In case you haven’t heard, there’s a little football game being played over at Taylor Field next Sunday between a team from Calgary and a team from Baltimore. Canadian football is known as a pass-happy game, so I thought I’d delve into the aerodynamics of a flying football. Football aerodynamics, however, isn’t something you just …
Tag: science
Secret codes
Like most kids, I was fascinated by secret messages. No, I didn’t have a secret decoder ring–I guess my parents bought the wrong kind of cereal–but I spent hours writing things out in code and trying to write with lemon juice (the original invisible ink). The trouble was, I never had anybody to send a …
Blood
Vampires are popular right now. There have been more vampire books, movies and TV series than you could shake a cross at in the past few years. Vampires, of course, have a number of unfortunate personality quirks–invisible in mirrors, can’t abide crosses, don’t like the sun–but we’d be willing to overlook all that if not …
Flooring
“Keep your feet on the ground” is good advice for anyone–unless, of course, you’re inside, in which case you can only keep your feet on the ground if you happen to live in a sod shanty. Otherwise, you’re going to have to keep your feet on some kind of flooring: and most likely, that flooring …
Stage fright
I love to perform. Getting up in front of an audience and singing, acting, reading or just speaking is about the most fun thing I can think of. But many people find that hard to imagine. Research shows that what North Americans fear more than anything else–more than snakes, heights, disease, going broke, even …
Wax
We wax floors, cars and skis; make wax paper and wax candles; use wax in the creation of batik wall-hangings, lost-wax bronze sculptures and wax-crayon masterpieces; use mustache wax and at Hallowe’en have even been known to wear wax lips. Which, naturally, brings up the question, “What is this thing called wax?” “Wax,” says the …
Food preservation
As a kid, I found the kitchen a rather mysterious place, filled with exotic implements like the bizarre “colander,” the ominous “deep-fat fryers,” and the straight-out-of-the-mad-scientist’s-laboratory “pressure cooker,” as well as bizarre ingredients like “bouillon,” “baker’s chocolate” (real chocolate’s evil twin), “paprika,” “cloves,” and something called “pectin.” Both the pressure cooker and pectin mostly came …
The voice
With the season about to tilt from summer to autumn, Canada geese are once more filling the air with their melodious sounds as they prepare to fly south for the winter. To us, of course, the sound of a flock of geese “talking” to each other is more or less the same as the sound …
Future phones
When I was a kid (and though young whippersnappers may beg to differ, I’m not all that old now) pretty well all telephones were black and had rotary dials: no digital readouts, no push-buttons, no “recent callers” buttons or “redial” buttons or “recall” buttons or any of the other buttons that my current phone boasts. …
Ants
I spent the Labour Day weekend at the home of some friends at Crooked Lake. The weather was beautiful and so was their yard, and so we ate lunch outdoors, observing and being observed by cats, humming birds, bees, butterflies, hawks–and ants. Of all of them, it was the ants who were most interested in …
Dry cleaning
Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve wondered something. Somewhere in between the first time I asked myself, “Why is the sky blue?” and the first time I asked myself, “What is the meaning of life?”, I first asked myself, “What the heck is dry cleaning?” The cleaning I knew mostly involved water–lots of …
Teeth
Here’s a question that has bugged me since childhood. Why does the tooth fairy collect teeth? Why does she want them so much she’s willing to give a quarter or even a loonie for every one she finds under a pillow? Teeth, at first glance, don’t seem very valuable. As any encyclopedia will tell you, …
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