Eleventy-one thousand eleventy-one
Remember the significance of the three circles!
He then promptly distracted himself with a tangent about how boring people drive Fords, and whenever you see a Ford it's being driven by a boring person. After a couple minutes of this he turned back to the board and said, "I have no idea why I made these three circles. They must mean that boring people drive Fords." This got a chuckle out of the class, and he added, "Remember that! It'll be on the final."o o o
Vaccine fears and risk tradeoffs
A duck from the Economist
Here's a nice duck from the Economist. It's interesting that coups d'etat have become less common in recent years. It's also interesting that these commandos are reaching through the grid lines to pat the data.
Rail fuel economy
Dylan Foley pointed out to me that my question about CSX's advertised fuel efficiency has previously gotten attention from FactCheck.org.
Musical Doppler self-sonar
If you stand reasonably close to a road, the sounds of passing traffic get Doppler shifted: they start off high and end up low, "wheeeee-oooooom." Professional and amateur musicians have sophisticated training in recognizing frequency ratios. (Though, explicitly mentioning the relationship between frequency/wavelength ratios and intervals is more common when players of string instruments experiment with making harmonics.) How accurately could you estimate the speed of a passing vehicle by the sound it makes?
What's the antimatter content of a banana?
Antimatter is strange, exotic stuff, right? Only produced in dangerous physics experiments? Leads to complete annihilation with ordinary matter?
Sort of. It's a question of quantity.

