Graph :-)

While sorting photos from my recent trip to Uzbekistan, I found this hidden gem on Wikipedia. 

Samarkand airport annual passenger traffic :-) 

:-D

Physics!

Don't you just love physics?

Well, I do :-)

More crazy weather

I wasn't the only one who noticed the huge temperature differences within one day:

Image from ARSO twitter.

Not where I live, but they went from -8 in the morning to 22 during the day. 

Another interesting trivia (and super worrying) is that there was not a single drop of rain in March so far. Likely to remain like this. 

Not good. 

Not good at all.

Update: we finally had some rain! A little bit on the 30th, but a whole lovely rainy day on the 31st. My garden is happy.

Optics in spring

Now that my hand is getting better (and the weather warmer), I opened the kayaking and cycling season. 

And I can again play with some simple experiments.

Optical activity of sugar (sugar dissolved in water between polarisers)

I mean - how can anybody not love physics?!?

Time for more science!

 I mean, what can be prettier and more fascinating than science?

Glass of water acting as a lens and reversing the image :-)

Crossed polarisers show birefringence in standard school rulers :-)

Droplets on phone screen acting as magnifying glass making individual RGB pixels visible :-D

Almost perfect

Imagine compiling a 326 page document in latex and ending up with:

0 errors, 0 warnings, 2 badboxes...

You cannot imagine how these two underfills bother me. But they are in the table of contents and I just gave up on tweaking the toc line spacing. Oh well.

Almost perfect. Almost happy.

We are all made of stars

I know, I know - I should have planned this and gone somewhere where the lights don't shine.

But I was still able to photograph the Neowise comet both from my terrace and from ... somewhere... about a 15 min drive from my home.

The Milky Way (with Jupiter) was pretty too :-)

But, Earth, could you please next time stop rotating for about 30 seconds? It would make star photography so much easier :-)

Oh, and People, if you switched off all the lights, it would be easier as well!

:-D

Don't you just love the smell of freshly printed books in the afternoon?

Especially if you are the author of the book?

The book that you have been working on for years?

:-D

Winter is here!

Don't you just love the weather?

Temperature is -7 at 1000 m and +6 at 1300 m above sea level.

13 degrees change in 300 meters!

It's just too bad that I am stuck down there. Yes, down there.

Data, image and photo all taken from ARSO webpage.

Bored?

Sheldon in me speaking but if you ever get bored, Project Euler gives you hours of fun :-)

It can also cause frustration - you write a lovely code, solve the problem, look up other people's solution only to realise it can be done about 10-100x faster than what you did.

Oh well...

Escape room!

Escape rooms are great fun for solving but also for creating!

The last couple of days I was brainstorming for random ideas and we came up with an - IMHO - brilliant escape room for fellow mathematicians. Now I'm curious if they manage to solve all the clues... :-)

This is just a red herring, one of dozens in the room :-)

Elba

Ohhh, I love school projects.

And since I am who I am, I am not satisfied unless my kid's school project looks... as good as it possibly can.

This time the task was to make a raised-relief map. After a bit of brainstorming how to make the relief, I came up with the idea of coloured foam sheets. Easy to work with, easy to cut, easy to glue...

So, I'm proud to say that with only a tiny little bit of my help, MiniMojcek Nr. 1 came up with this. The island of Elba.

And yes, this was the first time I let him use my scalpel :-)

Stars!

I just love kids' science projects. This time we went stargazing and it's amazing that just about 15 min from the city centre you can see a wonderful starry sky.

Orion with his large dog.

The two bears with Polaris.

Science, again

Don't you just love science? So that we can explain exactly why this happens?

Add a linear polarizer and one line disappears...

Now turn the polarizer and the other line appears.

No, no magic. Just birefringence :-)

Science projects

God, I love kids' science projects: crystal growth, NaCl and CuSO4.