When I probed it with a wire, I heard "tinks" at 2KHz as expected (shorting the current-limited supply causes the LC to briefly ring.) But when I poked certain spots in the burned crust, VERY LOUD oscillation. Too loud for headphones. Very cool: a sinewave generator with no transistors. I'll take it to the Weird Science Salon tomorrow night.

No one seems to know just how N. Tesla was going to use his high freq Magnifying Transmitter to broadcast at VLF/ELF frequencies. 100KHz or 50KHz won't excite any Schumann global resonances. But if we can manage to see through Tesla's eyes, the answer is fairly obvious.

ANOTHER "LIFTER" EQUATION

 Newtons/M^2 = 0.5 * (3e6)^2 * 8.9e-12
        = 40.1 Nt/M^2
        = 10-3/4 lbs per square yard

Video: Make your own liquid nitrogen

Dry ice and 99% rubbing alcohol form "poor man's liquid nitrogen," a cryo-liquid which instantly freezes flowers. Perform many LN2 demonstrations: quick-freeze fruit, rubber balls, etc.

I wonder if Quantum Mechanics stops existing if nobody is watching?

Video: Traffic Jam

It's fairly easy to erase part of the left-lane traffic jam on I-5 just south of Seattle. Sometimes a single driver can wipe out the whole thing.

YOUR PLACE IN LINE IS MEANINGLESS
In the above video, the jam forms when people in the left-lane all pack together and try to block all merging drivers. Next, cars coming in from I-90 then force their way in, down at the exit ramp far ahead, which halts the flow. Who's at fault? The close-packed drivers in the left lane are probably trying to "block cheaters." The I-90 cars are not cheating; they had no chance to get into the clogged lane, so they probably feel justified in bulling their way in. But if just one driver lets in five or ten cars, often the whole jam unplugs and flows freely. So, whenever early merging is possible, then nobody forces their way in and halts the flow, so the jam evaporates. And whenever the jam is gone, then early merging becomes easy, so traffic keeps flowing. [Note: dense traffic moves at about one car per second, so if you let ten cars in ahead of you, your commute will become TEN SECONDS LONGER, OH THE HUMANITY! To shorten your commute by only a few percent, you'd have to pass at least fifty other cars. Highway traffic is not like a line at the cash register where every single person ahead of you represents many minutes of delay. And anyone not already in line ...they can't drive backwards to politely find the start of the queue. Yet most drivers won't even let a single car in ahead of them, and they get angry if someone else does it.]

Video: Abrasion holograms

I've made a few more videos: scratch holograms, magnet beads, Asian seed drink wind tunnel, soda/ultrasound fountain.

INTERNET SCIENCE MEMES: HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
In 1993 early internet days I looked around the vast empty space and decided to become "Johnny Apple-meme" to try to trigger some infectious ideas in any normal people who dare to come use this "www" thing. Some ideas were my own invention, while others were just cool things I'd found in obscure articles. Let's see how they're doing:

• Intentionally creating new generation of science nerds 1993
  Since the Scientific American ended their column "The Amateur Scientist," and Popular Electronics magazine died off again, the kids of the 1990s have no chances to encounter any wicked-cool DIY science hacks. Our whole culture is going to be taken over again by sports and TV shows, with all the nerds hiding out in libraries and in 90s sw startups. What can be done? (Actually I just want to turn lots of kids into loner-weirdo physics-geeks.) Hey, this "internet" thing might be big. Nobody knows about it! Since I'm here early before everyone else, and since the entire www is boring and empty, I can post articles on the best science projects I've encountered. My site should end up as some of the only interesting "content" on the entire 1992 internet. Porn isn't available yet, so they'll have to come to me for twisted online entertainment! With luck, maybe HUNDREDS of kids will find these physics DIY projects and become infected with science geekery. Neo magnets! Scratch holograms! Leaf blower hovercraft! Electrostatic pop bottle motor! Maybe more than just hundreds.

• Millions of fanatical Nikola Tesla worshippers
  As a kid I was one of these myself. Tesla fanatic, 1970s, seeing those vacuum-tube T.C. projects in ancient magazines, but not enough allowance-money to buy parts. (Made a 1" spark using a flyback xformer, when I was 12.) Now, if my website is going to attract vast numbers of innocent little kids doing science fair projects, I can infect them all with Nikola Tesla, introducing them to a whole resource page about some unknown Serbian high-voltage weird inventor which early-1990s internet has never heard about. Get them all subscribing to T.C.B.A and Pupman forum. Ooops, it worked far better than I expected. Exponential growth yknow. Nowadays I'm more of a Tesla-skeptic myself, but faced with ravening hoards of fanatical Tesla Worshippers, a religion I helped create. Sorry about that everybody.

• Aware of your Skull. Skull Awareness!
  In a very old Peanuts cartoon, Lucy causes Linus to become aware of his tongue. Then he can't turn it off again. When making faces in the mirror one day I accidentally made myself aware of my own skull. It took quite a while before I was back to normal. But I could also talk with an echo, cross one eye, and make smoke come out of my mouth. I started collecting these "little kid mental techniques." The list became very long. When the internet came along, I realized that the same good things that happened to my own brain... could be put inside YOUR brain too!

• Goldenrod pH paper 1987
  While at Museum of Science I heard from Roy G.'s chemist brother that Galaxy Gold paper uses Direct Yellow 4 dye, a pH indicator which turns red in alkaline, just like phenolphthaline does. This fulfilled an old childhood dream, where litmus paper could be cheap enough to have vast sheets of it (they only gave us one or two strips in Elmira chem class, too expensive.) Write with wet vinegar fingers, or baking-soda! By being involved with Dawkins' "memes" and infectious textbook errors at the time (1988,) I tried to engineer a "positive disease," a chem-edu virus. (I wanted it to compete with vinegar/baking-soda volcanoes in all science fairs.) I distributed a list of Goldenrod Paper tricks via MOS in 1988, also had the MOS floor demos using it for instant acid-rain tricks. Didn't spread though. When Gopher sites turned into html in 1993 I saw my chance, and put my old Galaxy Gold demos list online ...then never promoted it. Meme test! How far would it spread, all under its own power, just from a single "handout sheet" on amasci.com? It took over the chem-teaching community! Spread by itself from just one source (I avoided promoting it, never included it on youtube channel, etc.) The viral "signature" was preserved as it spread: various secret writing techniques, the 9V battery trick, the ammonia vapor tricks, the "DNA test strips" w/baking soda. Years later Teachersource discovered that it's the same as Turmeric (yellow turmeric spice turns magenta in alkaline!) "Saffron" cloth in India, and Vermillion dye is actually yellos goldenrod paper, Buddhist and Tibetan robes can switch between gold and magenta, Direct Yellow 4 is a water-soluble variant of Diferuloylmethane (curcumin, turmeric.) The traditional red forehead spot in India would be yellow if alkaline paste from ground-up seashells wasn't included. Yellow turmeric ice-cream turns red if sprayed with Windex. So does yellow mustard.

