Linkiness

Marginally science related fun:

How to levitate a frog. Via Ken. Make sure to click the "direct link to video" under the picture.

How did "Duck Hunt" know where you were shooting?. Search inspired by a conversation with my brother, who couldn't believe Ken and I fell for the Back to the Future hoverboard scam, but had to admit there were technological wonders of the '80s he couldn't explain either.

Speaking of which, I also seem to remember a TV segment from the '80s about flying cars that we could expect on the market any day. Turns out, this company has been making them (prototypes of them at least) since the sixties. Link via UserFriendly's Link of the Day

Beautiful High Res Hubble Images via Jaquandor. One of these is now our desktop wallpaper.

Optical Properties and Optical Phenomena in Gemstones Strange to see dispersion and diffraction and total internal reflection and atomic crystal lattices mentioned in the context of jewels. As far as I can tell the physics here is all correct, but approached very differently than what I'm used to. Birefringence is described without ever mentioning polarization, for instance... Via Making Light. (I take it back, they do mention polarization further down, with a lot of neat pictures of gems taken through crossed polarizers.)

That's all I've got for now.