While visiting family over the holidays, my cousin mentioned he most enjoys my blog posts about my pain, discomfort or failure. I’ve noticed a theme here. When others tell stories about their pain, the normal reaction is sympathy, but when I experience pain or misfortune, my friends and family have a good laugh and quite enjoy it. To keep my readers happy, the stories below highlight at least...
It’s interesting what we can learn from just playing around in the lab. The thoughts below originate from messing with the equipment in the acoustics lab at Penn State many years ago. If you generate an electronic pulse X times per second and run this signal through a speaker to hear it, so long as X is below 20 Hertz (beats per second), you hear the individual pulses. You can almost count them...
My 16-year old daughter Julia and I were at the grocery store. At one point, she stopped to smell a bag of marshmallows and began to tell me how awesome it smelled. Meanwhile, I was thinking about what to get next on my shopping list. “Smell it Daddy.” I grabbed what I needed from the shelf and, before I walked away, I humored her. I picked up a bag of marshmallow and breathed in. As...