• Ball Lightning 5/1996
  "BL" is an infamous physics phenomenon: denied and scoffed at by the entire science community until the mid-1980s, then treated as real-but-irreproducible mystery. I posted an entire page of links, articles, and a pro literature search printout. Hey, maybe if I can get the garage science crowd to mess with it, then some hobbyist will make the breakthrough and create it on demand. Then guys on vortex-L figured out how to make microwave oven Plasmoids on demand. That did it; interest soared (although microwave Plasmoids probably aren't thunderstorm BLs, those seem to be Giant Welding Spatter, an incandescent-hot aerogel made from metal ions and air.)

• Lifting-Force Misconception 1996
  At MOS Boston we had a small pushbutton windtunnel w/movable airfoil ...with the wrong explanation of lifting force. I'd been vaguely aware of some sort of problem with these explanations, and argued about it with Larry Bell, the exhibits director. Then in 1990 I saw Weltner's correct explanation in AJP American Journal of Physics and in "The Physics Teacher." In 1996 I decided to force this issue: introducing it on PHYS-L and spreading the debate to all the Usenet newsgroups. Jan-Olov Newborg was a fellow troublemaker. We pushed and pushed the issue of misconceptions, got it into everyone's faces, triggered repeated flamewars on the RC-modelers and professional pilot forums. My airfoil misconception page attracted much traffic. I found Jeff Raskin's treatment of the issue, and Gail Craig's book. Then Anderson/Eberhardt took it up with their paper, then wrote an entire intro textbook. Pilots started photographing the vortex-downwash penetrating cloud layers. Online I met the author of the NASA GRC education site and, during a big nasty (private) fight between three physicists, apparently convinced him to deeply research the issue and to post misconception-fighting articles on the NASA site. Soon major news services picked it up! NYT, NPR Discover Magazine, several piloting magazines. It went exponential. Note again that this one was not my invention. I was just "Weltner's bulldog."
  

  LATEST: After looking at it for years, I slowly see that a second hidden misconception is behind all this. It infects fluid dynamics experts and aircraft designers. It's this: an airfoil section is ALWAYS IN GROUND-EFFECT MODE, because it's an infinitely wide wing, so it applies instant direct-force to the ground, and the ground applies identical up-force on the wing. A 2D airfoil in a flow-diagram is an example of GEM flight, where the airfoil rides upon a pressure-bubble, and no work is performed (no engine required) ...but real airplanes fly in a totally different manner. Real airplanes hover via propulsion; behaving like helicopters: pulling air in from all directions, then launching it downwards, encased in a shell of "vorticity," and injecting work into those moving parcels of air. Airplanes (and helicopters) fly by actively launching a stream of "smoke-rings" flying downwards, and they receive an upwards kick. "Aircraft flight originates in vortex-shedding." So, any lifting-force explanation which shows a 2D airfoil section ...is inherently wrong. It blatantly violates Newton's 3rd. It removes the propulsion and instead silently replaces it with a venturi, involving instant-action against the distant ground-surface. Also, it's only explaining a "WIG-craft," explaining an infinitely-wide venturi which is infinitely close to the ground and sky, and which can never fly high enough to escape ground-effect mode of flight. Real wings hover because of momentum-conservation, real wings produce vertical propulsion, but every textbook removed this! Wow. And seemingly nobody anywhere ever discusses the issue. Closest are discussions involving "starting vortex," but they always drown in details and never touch on ground-effect flight versus 3D flight based on vortex-shedding. Humming birds, bumble bees, and aircraft, they fly by vortex shedding, by launching a mass-bearing collimated jet downwards, not by infinite airfoils with upper and lower flow velocity and no wing-tips or vortex-shedding allowed.
  

  EVEN LATER LATEST: Weltner discovered the origin of the "grade school misconception" or "transit time fallacy." It was Prandtl, in a 1921 NACA article. Prandtl's flaws are buried behind a wall of diff-eqs, and won't be discovered by those who ignore Feynman's instructions regarding "experts," and who worship authorities rather than questioning them. And so, Prandtl apparently has made another enormous error: his lifting-line theory "horse shoe diagram," if it extends out parallel to the ground, is wrong. If it isn't tilted, with moving vorticies going downwards, then it violates Newton's 3rd as well as momentum conservation. So, when an aircraft flies over a wide layer of ground fog, is the vortex-wake tilted, so it descends and carves a slot in the fog? Or does it do as Prandtl says, and extend straight back horizontally, with no descending vortices? (Eh, perhaps it wasn't Prandtl himself that screwed it all up. If later authors remove the small tilt of the horseshoe diagram, they may think they're just simplifying it, when in reality they've missed the whole point, and have eliminated the vortex-shedding effect which produces an upwards force!) If the horse-shoe diagram is horizontal, the vorticity becomes zero, and the wing-tip vorticies vanish entirely. 3D flight is based on vortex-shedding. 2D flight is based on venturi instantaneous forces, called "ground-effect flight."

• Simple DIY electric generator 1988
  Back at MOS Boston I saw several articles about the ultra-simple electric motor (today known as Beakman's motor.) Well, what about an equivalent generator? Robert Oppenheimer at Exploratorium had built one using magnetron magnets and a pancake coil. I messed around and found that a pile of 3" loudspeaker magnets shoved into a one-lb coil of #24 magnet wire could easily light a one-volt #48 bulb. Internet later came along and still nobody had spread the word on DIY ultra-simple electric generators. Looks like it's up to me. In 1996 I sat down and figured out a design using cardboad, tape, and common parts from Radio Shack. Wooeee, did that one ever take off. Right now (2010) it's the most popular page on my site, and the youtube generator vid is well past a million views.

• Steel wool, instead of iron-filings 1988
  Back at MOS Boston I started developing a 3D magnetic field display. It would use thick oil and iron filings. Wouldn't work! Iron filings are far to large and dense. After much testing I discovered that steel wool of "OOOO"-grade, if chopped fine with scissors, would remain suspended for quite a while. In a large tank, a fluid pump could keep it going. But then we never used this in an exhibit. I did make a hand-held version for our Science Kits project. Baby oil bottles, with labels soaked off and one side painted white. I melted the squirt-hole closed, then wrapped black electrical tape around the caps, so little kids wouldn't make a mess. Then, internet. In ?1997? I posted it as a science fair project on Science Hobbyist. No takers. It attracted very little attention. Ten years later I finally posted a Youtube version. Don't make a tank, just find baby oil where you can remove the paper label. Don't use iron filings, use steel wool. My idea has spread all over the place.

