Category Archives: Random junk

Random junk

Cerveza Indio: Coming Pronto

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Ladies and Gentlemen, especially Mexican Ladies and Gentlemen who reside in the US and are thus deprived from certain alcoholic beverages sold exclusively in your home country, please make sure you are sitting down before reading this. Are you sitting? Good. Read on:

Indio beer... Coming Pronto to the U.S.A.

The MKX® correspondent Mr. Del Castillo sent the above photograph, taken today on Lamar Boulevard in Austin TX. Yes. As in Austin Texas in the United States of America.

I spent my first 6 months in the US calling liquor stores and asking if they stock Indio beer (also referred to as sweet nectar of gods). Over the next decade I drove cases of it across the border. A flicker of hope emerged last November when HEB imported Nochebuena beer. Then Indio beer spruced up its image (corrected), for what it seems like preparation for bigger things.

When? I don’t know. I could not find any further details online (any tips are appreciated). But it seems like our friends at Cuauhtémoc-Moctezuma finally got over their fear of offending Native Americans north of the Bravo (that’s Rio Grande for some) and will treat us to some cold Indio. Yes. Indio beer in the United States.

Random junk

Supermonet

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Interesting thing I learned today: Not only was Claude Monet a super-painter, but he actually had a super power: The ability to see ultraviolet light. How? In 1923 he had the lenses in his eyes surgically removed due to severe cataracts. Without the lenses filtering out UV light, he could see it. This is known as aphakia.

Here’s a comparison of two paintings he did of lilies. One before and one after he acquired his super power (source).

Neat, huh?

Random junk

Puzzle

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Another puzzle from Wiseman’s blog (don’t click until you’ve solved it).

There are 2 flagpoles that are each 100 foot high.  A rope that is 150 feet long is strung between the tops of the flagpoles.  At its lowest point the rope sags 25 feet about the ground (see schematic diagram below).  How far apart are the flagpoles?

Note: The image below is not to scale.

Random junk

What is the Higgs Boson?

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Also known as “The God Particle”, you may think that it’s the basic building block of chocolate.

But no. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle that gives mass to all other particles. You see, physicists have always been trying to understand and model our world so that they can explain what we are made of and how things work. They make a bunch of hypotheses and mathematical models that fit our observations of the world. They use those models to make predictions of things we haven’t observed yet, and then they build gigantic physics experiments to see if they can reproduce some of their predictions.

One of the particles they hypothesized about but has not been yet proven to exist is called the Higgs Boson. This is why scientists built the Large Hadron Collider (the coolest machine on the planet), and are now analyzing data from recent experiments run on it. They think that some of the results are proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson.

If things pan out, it would be a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. So in order to be better prepared for a possible eventual announcement, watch this video by the good people at Fermilab.