August 2011
10 posts
Inverse Square Law →
Fun fact: the gravitational attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. But so is the relationship between light intensity and distance to the light source. So if you’re all up in someone’s face with a flash and said face turns white, and you want to halve the light, you don’t need to double the distance between subject and...
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Septal stimulation for the initiation of... →
Not all science is good science (in either sense of the word). Some experiments are simply useless. Some are profoundly unethical.
In 1972, Robert G. Heath published the results of a bizarre study involving a gay man and stimulation of a pleasure system in the brain. Building on studies in rats that showed that stimulating the septal area of the brain produces pleasurable effects—rats...
A Series of Tubes →
Pneumatic tube transportation systems! Horror vacui!In 1812, a man named George Medhurst speculated that it might be possible to blow carriages laden with passengers through a tunnel, but he never got around to building anything. He lacked a pump with enough power to generate the requisite air pressure. In the mid-1850s, there were several rudimentary “atmospheric railways” — in Ireland, London,...
