Book-Balancing, Rubik’s Cube-Solving, Pi-Reciting Geek Girl Goes Viral | Discoblog

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You would think that kids these days would have something better to do with their time than balancing 15 books on their heads while manipulating Rubik’s cubes and reciting the mathematical constant pi to a hundred digits.

But no. In the latest geek-tastic viral video, a young lady who calls herself “Bookonmyhead” carries out just this stunt. The video was posted in November but just went viral in the last few days; by now it has racked up more than 131,000 hits. Mashable says the girl is 18-year-old Lauren.

The 42-second video is pretty cool but comments left on YouTube allege that Lauren had solved the Rubik cube prior to the taping and that the books were superglued together—which is why they didn’t slither right off her head. Whatever! When was the last time you balanced 15 books on your head, messed with a Rubik cube, and got so many pi digits right? We thought so. Now watch.

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DISCOVER: The Rubik’s Cube Solution That Could Improve Your Life

Green House Woes

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I am building an 8 x 12 greenhouse. In order to maintain a temp below 90, I have installed the following:

-replaced wax roof vent openers with damper actuators (spring return) 24v

- installed a 1/4 hp shutter fan on the end exterior wall

- wired the fan to a relay thus to the stat

Why We’re Not Reviewing the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Yet [Reviews]

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You've probably seen some reviews of Sony Ericsson's first Android phone, the Xperia X10, which tries to do something a little different with its custom interface. We've got one, but the software is riddled with strange issues, and Sony Ericsson confirmed to us that when the phone's actually released in a couple months, consumers will be running a muchly updated OS. So! We're gonna wait to we review the phone you're actually going to pay money for. More »


My Health Care Gap | The Intersection

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According to my understanding of the new reform, courtesy of CNN:
Citizens will be required to have acceptable coverage or pay a penalty of $95 in 2014, $325 in 2015, $695 (or up to 2.5 percent of income) in 2016. Families will pay half the amount for children, up to a cap of $2,250 per family. After 2016, penalties are indexed to Consumer Price Index.
Um, okay, so I will definitely have to buy health care by 2015 or so. That I get. After that, dodging it starts to hurt. Meanwhile, my current MIT health care ends in May with the end of the Knight Fellowship. At that point, it seems likely that I'll return to being a freelance writer, so for about 3.5 years, I'm not sure what I'll be doing for health care. My previous strategy was to buy something relatively cheap with a high deductible--catastrophic coverage, essentially. But I can't say the approach was particularly satisfying. I spent some $ 1300 per year (premiums increased each year) and barely went to the doctor, because I essentially had to pay 100 % for anything routine, like a check up or a bad cold that wouldn't go away. To obtain significantly better coverage, I ...

How can I create large letters for printing?

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I'm sure this is easy, but I can't seem to figure it out. How can I create letters of the alphabet on the computer that are scaled to 7" tall when printed out on standard 81/2"x11" paper? I'm using windows 7. The font that I'm using is century gothic. Thanks in advance.

Barbuda’s Pink Sand Beaches

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A rosey swath on Barbuda

As a beach lover, I’ve had the pleasure  of  enjoying  many beautiful shorelines, in many countries. I love pristine white sand beaches and I adore exotic black sand beaches but hands down, the most drop-dead gorgeous beaches I have ever gazed upon were on the tiny island of Barbuda.  An unspoiled, sparsely inhabited sister island to Antigua, Barbuda offers the most beautiful and serene beaches in North America.

Stretching for 11 miles nonstop, with hardly a beach towel or chair to mar its rosy glory, Barbuda’s beaches recall  true paradise.  There are lots of beaches on the island and some reveal pearly white sands but more with names like centerpiece and pink sand, present mounds of deeply hued blush-colored sand. I’m not talking slightly pink or almost pink ,like you find on Bermuda or Harbour Island. I mean true,cotton candy pink.  The color comes from crushed coral and tiny pink shells.  I keep bowls and bottles of it around my house to remind me of Barbuda’s pink sand loveliness. You can’t buy land in Barbuda, it’s all owned in common by Barbudians so the closest you can get to permanently capturing the idyllic beaches is by scooping up some of the pink sand and taking it with you.

Photo by Rosalind Cummings-Yeates

One solar piece of flare | Bad Astronomy

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The Sun is displaying its individuality — I guess the manager at Chochkies finally got through to it — by showing a nice little flare the other day:

STEREO_flare

This image, taken by the STEREO spacecraft (for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), shows the Sun in the far ultraviolet, almost at X-ray energies. The bright flare is on the left. The slightly tilted elongated diamond is not real; it’s what happens when an electronic detector gets flooded with light. Detectors like this convert photons of light into electrons, and if too many photons hit it, the electrons leak out and "bloom" into nearby pixels.

Flares happen when the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A huge amount of energy is stored in those lines! If the magnetic field gets too entangled, they can suddenly reconnect and release that energy. In my book, I make the analogy to a bunch of bed spring coils all under tension and thrown into a bag. If one snaps back, it hits the others which then snap, and you get a very quick and very violent release of energy. For the Sun, that means a solar flare is released. The one shown here is little, but big ones can release as much as 10% of the Sun’s total energy! They roar out, vast and powerful across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and unleash a flood of subatomic particles as well.

If you look to the right of the flare, you’ll see some arcs extending up from the Sun’s surface. Those are also loops of magnetic energy, and a little time after this image was taken they too snapped, releasing a coronal mass ejection; it’s spread out more than a flare, so it’s less intense, but CMEs can blast out huge amounts of energy as well.

Images like this, and more observations by STEREO, help astronomers understand our nearest star better. And this isn’t just academic knowledge: flares and CMEs can damage or even destroy satellites, which represent billions of dollars of assets. The government and private companies take this threat very seriously indeed, of course. Just imagine the number of TPS reports they’d have to fill out!

Image credit: NASA, STEREO


Photo Gallery: Ridiculously Good Photography of LIFE in All Its Glory | 80beats

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Life: Ain’t it grand?

That seems to have been the starting point for the new nature documentary series LIFE, which spotlights some of the planet’s most gloriously unusual critters. The series, which airs on Sunday evenings on the Discovery Channel, presents animals that belong in the evolution hall of fame. Many have developed remarkable tricks to survive in inhospitable environments, while others have developed fascinating mating rituals that ensure that the fittest individuals pass on their genes, generation after generation.

Click through the gallery for some of our favorite hall-of-famers from the show.

A Restless Trail-Runner

sengi

Size does matter, especially for the tiny rufous sengi, an “elephant shrew” whose small size and constant movement makes it hungry—all the time! But movement in a forest full of predators is dangerous, so the sengi devised a clever method to forage for food.

The tiny mammal constructs a series of neatly cleared trails between its regular feeding spots and memorizes their details. Then it launches itself on a trail patrol at breakneck speed, stopping only to check for tasty insects and to clear the trail of any debris. A single twig can be fatal, so the sengi spends up to 40 percent of its time running the trails and clearing away obstacles.


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