The prospective launch of the ambitious and successful Copenhagen Suborbitals rocket received a lot of press. The subsequent launch-abort and delay to spring may not seem an upbeat thing.  In a broad sense, though, it is.

"MAIN LOX VALVE FAILURE

I remember, as a child, being very upset by a ventriloquist’s dummy at a show, and crying out and making a ‘scene’.  Even well into my teens and beyond, I felt disturbed by “magic”, even in mathematics or science.  One particular incident I remember was being shown in class the ‘proof’, by an elementary form a calculus of variations, that the shortest path[1] between two coordinates is a straight line.  This left me with an uncomfortable feeling.

A non-mythological unicorn?   So it seems.   Unicorns have been mentioned throughout history, in mythology and in the works of The Bible and Pliny the Elder's Natural History.    Today the modern westernized unicorn is pure white and hangs out with virgins.

In zoology, it is never so simple.

In 1992, in Vietnam's Vu Quang Nature Reserve near the country's border with Laos, a spectacular zoological discovery occurred.  A creature with long horns (sorry unicorn fans - two of them) and white facial markings, and resembling the antelopes of North Africa but more closely related to wild cattle, a new species called the Saola was discovered.

My last post about hydrogen bonding included a video about dogs as an analogy to the chemistry. This got me thinking about visual analogies, and how video or images can be used to convey something that perhaps print can't quite accomplish.

This video by Brad Plummer and Julie Karceski of SLAC (disclaimer -- they are both colleagues and friends) explains the concept of gravitational lensing -- in which a particularly large galaxy bends light in such a way that an observer can see objects behind the galaxy -- with a simple household item: the wine glass. Watch: