Ferrofluids

I randomly find myself interested in science, especially physics. In one such instance, I came across ferrofluids.
Wikipedia's explanation of ferrofluids is:
'Ferrofluids are composed of nanoscale particles (diameter usually 10 nanometers or less) of magnetite, hematite or some other compound containing iron. This is small enough for thermal agitation to disperse them evenly within a carrier fluid, and for them to contribute to the overall magnetic response of the fluid. This is analogous to the way that the ions in an aqueous paramagnetic salt solution (such as an aqueous solution of copper(II)sulfate or manganese(II) chloride make the solution paramagnetic.'

All that is a fancy way of saying that a ferrofluid is a liquid that looks really cool when a magnetic field is applied to it. From an engineering standpoint, ferrofluids are used in high-powered computers and NASA is looking into uses for spaceflight, but what I find more interesting is how it's being used in art. Sachiko Kodama uses ferrofluids to climb and grow off various things, giving some really cool-looking things.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4&feature=player_embedded

wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopeida, of which the information comes from the users. It is a multilingual encyclopedia project supported by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. It currently has over 13 million articles to date. It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.

This is one of my all-time favorite websites. It contains something on everything, and is perfect for when you want to get an overview on pretty much anything. Anyone in the world can add information, and contrary to what many individuals say, is very good about getting the right information. Wikipedia now employs more fact-checkers and editors than Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia encourages everyone to learn as much about anything they want.I use wikipedia on a fairly regular basis, just to simply gain more knowledge on whatever I'm currently interested in. I'll start on one simple page for a video game or something, and two hours later somehow be reading up on black holes.

crew9.net

A professor showed this site in one of my classes, and I really like it. The way it works is that whenever you hover over any person's picture, the rest of the pictures "turn" to look at the picture you're hovering over. The site itself consists of people looking for internships, and when you click on any of the people, it goes to what they've done and what they're looking for. To be honest, I think it's rather unnecessary as far as what's it is trying to accomplish, but I still think it's a cool idea.

The Dark Knight

Unlike most other recent comic-based movies (the Spiderman movies, Fantastic 4, etc) which are brightly colored, virtually no one dies, and contain very little in the means of somber drama, the Dark Knight actually went to these extremes. It didn't rely on the name 'Batman' to sell tickets, instead it was dark, gritty, and didn't try and be something is wasn't. The Joker was an anarchist through and through, didn't worry about anything but himself, and even that is debatable. He walked around in clown makeup, and fought a guy who dressed like a bat, and yet it wasn't campy or fake. It felt real, like these characters actually have some basis in real life, the epitome of good and evil. The Batman fights crime simply because he feels its what he should do, he breaks the law, but he doesn't kill. At the end of the movie, though, he takes the fall for the death of Harvey Dent, for the good of the city. Harvey Dent showed how the human mind, even one with the best of intentions, can be broken given the right circumstances. The Dark Knight went much further than most comic movies dared to tread, and it ended with a much darker, more real, kind of movie, and has received like acclaim.

Pastafarianism

Pastafarianism, or The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is a parody of the "theory" of Intelligent Design. (Yes, I do have a personal bias to it, and actually wrote a 10 page research paper on Intelligent Design last semester, but I won't get into that right now.) Pastafarianism is the belief that the universe was created by an entity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who may or may not have been drunk at the time (just look at the platypus). The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has the 8 'I Really Wish you Didn'ts,' which were given to the Captain Pirate Mosey some time in the past. There were originally 10, but Mosey was drunk at the time and so lost two when climbing down the mountain. But to be more serious, Pastafarianism uses falacious arguments to show the flaws granted by Intelligent Design, such as claiming that since the earth is warmer now than it was in the past, and since there are fewer pirates now than there were in the past, there is a direct corellation between global warming and a lack of modern pirates (the fun-loving, swashbuckling type, not the murderous scallywags hollywood wants you to think used to exist).

Vetruvian Man, rocker style

I randomly found this t-shirt online, and think it's hilarious. For those of you who don't know, this is a parody of da Vinci's 'Vetruvian Man,' which shows the ratio of a man's arms and legs within a square relative to a circle. This shows what is known as the 'Golden Ratio' which is a ratio found throughout nature. But ignoring the math behind it all, I find this really funny. And yes, I do realize how nerdy that makes me.

Planet Terror

One of my favorite movies is Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez did the movie as a kind of spoof on older movies, and it was released in theaters as "Grindhouse," with the movie 'Deathproof' playing with it, done in the style of early drive in movies. The whole movie has a layer over it like it is being shown on an old projector, with scratches, and at one point in the movie there is actually 'missing slides to the reel,' which was, of course, done on purpose. The overall plot is done as a bad zombie movie, full of plot holes and terrible dialogue. Even the main character is meant to be a play on how 'bad' movies used to be, the character being a go-go dancer who wants to be a comedian, who ends up with a gun/rocket launcher for a leg, after it is ripped off by zombies. But even after all of this, I feel it was done extremely well, and fully accomplished what Rodriguez initially set out to do.