JaySmall.com/old

Totally off-topic, and appropriately so given that no one seems to be posting or reading much about Internet design this month anyway:

Apparently the physics of quicksand don't require water. Toss some air into a pile of dry sand much the way you'd toss your friendly neighborhood Caesar salad. Then watch it swallow objects faster than Letterman's "Will It Float?" tank.

Especially, eerily impressive: the thin column of sand that rises in the post-consumption "splash."

As a liberal arts graduate of a reputable party school, I count myself lucky. I realize physicists have to study atomic structure, mass, gravity and quantum theory, and at least pretend to understand what Stephen Hawking is talking about. If you're going to be an expert at that stuff, you pretty much have to be awake and alert.

All I had to do was learn how to put letters of the alphabet into some kind of marginally lucid order -- a task which may even be aided by various adult neuron-depressing beverages or even profound stages of sleep.

But it sure looks to me as though those physicists have more fun in their labs than we ever did in journalism lab. They actually get to play in a sandbox!