• Leaf-blower hovercrafts 1989
  I saw an article on "human air hockey pucks" in Physics Teacher magazine. Rather than letting physics teachers have all the fun, I started pushing it via Jim B's science outreach company. (I modified the plans: moved the holes to near-center, since the original pattern made the plastic bubble explode!) I was hoping to post the plans via Gopher hypertext on something called "The Internet," but fortunately the WWW appeared, so I didn't have to figure out how Gopher works. The science fair community became infected by those plans, and now leaf-blower hovercrafts are competing with volcanos and solar-system models to be the most common science fair project. Yes, it really does lift an entire crowd of high-school kids. In 2004 the Mythbusters tried to "bust" it, see episode 17 "Levitation machine."

• Flowing "Electricity" as copper metal's own electrons 1988
  Back in my days at Museum of Science in Boston, I was working on K6 science textbooks for Holt/Rinehart/Winston, and also designing devices for our inhouse Electricity/Electronics exhibit. Based on my vast collection of student misconceptions taken from those K6 textbooks, I worked out a cure: a brain-hurting alternate vision of electricity. Well, not really "alternate," since it was taken right out of basic undergrad physics and E&M texts, with their math models translated into simple verbal descriptions. Compared to the distorted stuff in K12 textbooks, mine was certainly Alternate. But unlike the gradeschool stuff, my version is just like university physics: it actually hangs together and makes sense. Not just a list of disconnected Important Facts to memorize. Now that the internet suddenly has appeared, how many other minds will pick up my infection. After all, once we finally "see" electricity, CANNOT UN-SEE!

• Neodymium Supermagnets 1994
  While working on science exhibits in 1992 we had some large, dangerous "neodymium" magnets. I'd worked with tiny SmCo supermagnets, and these Neos were the same. But they were cheap! There were all sorts of weird new physics demonstrations you could perform. But the magnets were only available from China imports Tridus International. When Gopher changed into Web in 1993, I started pushing this as science fair projects. I posted a big list of suggested demos and flogged my URL all over the newsgroups, and particularly PHYS-L and TAP-L forums. Arbor Scientific then started selling cm-sized magnets for only five bucks, so soon the public could start messing with these. The word started spreading. Then Wondermagnet started selling them. Then Eng-concepts. Wow, this one took off like wildfire. Would it still have happened if nobody intentionally contaminated the online amateur science community with neodymium?

• Scientists don't actually use "The Scientific Method." 1999
  Because of my textbook consulting work, I'm very familar with the bogus "Scientifc Method" being promoted by those publishers. That stuff about hypothesis-experiment-conclusion? It doesn't exist. Real scientists don't work that way. There's lots of articles about this, but nobody gathers them together in one place online. They're too dilute, and have no impact. If I add a small "scientific method" section, maybe I can light a few fires and get some changes happening. Aha, it begins. A small war erupts on Wikipedia definition of The Scientific Method. William McComas encounters wild success from his 1996 "Ten Myths of Science." LOL the AAAS itself has turned against 'scientific method.' It's being replaced by NOS, "Nature of Science." How far will it go? McComas is now ?head? of the NSTA, editing The Science Teacher. Scientific Method becomes the enemy, all the grade school textbooks are turning against it! Amazing.

• Neodymium sphere-magnet beads toy 2001
  The neo magnets craze caught fire. Can I do it again, a different one? Well, as part of Seattle Weird Sci. Salon we make bulk purchases for the group. One popular item has been supermagnets. In this case, our bulk purchase had an interesting result. In the late 1990s, Dan and Dan at Wondermag invented the supermagnet sphere, and started selling 1/4" version. Round supermagnets had no use ...but since I was buying them in bulk, I quickly discovered that supermagnet balls were amazing in large quantities. The 0.25" magnets cost over a dollar each, so nobody but me was able to play with hundreds of them at once. I was making Bucky-spheres, nanotubes, and finding cool patterns possible using long chains. These would be a hot-selling toy item, and I showed them to one toy company but they weren't interested. Way too expensive, and far too dangerous as a toy for little kids. Eventually the price came down enough that a hundred magnets didn't cost $100, so everyone at Weird Science Salon bought globs of them (mostly as adult xmas gifts!)
  

  I realized that I didn't have ambition to start a company selling them. They're not a toy for little kids. Also, way too much work: mainly a fulltime job of packaging and mailing. So I finally decided not to patent the magnet-beads puzzle toy, but instead, break secrecy and put the idea in the PD (public domain.) I could use them as an "internet meme." How far would they spread? I decided to test the waters by describing them on my own Neodemo page around 2001. Nope, nobody noticed. Years later in 2004 I split off a webpage just for neo spheres. Nope, nuthin'. I started selling them at the yearly Mike and Key ham radio fleamarket, and later at my table at Freemont Sunday Market (see 2:23 in the vid). No matter how cool they are, they just don't attract attention.
  

  Finally towards the end of 2006 I posted some youtube videos. Still nothing. Nobody notices. Apparently some "seeds" are too small, and just won't sprout! You can't light a forest fire with matches that go out.
  

  Then in March 2008 I posted the coolest secret: making BUCKYBALLS, a Buckminster Fullerene sphere. Apparently that triggered it! The "neocube" video was posted on youtube, and suddenly the idea caught fire all over the place. A few months later there were Neocubes and Cybercubes and QQmag and Magcube and Magbead and Buckyballs and Cubercube and Nanodots, and many un-trademarked magnet blobs on eBay (none patentable you see! I put it into in the public domain, anyone can pick a new product name and start selling them.) FINALLY at long last there's a valid purpose for spherical supermagnets. They even might end up outselling all other shapes. Probably the sales-volume in spheres is supporting entire towns in China. But still ...they're lethally dangerous for little kids, and unless the price comes down, they're still too expensive for giant toy companies to show interest. The indie toy companies can go wild, with no Mattels or Hasbros coming in to take over everything.

