Musings on the byways of popular culture
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This was my favourite news from the past week. MIT (of course) boffins have invented a plane that flies with no moving parts at all. It creates ‘ionic wind’ with lots of ion particles pushed from a powerful electrical field, these then hit air molecules, push those back and voila thrust.
The video is absolutely spooky. Just a silent machine gliding through the air.
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We get frequent comparisons to Olympic swimming pools, London buses and elephants among other things, when people try to help us image the volume of something. However I am unable to compute, even approximately, 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter, as expressed by unnamed scientists in this story.
Milky Way clogged with trillions of tonnes of ‘dirty, toxic space grease’, study finds
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it’s easy to look around and think the world is all bad. Then yesterday you look and see that physicists at the LHC may have just discovered an entirely new type of elementary particle that are only quadrillionths of a metre wide, and that NASA sent a spacecraft 3 billion miles to look at the most distant member of our little corner of the galaxy. And it worked! Recently, we managed to land a probe on a comet travelling at 30000 miles an hour.
The human race can be barbarous and cruel, but we are also capable of the most amazing things. In spite of everything these really are times of awe and wonder, and it makes me think perhaps, just perhaps, there is a spark of hope for us as a species after all.
And then I see that Donald Trump might actually a chance to become the President of the USA, and I think we’re totally doomed.
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A pal of a pal has a student researching creativity, thinking style, etc. Please participate if you have the time. They will give you the results if you leave an email.
