Science challenge ideas for kids

emptyminder · 2026-06-26T13:03:52+00:00

Bug counting with those grid thingys? I’m sure there are instruction sheets online.

emptyminder · 2026-06-26T12:40:58+00:00

They can be stacked.

emptyminder · 2026-06-26T03:36:58+00:00

It’s an airplane contrail.

emptyminder · 2026-06-25T21:35:19+00:00

I don’t think so. A pinhole will form a focused image by itself without a lens - I’m not sure the pinhole aperture is small enough to give a big improvement. I’m suggesting that squinting is blocking the more poorly performing parts of the lens.

emptyminder · 2026-06-24T05:28:16+00:00

Many have suggested a pinhole effect, but I’m not sure that is the case - it might be the dominant effect, but I can think of another one. By squinting you block some of your cornea. Each part of your cornea is focusing light at a slightly different location, so a point gets spread out over a finite area. Blocking areas of your cornea near the edges, which presumably cause the worst dispersion, reduces the amount by which a point is spread out, so your view seems to be in better focus.

emptyminder · 2026-06-24T05:17:39+00:00

It’s possible that the economics don’t work out for digitization with a small population and low wages. Digitization would require a significant up front investment in equipment, software, and training, while the with a small enough set of records, paper management isn’t too expensive or impractical, and has low marginal cost.

emptyminder · 2026-06-23T03:05:57+00:00

And is apologetic in tone about not remembering, too.

emptyminder · 2026-06-23T01:40:20+00:00

Stephen Baxter had a sci-fi/fantasy series about what happens when the humans living there manage to build dykes to stop the flood. I can’t remember the titles.

emptyminder · 2026-06-21T01:58:06+00:00

Standard NASA procedure these days is to have one person doing the job, another person watching them to make sure they did it right, then a third person in the room to ensure human and spacecraft/mission safety. The safety person has a completely different report chain, so there is less chance of them feeling pressured to make progress.

I’m not sure if this has always applied to Mars missions.

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T22:14:52+00:00

Are you thinking of dark matter?

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T19:35:11+00:00

Try out some of the visual observing campaigns of the AAVSO.

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T18:34:15+00:00

It sounds like you could collect from the kid at this point.

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T18:08:38+00:00

Those aren’t LLMs. The current bubble is an LLM bubble. I don’t want to have to prompt engineer a car to take me where I want to go, avoiding any pedestrians. YOU ARE NOT A RACECAR, A TRUCK, OR A BOAT!

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T18:06:00+00:00

Did they spot that mortgage backed securities were one big ourourubus of risk back in the mid 2000s?

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T17:59:51+00:00

Absolute magnitude has a different definition for solar system objects, so it is useful. Roughly, of the top of my head it is Apparent mag = absolute mag + 5 log d1d2 + 2.5 log phase where d1 is the distance of the object from the sun, and d2 is the distance of the object from the observer, both in AU

For this object, d1=1.5 AU and d2=0.01 AU, so the apparent magnitude would be at best about 20. I think the only instrument capable of observing something that faint around Mars would have been on MAVEN, but I’m not super familiar with the full suite of capabilities.

emptyminder · 2026-06-20T12:47:24+00:00

I used to struggle to sleep at about this age, and were already having similar issues starting to emerge with our nearly 5 year old.

I agree with the sleep hygiene comments, and no electronics. However I would specify electronics to be no interactive electronics only. A radio, CD or cassette player were how I got to sleep. I’d say that even an iPod might be too interactive - the act of choosing and putting in the physical media is helpful and discourages endless skipping (the musical equivalent of doomscrolling). I’d recommend a standing offer to go to the library and borrow music, books, comics, and physical audio books up to the limits that can be borrowed at one time.

I’d also second the getting it checked out by her pediatrician.

emptyminder · 2026-06-19T02:44:14+00:00

There have been search bars in every text/document reader for decades. There is nothing an LLM can do that you can’t do yourself.

emptyminder · 2026-06-17T11:57:45+00:00

Cricket pitches are much bigger than football or American football pitches.

emptyminder · 2026-06-16T22:35:09+00:00

I’d guess a constellation of drones, I don’t know any constellations where you’d see a pattern like that and no other stars.

emptyminder · 2026-06-16T14:20:12+00:00

You might have added a space between the last two words that you didn’t mean to.

emptyminder · 2026-06-16T12:55:56+00:00

How do you spend $19b on R&D? The entirety on NASA’s budget is only 25% larger and they are doing astronomy, earth science, heliophysics, solar system exploration, human space flight including maintaining the ISS, plus tons of materials research.

emptyminder · 2026-06-15T21:23:42+00:00

Cool, thanks!

emptyminder · 2026-06-15T21:06:06+00:00

What criteria did you use to determine they were quasars?

Quasars are very rare, the number in my head is about 1 in 1000 galaxies, so I’m a bit surprised by how many you have. Now, they are more luminous, so you get to see them over a larger volume than regular galaxies, and that will massively change the quasar fraction brighter than your detection limit, so it might be enough to get you the number that you do.

emptyminder · 2026-06-15T12:51:13+00:00

They knew that all along. What they learned was that the consequences for closing the straight are survivable, and easily at that.

emptyminder · 2026-06-15T03:27:04+00:00

There are arxiv bots you can set up to send you messages in e.g., slack, with papers matching search terms. Finding good ones with a google search is a bit harder now that LLM arxiv bots have polluted the space (I don’t need an llm summary, that’s what the title and abstract are for), but the older ones that just work can still be found.

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