Fun Facts about Mercury

If you weighed yourself on Earth and then went to Mercury, you’d weigh 38 percent of what you weighed on Earth, even less if you didn’t eat much on the trip. A day on Mercury lasts 176 Earth-days. This means when you go home on Friday night, you don’t have to go back to work […]

Terse Llama’s Second Covid Advice Page

Dear Terse Llama, Just after the “stay-at-home order”, my wife issued a “now do all the chores you’ve been avoiding order”. I’ve carefully weighed out my options and I think a one in twenty chance of dying by suffocation would be far less unpleasant than trimming the hedges in my front and side yard. Can […]

Elementary Facts about Neutrinos

A neutrino is an elementary particle. An elementary particle is any matter that cannot be broken down any further. So, the neutrino you thought you destroyed when you ran over it with your car was probably the neighbor’s cat. A neutrino is not a neutron. The name “neutrino” was coined to give the newly discovered […]

I Have the Foresight to Talk about the Hubble Telescope

January 1994: The Mystery Nebula: That’s right, the Hubble Telescope discovered a nebula that DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING. They tried mixing it in with Rorschach Tests and still not one person could come up with anything… except the “Stabbing Horses with a Syringe Nebula”… August 1994: Planet X: This is a mysterious object that has […]

Talc of the Town

Thanks, Deb! Talc really sucks at being a rock. It is the softest mineral there is… at the very bottom of the hardness scale. I’ve never seen a news headline with the words, “Man pelted to death by talc”. This hardness deficiency is precisely why it hides in baby powder jars. But, talc has an […]