The Paper Airplane Guy

Or, how one wing nut can spoil a whole bunch of space movies. There’s a weird looking effect created by some spinning objects in micro-gravity. It was first documented by a Russian cosmonaut, and it was a guarded secret for a while. That was then, and, well, there’s social media now. Not as much stays secret as conspiracy nuts would have you believe; and certainly not this interesting quirk of physics. Once you see the effect, you can imagine what would happen to a lot of

Let’s face it. Time is on nobody’s side. Primitive Homo sapiens showed up 300,000 years ago. Physically, we haven’t changed for about 200,000 years. Our brain structure has been the same for about 100,000 years. So, pick a number for how long we’ve been around. For our thought experiment today, it doesn’t matter if you’re a young earther (believing the Earth to be only 6,000 years old). In fact, it’s convenient to work with smaller numbers, so let’s all get in the geolo

When I create a new set of planes for my show, it’s always part work and part wonder. The paper fibers break in an organized way, if my folding technique is good. I’m aware that folding is the final insult to the cellulose walls that survived being shredded, cooked, pressed and baked into paper. Yes, my mind drifts a bit through eight hours of folding. Sometimes the little things are a big deal. The similarity of genomes across life forms, from the very simple to the most c