CoachSullivan pointed out an odd little quirk of the intertubes this past weekend.When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity.Sorry, folks...I'm a little buried this week, so 'til I catch up, there may be a bunch of link blogging.
Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.
Why water would act this way was a surprise, Fuchs told PhysOrg.com. But the group’s analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the water’s structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact.
I can't believe that I'm doing this, but today I offer up fifty pieces of advice from Right Wing News. The compilation of advice is titled Fifty Things Every 18-year-old Should Know, and I can safely say that I agree with nearly all of them. In particular, I recommend that everybody keep these in mind:1) If you are buying something that you will use often and for a long time, never go cheap. You'll end up replacing it sooner or paying more in maintenance costs than if you had spent more on good quality in the beginning. Plus, you'll enjoy the nicer product throughout its lifetime, rather than cringing every time you use something that is falling apart.Check out the rest, folks.
23) When you move, sell, throw away, and give away as much as possible or you'll just end up moving boxes from one closet, where they have been sitting for five years, to another closet, where they'll be sitting for the next five years.
30) When you're 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you're 40, you don't give a darn what anybody thinks of you; when you're 60, you realize nobody's been thinking about you at all.
If I had to count the number of times that I bought something to assuage my sweet tooth while simultaneously knowing that the item was going to be horrible, I certainly would have a bit of a task in front of me. It's an admitted weakness of mine - the semi-constant cravings for sweet treats. Where The Girl will content herself with a smallest morsel of high-quality chocolate, I'll be equally as likely to turn to a half gallon of ice cream that I would classify as "just okay." It's not a good trait, but it's the kind of thing that leads me to trying new-to-the-store product like Kroger's Cupcake Kit - Slice 'N Bake.
It was officially announced this morning, but I thought I'd pass along that Princeton's Pasta for Pennies campaign raised $38,378.46 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society this year.
As we head back to school, wrapping up Spring Break, today, I offer you a blahbitty blah of linkity blinks...
First up, Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares...
Next up, Batman: RIP...
On the face of it, the story of an expatriate Dutchman obsessed with playing cricket might not seem to have the makings of a quintessentially American novel. But at its heart, Joseph O’Neill’s new book, Netherland, is about rehabilitating one’s life and chasing the American dream, albeit at a time when that dream has lost a bit of its gloss.
Netherland doesn't turn on plot. In both form and content, it questions the idea that a life can be told as a coherent story. It is organized not chronologically but as a series of memories linked by associations. For example, Hans remembers a day during his last cricket-playing summer in the city:
"This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue.
"I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge.
"Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America."
Hans goes on to recall bicycling with his mother to Brooklyn, a memory that summons his boyhood in The Hague delivering papers, his mother filling in for him on the route and meeting her "gentleman friend," Jeroen, which then evokes an encounter with Jeroen after his mother's cremation, upon which Hans returns to Chuck, who is still at the wheel and headed for Green-Wood Cemetery.
[O]ur dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it’s the same quality that enables me to thrive at work were so many of the brisk, tough successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are – in some – desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy.
This chronic and - I think – peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I. Neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.
Well, for ten of my students, anyway.
So, I've got a thing for mini-golf. 
I dig the concept of the indoor mini-golf course. In a climate like ours here in Cincinnati, any outdoor miniature golf course gets a solid three or four month season plus a dicey month or two on either end of that season. Moving the course indoors extends the season year round, but such a course needs to find a different way to draw in casual customers, those who might drive by an outdoor course and choose to drop in for a game. If the indoor course doesn't have that steady source of walk-by traffic, what they gain in year-round playability, I think they'll trade off for decreased visibility.
Monster Mini-Golf's gimmick then, is a game played under black light and an amazingly efficient use of their interior space. The front of the store is taken up by a half dozen fluorescent games - air hockey, video games, typical Chuck E Cheese stuff - and two party rooms available for birthday parties and sweet sixteens (catering to a demographic more in line with the decorations and mood of the place).
From there, every inch of the back half to two-thirds of the store is taken up with the course itself. The holes are bordered by landscape timbers (maybe 6x6") that have been sponge painted with fluorescent paint. Framed on these are simple boxes as bumpers and angled barricades. These are also important as without them, there would be no places to stand off course, to avoid being in someone's field of play as every single inch of the course is part of the eighteen holes.
It's a neat theme and makes for a festive atmosphere, something probably more suited to teens than to lower elementary kids - not because the artwork is particularly scary but because of the music choice being a little more aggressive and a little more Green Day than Jonas Brothers. 
The Girl was showing her elementary students - she's a librarian about a mile from home - some functions on various website. She was showing them things like forms and radio buttons and webcams. She came home and was telling me about he day and mentioned the National Zoo's website with twenty webcams that run twenty-four-seven.
Any afternoon productivity that I used to have has taken a severe hit recently as I found that scrubs plays from 5-6 (yeah, two back-to-back episodes, I know!) on WGN. Turns out that my über-limited cable has an hour of scrubs.
