Today was CERN‘s big announcement that results from the Large Hadron Collider proton-proton collisions point to a new particle that could be the Higgs boson.
Read their press release or watch the video “What is the Higgs boson?” from theoretical physicist, John Ellis.
I have always found the Large Hadron Rap to be educational and entertaining.
The UEFA 2012 European Championship final was decided yesterday but here is one tech item that may help to fill the void. Two young inventors found a way to turn a soccer ball into a power source as a project for an engineering class. Jessica O. Matthews and Julia Silverman founded Uncharted Play last year and have introduced the SOCCKET. It turns a soccer ball into an eco-friendly portable generator.
Here’s how it works: the SOCCKET has a mechanism inside that captures and stores the kinetic energy from playing with the ball. The mechanism turns a motor and the motor powers a battery that can support small appliances when they are plugged into the ball. For example, after being kicked around for about thirty minutes the ball can power a reading light for three hours. If you are interested in the SOCCKET, find out how you can get in the game.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to bring you this blog. We at Schulich Library have been thinking about it for some time, bookmarking interesting sites and writing little notes with “idea for the blog?” on post-its. We get excited about science and technology and how it intersects with popular and scholarly communication. We hope to fill The Turret up with entries that are timely and topical and now that it is up and running there will be no more procrastinating.
I’m sure that everyone knows a thing or two about procrastination but one great tip for getting those projects off the ground is to write a little every day. A quote from Paul Rudnick that someone shared recently resonated with me:
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.
Writing a little each day can seem like a chore but here is a tool that was recommended to my librarian colleagues and me: 750words.com. It will remind you to get that writing done whenever you have some time. No one has to ever see it and it doesn’t have to be stellar – you just have to start writing. I promised myself to give it a few weeks to see if it will become habit forming. Wish me luck.
I would be remiss if I did not include at least one procrastination aid. Here is some fun with Google that got me through a patch: type ‘askew’ or ’tilt’ into the search engine or ‘do a barrel roll’ and watch it go, check out the “did you mean” options for ‘recursion’ or ‘anagram’, or just play around with Google Gravity.
If you are wondering what 750 words looks like – it is almost twice this length. I used 750words.com to inaugurate The Turret and made it as far as 397 words. It is my first time after all. It wasn’t at all painful so I’m not sure why I had put it off for so long, although I did shamelessly fill up space with a block quote and pause twice for cereal.
Welcome to the blog. Happy reading (and writing)!
Image by Jimmy Coupe