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When I learned that a new Hannah Montana Linux distribution had been released for the first time in seventeen years, I had to write a review.
Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future
- by Ali Rıza Taşkale
Clipart Studio lets you cut up magazines sourced from the Internet Archive, images from Wikimedia Commons, & files you’ve uploaded, and create art collages from them. This is great — be sure to check out the gallery.
Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called "silly sprinklers," designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there's some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute conducted a series of experiments with different silly sprinkler designs to find the answer to a longstanding problem in fluid dynamics, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As previously reported, the reverse sprinkler problem is associated with physicist Richard Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.
Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and threw himself into the debate with gusto, even devising an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory to test his hypothesis. One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”
Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work?
- by Joshua Habgood-Coote
A visual proof that the sum of all positive odd numbers up to 2n – 1 is a perfect square.
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