• Imaginary power is not imaginary, it's just vibratory 1994
  Just after moving to Seattle, I was working on exhibit devices for museum-physics, when I stumbled on a cool idea. How do we explain AC Complex energy flows, imaginary power, reactive wattage? GET RID OF THE MATH! When connecting a capacitor to an AC power line, first the energy flows leftwards and the capacitor gets charged, then on the next half-cycle the energy flows right and the capacitor is discharged (and the capacitor must be driving the dynamo, speeding it up a tiny bit.) But with resistors, the energy always flows leftwards all the time. The energy rate is not "imaginary," it's just going back and forth! But this gets missed in our AC network analysis classes, because AC is already a back-forth effect. Except it's only the charges which wiggle, while the AC-energy is a wave which races in one direction, from source to load only. When the ENERGY also starts wiggling back and forth, with zero average flow into the distant load, that's pure "reactive" power. That means, for your KWh meter on the side of your house, the aluminum disk doesn't halt for imaginary power, instead it wiggles violently back and forth at 60Hz, rather than turning slowly in a single direction. (These ideas are more easily grasped using capacitors, and square-wave drive rather than sine. But inductors do it too, if we pretend that our coil is made from zero-ohm wire.) I spread this idea all around on "science question" sites, Stackexchange and the old ones in much earlier times online.

• Electric Circuit Mechanical Analogy 1986
  While consulting for Holt/Rinehart I considered the typical hydraulic analogy to explain electric circuits. I found a better one: electricity is like the molecules in a loop of rope wrapped around pulleys. It's like the rubber of a conveyor belt: when the drive roller turns, all the other rollers turn as well. When internet came along, I started pushing this analogy all over Usenet forums. It slowly caught on. Then I came up with another version: electricity is like a rubber bicycle tire: push it in one place, and all the rubber must turn as one. The bike-tire meme leaped to the "Ask Beakman" science cartoon in Sunday newspapers! All circuits are ALREADY FULL OF ELECTRICITY. And "conductor" means "contains mobile charge." A single electron, if it's free to move, is a conductor. Same with mobile protons. Look around the www today, and see how far these ideas have spread.

• Bare-hand bottle smash: IT'S CAVITATION!(1989)
  At MOS Boston I worked out a water-cavitation demo for classrooms: if you whack a can of beans on top, it goes "snap!" But if you whack it gently ...no snap. In the near-vacuum contents there are bubbles of hard vacuum opening up and then slamming shut. The same works with glass jars of spaghetti sauce. Also with vacuum-packed bottles of orange juice. Finally I found that if you're demonstrating the onset of cavitation to everyone at work, and you're hitting a glass bottle of juice over and over with increasing violence, first you get the "snap." Then you get a missing bottom! Orange juice splashes all over the office! A perfect glass disk is left behind.
  

  Years later I heard about the beer-bottle smash trick. Whack a beer bottle hard enough, and the bottom pops out. Ah, but I knew the secret. With beer you need a weak bottle and it barely works, since CO2 effervescence fills the cavitation spaces almost instantly, which provides a cushion. Do it with water. Do it with "de-gassed" water that's been sitting around for hours (or that you've previously boiled.) Works like a charm. Even very thick glass bottles can be smashed.
  

  While showing someone the "Ragu Sauce snap effect" I noticed a silver flash. Hey. CAVITATION IS VISIBLE. Ooo, I gotta make a vacuum bottle to capture this effect. Found an easy way to do this. Works great. The cavitation is slowed, so you can see it by eye, no high-speed camera needed. So I made a youtube video to introduce the beer-bottle phenomenon, then to show closeups of silver pockets of cavitation which cause it.
  

  Lol, right away it ends up on the show "Time Warp." They didn't contact me. Did they by coincidence figure out that bare-hand bottle-smash contains well-hidden high-speed phenomena ...and then work out the correct explanation? Or are they working under the commands of a Meme infection? PS supposedly you can remove a cork from wine using this same phenomenon. Aim cork down, hit top of wine bottle repeatedly with shoe or other solid object. Cork slowly is hammered outwards! NOTE TO TRY: OIL-BOTTLE CAVITATION ABOVE TESLA COIL, DO VACUUM-CAVITIES FLASH BRIGHTLY IN A DARK ROOM WITH KILOVOLTS?

• Congo Blue as cheap IR filter 2001
  Infrared Goggles for under $10. While working for Eaton Optosensors in 1998 I wanted to spread this idea, but it had to wait until I discovered Congo Blue filters. A truly mad-scientist toy: it lets humans see genuine infrared light ...but it also will fry your eyeballs if you use it to stare into the sun. As with Tesla Coils and Gauss Guns, these remain somewhat "safe" because most little kids don't have the ambition to order the supplies and build one themselves.

• Diamagnetic Water 1998
  Neo magnets were starting to spread online. Someone emailed me and pointed out that a neo magnet could slightly deflect a stream of water from the kitchen faucet. COOOOL. I informed the physics teaching forums and physics newsgroups, and my local hobby group had great fun with this. We found that a submerged neo magnet would distort water surface just above it. We found that you could deflect a horizontal popsicle hanging from a hair.

• Traffic Waves 1998
  Once you finally "PERCEIVE", your inner Commuter will be sent to stand in the corner, and your brain is now occupied by a suddenly-enlightened Zen Traffic Practitioner.           But "With great power comes great responsibility -Spiderman." If the Ice-Nine concept ever gets loose, will one person manage to solidify the entire traffic network around Washington DC? It's like flipping just one wall switch on-off in a special pattern and causing a blackout of the entire East coast. Will the solidification-wave reach out and engulf Baltimore, NYC, and Boston? Fortunately it all melts again by 4AM each morning, so we're probably safe.

• Bipolar Transistors are Voltage-controlled 1995.
  It always bugged me that technicians as well as the public are taught that transistors "amplify current," but then we learn as EE undergrads that transistors are actually controlled by voltage: I(c) is directly determined by e^(Vbe*k), not by I(b). Op amps, emitter-followers, and current mirrors are voltage-based circuits (where they still keep working even if I(b) is zero and hfe is infinite.) For YEARS I'd been unable to really understand transistors; not until I took semiconductor physics and learned the dreaded secret about hfe being irrelevant.

  I decided to stir up trouble with an accurate non-math transistor explanation aimed at school kids. I'd never seen any similar article anywhere, so I personally get a chance to introduce millions of hobbyists to an important fundamental idea which had been concealed inside the math models used in college-level electronics classes. Also got a chance to push one of my downtrodden "outsider heroes," Dr. J. Edgar Lilienfeld, who invented the FET transistor in 1923 (and Bell Labs was desperately searching for some way to re-patent his discovery 20 years later. Lilienfeld is the "Tesla of the transistor.") EF Johnson was caught lying about the Lilienfeld transistor being a failure! Bell Labs actually published a test of Lilienfeld's transistor, but in the paper, covered up that fact. Now it looks like Shockley may have been dishonestly pusing "current gain" in order to distance himself from the FET invention, even though hfe Beta is irrelevant to transistor operation (instead they're controlled by Ebers-Moll equations. Heh, why did Ebers/Moll need to publish, as if Shockley didn't actually know how BJT transistors worked?!!)

