Would you Adam and Eve it?
Did you know that your body generates thousands of times more heat, kilo for kilo, than the Sun? Or that there's more energy in a Scottish oatcake than in the same mass of TNT? Sometimes our intuitions can be very misleading.
Read these back-of-the-envelope calculations to find out more.
It's not true!
Raindrops aren't "raindrop-shaped" - that's a raindrop on the right. Heat doesn't rise. You can't make every colour by mixing red, green and blue lights...
Some science myths get endlessly recycled. Here I try to put the world right on a few of them.
Unlearn some science myths.
How high is the sky?
The air seems to stretch up limitlessly above us, and books tells us that the atmosphere is many tens or even hundreds of kilometres thick. But nearly all of the air is very close to sea level. In the picture on the right, 99.99997% of the air is contained in a layer no thicker than this full stop. We depend utterly on this thin film of air. We'd better look after it.
Be sobered.
Is common sense any use?
We can get rather uncomfortable when the behaviour of matter or energy seems to defy common sense (for example in quantum physics). But as our common sense is derived from the rather parochial experience given by our senses, in what range of situations can we expect it to be trustworthy? I did some calculations to find out.
Read about my calculations.
Means, medians, and modes
The mean, the median, and the mode seem to have little in common. But in fact they can be calculated by variants of the same procedure, changing the value of only one parameter. This page shows you how. Extending the investigation led to the positively spooky result on the right. This page assumes that you know some maths and statistics.
Find out what I'm going on about.