One of the things I like best about being retired is the opportunity it affords to travel…meaning, in my wife’s and my case, road trips in the United States and Canada. So far, in the year and ten months since I retired,... Learn More

In honor of Tom Brady’s return to football this weekend after serving a 4 game suspension for under-inflating game balls, we decided to do our own deflategate study. So, naturally, we put a football in our 120 kip test press and compressed... Learn More

For several years now, we have kicked around the idea of putting strain gages on a gun barrel.  Why might we want to do this you ask?  Two reasons: first, we like target shooting, and second, we’re huge instrumentation nerds.  Well, we... Learn More

Hey all, Here is an interesting video about Hexaflexagons. What’s a Hexaflexagon, you might ask? I wondered the same thing. Well it turns out that a flexagon is a flat model which folded in certain ways to display different faces than the... Learn More

1971 – Mariner 9 departs for Mars On 5/30, 1971, Mariner 9, an unmanned space probe, was launched toward Mars. Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, but only by a slim margin – two soviet space probes reached... Learn More