• Silicon contains "compressible electricity!" 1988
  Back in Museum of Science days I started working out an explanation of semiconductor physics (aimed at little kids and Einstein's grandmother, of course.) Immediately I saw a cute trick: the idea that diodes, etc., are only conductive because they contain movable electricity ...and also that doped semiconductors contain compressible electricity! We can pinch the pipe closed! With metals, every atom has one or two mobile electrons nearby, but with semiconductors, the dopant levels are 10-4 or far less. And the dopant levels gives us the number of mobile charges per atom of material ...and so gives the voltage needed to cause resistance changes. To turn a diode or an FET on and off, we only need a volt or two of "electric pressure," but to do the same with metals, we need at least 10,000X higher voltage (or 100K higher, or millions higher.) Semiconductors are like "electricity gas," and can become valves by varying their own resistance. But metals are like hollow pipes full of incompressible water. Cool idea, eh?

• Long High-volt streamers in flows of Argon
  harmless foot-long lightning bolts shoot from your fingers. This one hasn't taken off yet. "Mike's Electric Stuff" did pick it up.

• Static Electrical Sorcery 1994
  I had lots of cool demonstrations built up from the science museum. If I post the best ones online as Science Fair projects, can I turn thousands of innocent little children into practitioners of the dark High Voltage arts? The soda-bottle voltage-motor caught fire and spread widely. Once I even saw some school science-fair rules which banned three projects: baking soda volcanoes, papier-mache solar system models, ...and tinfoil electrostatic pop-bottle motors!

• Microwave oven plasma 1997
  In 1987 I'd written an entry for Lincoln Homework Encyclopedia containing a science classroom activity for microwave ovens. It was never used, so I posted it online for others to play with. This triggered much experimentation by members of various online forums, and eventually a couple of people worked out a way to produce stable plasmoids.

• "Ben Franklin Was Right" 2018
  Recently pushing a stupid idea, mostly on Quora.com, I'm starting the meme that, if his kite-twine was acidic, then Ben Franklin was right about the charge-carriers, since acids are proton-conductors only.
  "Here’s some disturbing/enlightening trivia: during Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment, for his conductor he used slightly-humid twine in damp air. Twine is not a metal, and it has no free electrons. Twine may be a bit salty? But more likely, Franklin’s kite-twine was conductive in the same way as are wood and paper: an acidic conductor, containing mobile H+ ions (movable protons.) This means that (gasp!) when Franklin was gathering some thunderstorm leakage-currents in order to charge his Leyden-jar capacitor …those currents were probably made of proton-flows! So, Franklin was right all along?! His “electric fluid” was made of positive charges?!!! Heh, except when the metal foils in Leyden jars were involved."

"Hey, you're the Traffic Waves guy?!!!"
"Hey, you're the congo blue goggles guy?!!"

"Hey, you're the Childhood brain guy?!!"
"Hey, you're that microwave ovens guy?!!!"
"YOU'RE the amasci dot com guy?!! I spent my whole childhood on your site!"

all together now...

"WE SENT YOU EMAIL, BUT YOU NEVER ANSWERED!!!"

Video: Melting glass in your microwave

Here's an alternate version of a classic physics demo. Rather than heating up a glass rod and then plugging it in to 120VAC, we heat up a glass bottle and plug it in to a few hundred watts of 2.1GHz RF.

Video: Ultra-simple Electric Generator

A great idea for school science fair. Don't make a motor; everyone makes motors. MAKE A GENERATOR! Light a bulb.

ACCIDENTALLY PRODUCING X-RAYS
A note about x-rays and "plasma globes." When attaching light bulbs to a tabletop Tesla coil or "violet wand," some small bulbs fail to produce purple plasma streamers. The space inside remains dark, but the glass flickers blue, or white, or sometimes green. This shows that the bulb contains a fairly hard vacuum. If run at high voltages (above 10KV,) such a bulb will produce soft x-rays. USUALLY the x-ray intensity is insignificant. It's way too little to light up a fluorescent screen. Maybe you could take x-ray photos by exposing film for minutes or hours. It will certainly make a geiger counter click furiously, but only if your GM probe has a thin window (for alpha particles.). So, to avoid even the slightest x-ray hazard, use only those large 4-inch spherical bulbs for your "plasma globe." Stay away from exit-sign bulbs, Renulife No. 26 "tonic saturator" electrode w/spring inside. Stay away from small green-fluorescing aquarium bulbs! Here's some radiation info, hazard tables. You can compare canoe trips and peanut-butter toxins to x-ray risk.

"Bring forth what is true; Write it so it it's clear. Defend it to your last breath."
- Ludwik Boltzmann, quoting Faust

CREATIVITY

- All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up. - Picasso

- Panic of error is the death of progress. - Whitehead

- Avoiding mistakes will end your creativity. (TED prize, video)

- Connect a metal needle to a high voltage power supply. Connect a small metal plate to ground. Put a microamp meter in series with the plate's ground wire. (Ground the other power supply lead, of course.)

- Power up the HV and aim the needle at the metal plate from many inches distance. The microamp meter should indicate a large reading. "Electric Ion Wind" is flowing from the needle, to the plate, and through the meter to ground.

- Now blow some crosswind through the gap between the needle and the metal plate. This should deflect the "electric wind" and make the meter reading fall to zero, right? Instead, NOTHING HAPPENS. The microamperes reading remains the same.

- Uhhhh... OK now, maybe the ion flow is bending around to hit the grounded plate from the side. Following the e-field lines? So lets put a wide metal ring around the plate and connect it directly to ground (no meter.) If the electric wind gets deflected, it should miss the meter and flow directly into ground. Power up the needle, get some microamps on the meter, now blow some wind. AGAIN NOTHING HAPPENS! The microamp reading stays high. The ion path doesn't deflect!

- Really blast some wind across the path. Use a plastic straw, and hit the needle tip with some series crosswind. Nope, still the same. Maybe the microamps fluctuates just a bit, but essentially remains large. The ion paths won't move. They blast right through any crosswind I can throw at it.

