Measuring up

Tempus fugitive: You’d use a stopwatch to time important things like a spoon-balancing race or a blindfolded-Rubik’s-Cube-solving. But what if you wanted to use a different measure of time, like the number of worldwide births, abortions, deaths from AIDS, species gone extinct, barrels of oil produced or cars manufactured? The World Clock does that and more, and can tell you how many of those things happened in the last year, month, week or day. Perfect for hard-core do-gooders and pessimists alike at poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf.

Big science: Measuring the speed of light sounds like the type of job that requires several pocket-protected Ph.Ds and a few tens of millions of dollars of government-funded apparatuses. But it turns out you can do it at home with a ruler, a microwave oven, some eggs and a little bit of CEGEP-level math—and that’s no yolk. Reveal the secrets of the universe at mrhood.co.uk/pub/?p=151.

by Michael Citrome

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