Grid Time (or “Why are clocks in Europe lagging behind by 5 minutes?”)

Yesterday I heard on the news that clocks in Europe have started to lag behind on the official time. The culprit is a fluctuation in Europe’s electricity grid. Clocks, like the ones in your microwave, that are reliant on Grid Time are affected by these fluctuations: Grid Time is a time measurement which is based …

The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in …

Where’s Waldo/Wally?

The Geek Solution (TM): First, I’m filtering out all colours that aren’t red Next, I’m calculating the correlation of this image with a simple black and white pattern to find the red and white transitions in the shirt. I use Binarize to pick out the pixels in the image with a sufficiently high correlation and …