For Pi Day, Calculate Pi Yourself Using Two Colliding Balls
This is at least my ninth year of writing about Pi Day—here is my post from 2010. Of course it's called Pi Day because the date, 3/14, is similar to the first three digits of pi (3.1415 …). At this point I've built up a whole library of fun things in honor of Pi Day.…
Tonight: Watch SpaceX Announce Its First Passenger to the Moon
Update: Read our coverage of the event—and the reveal of Yusaku Maezawa as SpaceX's mystery passenger. Tonight will be a big night for space tourism. SpaceX, the private spaceflight company spearheaded by Elon Musk, will reveal the identity of the mystery passenger who booked a trip around the moon on the company's massive BFR rocket.…
Don't Save the Planet for the Planet. Do It for the Beer
What beer wants to know is, why do you hate America? How can you just sit in front of the game on Super Bowl Sunday, ice cold domestic lager close to hand, and not consider the future of that great institution? No, not the Super Bowl—the beer. Beer is America. Americans drank 2.9 billion cases…
When Your Phone Sucks You Into the Void, This App Notices
Every night, an hour before bed, I stash my phone inside a drawer in my living room. Most days I retrieve it the following morning, when I'm heading out the door. It's a simple habit, but one that has helped me reclaim some focus from my smartphone—my personal fix for a growing problem that user…
We Can Still Avoid a Repeat of Last Year's Deadly Flu Season
As flu season nears its annual peak, between 8 million and 9.5 million people in the US have already been sickened by various strains of the respiratory virus, according to new estimates released Friday by federal health officials. That report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also estimates that approximately 100,000 people have…
Don’t Toss That Busted Toy Just Yet—Grab a Multimeter
The first time I used a multimeter was in my younger years. I was really into remote-controlled cars—but you couldn't just buy one and start driving. You had to buy a kit and a controller separately and put the whole thing together. My car was powered by a battery and an electric motor instead of…
What Does It Take to Put a Waterfall on a Skyscraper?
You don't see this very often—a 350-foot artificial waterfall pouring out of a skyscraper. It looks cool, but it also looks expensive. Gushing water isn't free: You not only have to get the H2O, but you need energy to bring it to the top of the building. This is why the building only runs this…
Neural Networks Need a Cookbook. Here Are the Ingredients
When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength. But with one of the most important technologies of the modern world, we’re effectively building blind. We play with different designs, tinker with different…
This Robot Debates and Cracks Jokes, but It's Still a Toaster
The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the…
How to Watch Friday’s Super-Long Lunar Eclipse
Click:Hair loss solution Click:R&M Vape On Friday, Earth will engulf the moon in its shadow and create the longest total lunar eclipse in this century: a full 103 minutes. The next one that comes close won’t happen until 2029. And this eclipse’s running time won’t be matched until 2123. In a nice little cosmic reminder…