Patronanejo

Patronanejo is interested in glitches in the Matrix

Dropping a Slinky

Once released from an arbitrary height, the top of the Slinky will approach the ground at what appears to be 1 g acceleration but the bottom will appear to levitate, stirring only once the top of the device meets its centre of gravity.

Edwin Land's Retinex Theory

Describes Color constancy, wherein the human brain can compensate for a missing color in three-color combination systems.

Kamm back

[[Named for Wunibald Kamm; while a three-dimensional object in nature seeks a tear-shape in response to aerodynamic pressure, the Baron Reinhard Koenig-Fachsenfeld discovered that truncation of its tapered tail would leave the remainder of the form with its aerodynamic efficiency largely intact.

Synchronization phenomenae

Physicists call it entrainment.

Fresnel lens

An optical lens of diameter d laterally deconstructed into concentric rings of uniform height h will fit (but not fill) the volume of an oversquare cylinder (or disk) of diameter d and height h. Resulting instrument is remarkable for optical properties maintained in common with the original lens, despite a to-all-appearances-catastrophic collapse along its major- (also focal-) axis.

Folded horn

Folding an acoustic horn in order to better fit an arbitrary container leaves its acoustic properties largely unchanged.

Wisdom of crowds

Quite apart from crowdsourced content, groupthink, or herd mentality, the wisdom of crowds is not an oxymoron. Also called the "hive mentality," it is most commonly described by invoking the example of gumballs in a jar:

• In 1906 the seminal statistician Francis Galton examined submissions to a typical livestock fair contest--to guess the weight of an ox after it was slaughtered and dressed.
• While not one entrant hit the exact mark of 1,198 pounds, the mean value among 800 guesses was an astonishing 1,197 pounds--accurate to within a fraction of a percent.

Japan's inexorable abandonment of hive mentality is related to the]] contraction of its global stature.

While everything from contact lenses to tin-can telephones might qualify as hacks of Mother Nature, the ability to assume
fundamental control of a complex system--as in gene therapy--makes science more powerful than superstition.

You're doing it wrong

Subject and object pronouns

• It is not always proper to use I in place of me, he in place of him, she in place of her, or they in place of them. If it doesn't sound right, it's not.
• Compound pronouns are no more difficult. Eliminate all but one for a quick audition -- Grandpa took ( I / me ) to the titty bar --> Grandpa took him and me to the titty bar
• One night I watched as someone struggled to eliminate object pronouns from conversation altogether--apparently because he was wearing a tie.
• Attempting to appear smarter than you are has the effect of betraying your limits--to everyone in the room with more brains than you.
• Better to overuse the object pronoun, which just appears casual--anyone who judges others for that is being silently mocked by everyone smarter than she is.

Web 1.0, or whatever happened to...

• Bomis Web Rings
• Mahir Cagri
• JenniCam
• Goatse.cx
• Cynsa Beans
• George H. Goble Extended Home Page
• Mr. T Ate My Balls
• The Amazing Netscape Fishcam
• The Trojan Room Coffee Cam
• Ate This Guy
• All Your Base (Are Belong to Us)

Seven Seas

5. Mediterranean Sea

and Marginal Seas:

Adriatic Sea

Aegean Sea

• Sea of Crete
• Sea of Marmara

Ionian Sea

Ligurian Sea

Tyrrhenian Sea