Comics, KFC, Wal*Mart, and Science!

Hey kids! It's time for another installment of Paul spews out a bunch of crap he sort of has on his mind! Yay!!!!!!
First, I found a sweet new webcomic to procrastinate with. It's called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Check it out.

Second, for you fans of Patton Oswalt, he's finally taken the plunge and tried one of KFC's "Famous Bowls." Courtesy of the Onion A.V. Club, it can be found here. I could comment further on this, but, well I'm not gonna.

However, this reminds me, I've been meaning to get myself a coffee machine, and the other day I was in one of the many disgusting Strip Mall Extravaganza that dot our American landscape (to buy a poster frame, in case you were curious), and I thought, "Hey, they sell coffee machines over at the Wal*Mart! I'll just go over and... Gah!" I literally went over, walked in, got about four steps, and walked right back out. That place is like the incarnation of everything awful about America. Here's a TED Talk I liked, ragging on suburban sprawl and strip malls.

Which reminds me of something else. Last week I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. If you're in the Bay Area, I highly recommend this place. It's a big-ass hands on science museum. It was reminiscent of the Queens Hall of Science back in New York, except that I have no idea what that place is like now, since I haven't been there since I was probably 12 or so. Anyway, the Exploratorium is enormous, and they have exhibits showing lots of neat phenomena, involving physics, biology, psychology, and acoustics. I also went to the Tactile Dome. This is basically a thing that is totally pitch dark, and you crawl and walk through it. There are ladders and slides, and lots of things to touch on the walls and ceiling. My only complaint was that it was a little small - it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to go through the whole thing. I think it would be really cool to do one that took like a half an hour. One guy went in with his girlfriend, and 10 seconds later the guy comes back out, sweating, and was like "No way I'm doing that." But for you non-claustrophics, why not pay the extra 3 bucks and do something novel.

What reminded me of that trip was this thing where they had a bunch of different gas lights shining through a prism (physics people may recall this as a spectrometer). The deal is that light produced by exciting different gases - like sodium, helium, etc. - produce different combinations of wavelengths of light. By reverse analyzing these patterns, astronomers, for example, can tell what elements are burning in a star.
In addition to all the various gas lights, they had a normal incandescent light and a normal fluorescent light. They both produced all the colors of the rainbow when shone through a prism, but here's the difference: the incandescent light showed a smooth transition between all the different colors, including all the in-between colors at equal brightness. The fluorescent light was different. There seemed to be small gaps, and some of the colors had streaks that were much brighter than the rest of the light. This probably explains why things appear to be the same color but look somehow different and crappier under fluorescent lighting. Here some people at Carnegie Mellon show you how to build a spectrometer out of a CD, a cereal box, and some duct tape.

This is incandescent light.

And this is fluorescent light.