- RATS! This means that I can't easily build an air-blast VandeGraaff generator using a HV supply, needles, and a small battery-powered fan. It also means I can't make a wind-speed sensor with no moving parts which measures the microamps difference between electric wind being received by two adjacent collector plates facing a single needle. A high-volt wind-direction indicator won't work; it just ignores the wind.

- SPECULATION: if the electric wind was made up of many slow ions, then even a gentle breeze would push it away from the receiving plate. Therefore, it must be composed of few/fast ions. It makes no sense! Ions should collide with neutral air molecules and experience large drag. Maybe the ion flow pattern self-organizes into very thin "filaments;" jets having narrow cores made of fast-moving ions. Thin filaments have a high RE (Reynolds Number), which allows them to move very fast but without turbulent breakdown. It's like the fast thin laminar stream of smoke above a cigarette. I wanted to make a hailstorm of ions, but instead I get a "death ray" beam far narrower than a human hair. Just like Tesla said.

- I lied about making too many videos. I couldn't resist doing this one about gas-filled capacitors that magically pump themselves down to vacuum.

WHO ACTUALLY SAID THIS?

Nothing sends them scurrying back to that black pit like
BAD SMELLS,
BROKEN RULES,
and
BAGPIPES

CURES YOUR ATHSMA TOO
Hey. IR GOGGLES FORCE YOUR LENSES TO FOCUS DIFFERENTLY! This means that the IR goggles (or simply some deep red goggles) would exercise your lens/muscles/brain system and force your lenses to excessively stretch. (Or do they excessively contract?) Either way, this would be a form of "eye exercise" which might end your need for glasses. Sort of like wearing prism-glasses to correct the lazy-eye problem. For nearsightedness you'd want the deep colored (red? violet?) goggles. For farsightedness you'd want deep (violet? red?) goggles. Of course use polycarbonate or glass lenses to avoid any problems with UV damage.

INNER LIFE OF THE CELL
Years ago one of my early morning visions involved weird EM resonance forces between biomolecules at hundreds of nanometers distances. If my delusions were true, then there must be a huge hole in modern biology, a hole almost as large as the one which would remain if the physics of chemical bonding had never been discovered. Without the long-range frequency-keyed electromagnetic bonding force, all sorts of nanomechanical phenomena in cell machinery would remain entirely unexplained.

Now Harvard U. Media has a long animated movie of subcellular nanomachinery within leukocytes responding to tissue inflammation. Just as in my dream, all sorts of bizarre effects are unexplained: they're glossed over, or more frequently they're fudged by playing a motion sequence backwards (against the laws of thermo!) Specifically: HOW DO THE FRICKIN' ACTIN MOLECULES SELF-ASSEMBLE? The movie doesn't say. Instead they give us a picture of actin subunits magically pouring in from all directions and somehow finding the growing end. Uhhh... isn't that just an animation of depolymerization and diffusion... but PLAYED BACKWARDS? Same with polymerization of tubulin: the subunits magically come running from great distances just so they can link up to the growing tubulin end. And these are just the most egregious examples. All through the movie there are molecules which somehow "know" where they're supposed to go, how they're supposed to rotate themselves, and they move with apparent intention over major distances. mRNA tips and ribosomes magically find the few rare membrane pores. Actin-snipping proteins both fly in from distances and also magically orient themselves through many degrees of freedom in order to bond to the fiber. Apparently the researchers are asking us to believe that all this happens by diffusion, by random tries and re-tries performed at high speeds. I got news for them: if you stick a padlock in a bag with a bunch of keys, you'll be shaking the bag a long time before one of the keys inserts itself. And in living systems, the bag should be filled mostly with quarters, with just a few keys, most of them not fitting that lock. And I thought *I* had delusions! But all this strange dishonesty will pop like a bubble if we admit the (possible) existence of a fairly simple thing: mechanical forces caused by AC electromagnetic fields in the nearfield regions between atoms and molecules having resonance lines at common frequencies. It's just attraction between electromagnets. But AC electromagnets. If their frequencies are different, they essentially don't recognize each other, and the net attraction becomes zero (well, it changes from attraction to AC vibration.) But if their frequencies are right ...or more likely a combination of different atomic frequencies in distant molecules are right ...then not only would the molecules pull together over relatively vast distances, but they would experience torques which twist them into proper positions. In other words, the unexplained "magically intelligent" motions of the macromolecules depicted in the above video might not be an exaggeration at all. They might be moved by electromechanical forces which act like simple computers communicating over hundreds of nanometers by coded radio signals.

KEELY SONIC SUPERHEATING WATER EXPLOSION CANNON!
One of the old postings on the "weird science" page involved a report where a column of water in an ultrasonic resonator flew upwards and punched a hole in the ceiling, and also in the roof above. See Keely ultrasonic explosion.

While waiting in line during the opening of the "Steamboy" movie, several things suddenly fell into place for me. First, guess what happens if we leave some water for hours under high powered ultrasonic treatment? This degasses the water, removing all the dissolved air and preventing boiling-nucleation. Heating the water increases this effect. Second, what happens if we strongly heat some thoroughly-degassed water? If microbubbles are lacking, then the water temperature will rise far above 100C, and the water will become massively superheated. It may even superheat to such an extent that, once it starts boiling, the stored heat energy may convert the entire volume of water to vapor.

Finally, what happens if we place water in a resonant ultrasonic chamber where the transducer is located at the bottom? In that case the pressure excursions will be maximum at the surface of the transducer and at both surfaces of the water (and at each standing-wave node.) But the upper water surface will cool by radiation, so if cavitation were to commence, it would be at the bottom of the water column against the hot transducer. Or, perhaps multiple nodes would cavitate/explode simultaneously.)

Taken together, this is a recipe for a water-jet cutter, or more likely a cannon, but a cannon where the bullet is a slug of water propelled by its own steam output. A tiny bubble will break out at the bottom of the water column, and the bubble will instantly fill with live steam. The water column will be smoothly accelerated upwards as the superheated water emits a downwards "exhaust" of hot water vapor. As the steam leaves the water, the water cools, but if the superheated temperature was high enough, this "exhaust plume" would never cool below boiling.

As the water slug leaves the pipe, the vertical water surface will emit vapor in all directions with little net propulsive effect, while the bottom surface will act like a rocket engine. But would this be enough to punch a hole in a ceiling? Well, we know that whenever a kilojoule capacitor-discharge propels a water column upwards, the water can punch a hole through a thick aluminum plate (tested by Richard Hull and Dr. Peter Graneau). Yet in their capacitor experiment, turbulent disruption converted their water column into a water spray after a few feet of traveling through the air. But what might happen when a superheated water-slug sends steam outwards in all directions at high velocity? Maybe this would preserve the shape of the water column on its journey towards the ceiling. It would be radial laminar outwards flow, excluding all turbulence and punching upwards through the air like a giant frictionless finger, with the relatively tiny water-column protected in its center.

