Frankster’s Blog

How to be humiliated by your iPod (or not)...

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:40:47 -0600

I’m like America. I’ll admit to pretty much anything about myself, including embarrassing stuff, and then put it onto the Internet for the world to see. (America puts it all into The Simpsons.) The incident I’m about to relate concerns the fact that your iPod songs are a window (or at least a peek)

Which is proportionately thicker: Earth’s crust or eggshell?

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:30:35 -0600

In May, while I was doing some dino-bone prospecting in Utah for the Denver Museum, I wondered one morning as I peeled a hard-boiled egg whether the eggshell was thicker or thinner, compared to the size of the egg, than the Earth’s crust is as compared to the size of the Earth. Here’s the answer. Y

Advice for college-bound science students

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:52:56 -0600

Reflections of a Frontiers of Science Institute participant ( FSIer) almost thirty years later Good morning. Not counting my brief visit here about a week ago, it’s been almost thirty years since I was at FSI in 1978. Back then, I looked like you all. I had hair. I couldn’t imagine that I would ev

My sense of humor: Laughing at the end of the world

Sun, 1 Jul 2007 21:52:45 -0600

Years ago, when I gave a lecture on atomic bomb design and the dangers of nuclear terrorism to a political science class at CU Boulder, I learned later that at least one student later complained. The essence of the complaint was that I’d been making jokes about the end of the world as we know it. I

The extraterrestrial statistics of hunting for a new girlfriend

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:55:23 -0600

I’m hunting for a new girlfriend; the sooner I find a new one, the better. But I work in fields where there aren’t a lot of eligible single women. I’ll work out the statistics of finding eligible single women, using the same technique as an estimation of the number of civilizations in our galaxy. T