Daily Archives: March 28, 2007

A Fair Cop

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RibenaSoon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.

I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….

From an article by Mike Steere: Click to continue reading this post →

Not all Noteworthy

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Continuing, this was the Tuesday:

  • 6:45am… Get up and look outside. Huh. Super clear and sunny. Unexpected, after yesterday. Cup of tea. Check email (delete 30 spams). Look at blog. Slow steady getting ready ritual while listening to NPR: Oatmeal again today, coffee for bike bag and journey in, sandwich for lunch…ironing a shirt…
  • 7:50am Have five-minute shower.
  • 8:05am Get out of shower. Aarrrrrgh! This is one the great mysteries we must solve concerning time, space, life, the universe. There’s nothing in Einstein’s GR about this: Why, when you go into a shower and spend five minutes – in your frame of reference – has 15 or 20 minutes passed by in the outside world?!
  • 8:17am Having gone from leisurely pace to frantic (since I have a 9:00am meeting) I leave home muttering something like “show me the meaning of haste” to the B as I point it toward the bus stop. (As usual, I make a mental note to not turn the haste into a misstep, so I go along my cycle route with purpose, but not abandon. I should make the bus that leaves about 8:27 or so.
  • 8:32am I did. On the bus I plan a future lecture for the string theory course about the role of various dualities in understanding strings. This is from both an historical and physical perspective. The history is interesting, but I’m also keen to present various physics perspectives to give a clear platform to help the younglings see further than what has been seen before. Yes. I said younglings. I know, it was deliberate, because it just sounds so silly.
  • 9:00am Technically this is on the the office hours for the E&M course, but nobody every shows up since (a) It is not the day when, or day before a […]

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