Wagon-wheel reverse rotation effect
During morning commute on I-90 I glanced at a truck wheel and noticed it had a pattern of light... which was rotating slowly backwards! It was the lug nuts. Obviously some garage mechanic had tightened the nuts to give a special pattern. As the six sides of the hex nuts flashed in the sunlight, the angle of each flash was slightly different as each of ten nuts moved past. It looked like a circular dotted line which moved opposite to the wheel's motion. I wonder how many mechanics know this trick? I wonder if the original inventor just had a weird mind, or do truck-repair depots tend to hire PhD physics types?

To start, tighten all the lug nuts, then turn them so they all point at the hub. Now pick a nut as number zero and leave it as is. Go to nut number one, and if you have 10 nuts with 6 sides, tighten that nut by an extra 1/60th turn (ten times six to get a 60th.) Go to nut number two and tighten it by an extra 2/60ths. Repeat. When you get back to nut number zero, you still leave it alone (since you could also tighten it by 10/60ths or 1/6th turn, which would leave the hex facets still in the same relative position.) Now when the wheel rotates, the pattern of flashes will advance by 1/10th rotation when the wheel rotates once. But will the pattern turn backwards? Figure it out. It depends on which side of the vehicle you're adjusting. Maybe you were supposed to loosen each lug nut by 1/60th turn. Watch: video, 1.3 min, also newer video, 0.6 min

Added note: these are somewhat common on the highway; more common than explained by over-educated garage mechanics. So, what happens if we align all the nuts parallel to a single line? This would happen if the nuts were tightened with a tire iron, and the angle of the handle was the same each time. This pattern gives annoying flashes, but it also gives a backwards-drifting pattern which is 6x slower than the wheel RPM. So it seems that these patterns are probably accidental.

The WEIRD SCIENCE SALON is going to Alaska in May. The 2006 UFO/Paranormal conference from Seattle's Museum of Mysteries will be held on shipboard this year, the week of May 7th - 14th. If interested, sign up by Feb ?? for low prices.

Hey, if you search Google for the word "unwise," the second hit is Unwise Microwave Experiments! And if you search for the word "oven," then it's the top Google hit. "Tesla coil" still leads right here, but "Science" has moved way down (once long ago this site was #13 on Google for "science," above Scientific American and the AAAS!)

Energy-sucking atoms and molecules
Remember energy-sucking antennas, where a longwave resonant coil can intercept radio waves even if they pass within hundreds of feet? And recall the speculations about odd forces hidden under the catch-all name "Van der Waal's", and what this might imply for biochemistry? Well, I finally encountered a mainstream physics article about just this topic. But it's not what I expected. Suppose you have an atom, a single highly-resonant atomic oscillator, on then end of a STM scanning probe. Suppose you bring it near another identical atom. Will there be some long-range forces which become strong when the two atoms are separated at less than a quarter wavelength? (E.g. if the atoms had a resonance line in the optical band at 500nM, then if placed within 125nM of each other would they strongly attract or repel?) The answer might be: NO. But INSTEAD, the atoms link together and refuse to change their separation! WEIRD! Resonant atoms trapped on adjacent surfaces create strong friction between those two surfaces, EVEN IF THE SURFACES AREN'T TOUCHING. In subcellular molecular machinery this could produce a "force" counter to diffusion, one which slowed any molecule which approached another with the same coded frequency. As with cockroaches and sowbugs who crawl more quickly when in a lighted region, the right kind of molecules would end up in the "slowed-down" regions under the fridge. You can find a bunch of articles about this AFM discovery via a Google search on "non-contact friction", also Google Scholar: noncontact friction and non-contact friction

THOSE GOOGLE ADS
I strongly resisted putting banner ads on AMASCI. They're all just ads for spammer products: diet pills and ringtones. They support unethical popup-ad companies. They insult our intelligence with "click the jumping monkey" animations. And as I found out with Network54, many banner ads are controlled by advertisers themselves, and they contain really nasty spyware and browser-hijackers. But Simon at scitoys suggested Google ads, and they avoid these problems. They're text-only and controlled by Google, not by shady advertisers. The company is non-evil (at least so far.) And more important, the ads "know" the page topic, so they usually put science-education ads on my site. You get ads for science fair products rather than for casinos. So, Quitcher Job, Live Off The Website Revenues? It actually looks possible. Would YOU become a big flaming sellout ...if it let you escape the nine to five world? :)

A moon that fell?
As a kid in the 1960s I remember staring at the world map in the classroom and *knowing* that the Americas fit with Europe and Africa like a jigsaw puzzle. In 1965 this was geological heresy, but the grade school kids like me were seeing something real, something that professional geologists denied. So now I'm looking at the map of Mars over my desk, and I know enough to take my first impressions seriously. The Valles Marineris is too straight. WAY too straight. Well, actually it's curved in a sine wave on the map which extends as a discoloration across more than half the planet. (World maps with sine waves drawn on them are plots of orbiting spacecraft, where the angled circular orbit is "unrolled" to form a wave.) Also, Valles Marineris is aligned with the Martian equator, so it's also aligned with the plane of the ecliptic where moon orbits lie. Also, Valles Marineris has many widely separate parallel features which are also perfectly straight. Also there are all kinds of crater chains parallel to the valley all around the same region. Yet explanations of this valley talk about a cracking crust. I don't believe it. There are linear gouges and discoloration way downstream from the main valley. I predict that within a few decades the expert opinion will shift: Valles Marineris is an astrobleme, it was carved out by a moon that fell from orbit. The Valles region doesn't extend all the way around the planet, so it probably wasn't caused by a planetary ring. Imagine the event! It's even more impressive than those craters left by direct asteroid strikes. An entire moon gradually hits the top of the atmosphere and starts heating up from gas compression. If it survives for several orbits, its heat output will bake everything below, perhaps turning continent-wide deserts into glass and leaving a scar so large that the professionals will miss it when looking right at it. Then it breaks up into two or three huge chunks plus lots of rubble, into a hundred asteroids, which then descend and roll across the land at orbital velocity from horizon to horizon like incandescent bowling balls the size of Manhattan. Downrange of the main strike the air is full of big dirt: flying boulders the size of large buildings which rain down and ...disturb the surface.

Speed freak
In his book "Surely You're Joking...", R. Feynman experimented with personal time sense, and he wondered what determines it. I think it might be social, not physiology. My first summer job was raking leaves on Elmira College campus, and it quickly became apparent that my normal rate of work was wrong. I did things much faster than the seasoned workers, and I attracted funny looks, so I adjusted my performance. I thought it was sort of stupid; why didn't everyone rake leaves normally instead of in slow motion? But slow raking was the "way you're supposed to do it," and anyone who strayed from the norm would encounter group pressure to slow down. But... that's how infants become people!!! We change behavior as we encounter immense nonverbal pressure from parents, friends, outsiders, etc., otherwise we'd all behave as one-year-olds even when adult. In different societies the standards are different; I've heard that tourists south of the border complain that everyone does everything slowly... and islanders complain about crazy Americans who are always rushing about. WHAT IF HUMAN TIME SENSE IS SOCIETALLY DETERMINED? I've experimented with this and find that it is. If I'm alone I can push myself to perform tasks much faster until until "faster" becomes habitual and unnoticed, but I get huge amounts of work done, and it takes forever for the clock to get to lunchtime. It feels like really waking up, at least until it starts being normal. Also, my usual body movements become tiring, and I find it's much easier to move in curves rather than starting/stopping the considerable mass of limbs. (Like switching to 'racewalk' rather than just speeding up my normal walk.) And when I tried it for days at a time, I started losing weight and had to eat extra meals. If I asked someone a question or tried conversing, their slow responses and slow thinking was quite irritating. But whenever I kept all this up in public, people responded badly. They seemed to be thinking "what's WRONG with that guy? What drug is HE on? Is he insane or something?" Bingo! That's the societal pressure which usually keeps its members living at the "proper" speed. It's the same as if I started acting like a 2-yr-old, or if I moved to a country where things happened at different speed: I'd encounter the same type of social pressure to adapt. So... I wonder how far this can be pushed. Can we live at 5x normal? Will we get huge amounts of work done, then have a crash from "exhaustion of manic energy" or perhaps die prematurely of old age? Or go the other route and let the outer world speed up to 5x faster while we stay "the same." Keywords: Professor Gibberene's New Accelerator, Star Trek Scalosian water, Wild Wild West "Night of the Burning Diamonds"

AMPERES VARIES MAGNET?
Random thoughts: if you pass a current through a bar magnet, it should create extremely intense circular fields inside. After all, the path surrounding the current is a closed loop of iron, and a low current should saturate the material. But wouldn't this path be disrupted if the current fell? The axial field of the permanent magnet would take over. Apply a weak AC to the bar magnet and create immense pulses of internal b-field. Are these detectable? Instead perhaps pass a cable through a narrow iron pipe to give the pipe internal circular flux patterns. Apply AC to the axial cable and look for pulses. Perhaps wrap a coil around the pipe to apply a bias.

Check out this discussion thread on tesla coils forum about x-ray tubes and powering entire homes and cars with wireless. And here's another one about Bob Golka, arc welders and ball lightning.

Don't miss SEATTLE WEIRD GENIUS REAL SCIENCE 2005, the 'science fair' in bldg #30 at Sand Point, Saturday July 16. I'll have a demo table there with microwave oven, Tesla coil, and bowl of argon gas.

When you drop a dish, usually it bounces once. Then it shatters on the second bounce. After noticing this effect I started listening for it. Sure enough, in restaurants (etc.), when you hear a plate go "DONGGGGG" when it hits, it usually goes "smash/tinkle" during the second bounce. I FIGURED IT OUT! When the dish hits the first time, it bounces upwards, but it also starts wobbling fiercely. It rings like a bell, and the vibrating edges of the dish are probably moving at several hundred miles per hour. [NO THEY'RE NOT! It's like a spring, and the edge can only move as fast as the plate was moving when it struck. When it comes back down, the wobbling edge could hit at twice the plate's velocity at most.] Now "view the movie in slow motion." The edge of the dish is going in-out-in-out as the dish slowly falls towards the floor. When it arrives, the wobbling edge whacks the floor again and again and again... and it hits at such high speed that it seems like the dish fell from 100ft altitude [wrong, it will seem as if the plate fell from *twice* the altitude of the bounce], not the two feet it fell after the bounce. My conclusion: if you grab for a falling dish but you're not fast enough, don't give up. You have a good chance of either catching it after the first bounce ...or even just *touching* it briefly which will damp out the intense vibrations that usually make the dish explode on contact with the floor.

SHOOT PLASMA BOLTS FROM FINGERTIPS!
This one was a brainstorm during Dorkbot Tesla Night at COCA gallery in Seattle. Get a tank of argon plus regulator, a glass vase or bowl, some hose, and an aquarium airstone. In a draft-free room, slowly fill the vase with cool dense argon. Argon is different than air or CO2: it supports immensely long electric sparks. Poke the end of your Violet Wand or Tesla coil into the argon pool and watch the huge flaming white streamers spew forth. Now for the next part. Ready? Place the HV electrode against the outside of the glass, then stick your hand inside. Blazing white plasma streamers spew from your fingertips! Feels like being poked by needles. Make a fist (it stings less!) Next trick: a larger bowl, one which my head fits within. Yes, I wanna become the central electrode in a "plasma globe" device. Shouldn't be too painful unless the arcs shoot from my eyeballs...

WAVE-MOTION COLA

The ice will disrupt the stream, keeping the two layers from mixing very much. You end up with dark cola at the bottom, and clear stuff at the top. (Sugar is denser.) If you tilt the cup back and forth, you can make slow-motion waves in the cola!

Even if the pizza place doesn't have see-thru cups, you can still use the trick. First add ice, then fill half way with full-sugar drink, then fill it up with diet drink. This creates two layers. You can drink the diet Coke first, leaving the layer of non-diet Sprite for later. Just remember to add the diet drink second, and use a thick layer of ice to disrupt the stream.

Idea for future hoaxes: leave messages on the cardboard tube inside toilet paper rolls. It's not so difficult to remove the tube if you bend it. Write a message, or even apply a professional looking sticker. Or perhaps carry around a rubber stamp made for just this purpose. "HELP, I AM BEING HELD PRISONER IN THIS SCOTT FACTORY." Or "HERE IS THE SECRET PHONE NUMBER, DO YOU DARE TO DIAL IT?" Put several copies on the same tube so it's hard to miss. Or even cause total amazement by wrapping a dollar bill around the thing. Reinstall the tube and put the roll back on the holder.

OK, how about this. Here's the Skeptic versus Woo-woo fight reduced to it's essentials:
mung cartoon A, and mung cartoon B . Also hundreds of others.