February 06, 2016 at 04:12AM

Today I Learned: 1) ...how to use a Buck converter! That's a circuit component designed to take an input voltage and convert it down to a smaller voltage. Very handy for, oh, say, finding the voltage potential required to evolve oxygen off a catalyst.... This was particularly difficult because I and the high school students involved with this project didn't have any experience with or instructions for a Buck converter, so we had to pretty much guess our way through it. 2) When E. coli get stressed, particularly from starvation, they sometimes transition to an absolutely ridiculous morphology where they keep growing but more or less stop dividing, so they get absurdly long. If you're not familiar with what E. coli normally look like, go do a quick Google image search. Then check out Figure 1 from this paper, in which the authors induced filamentous growth with platinum salts: http://ift.tt/1PqC0xe. Also check out figure 3, where they show what hapens to the filaments when they're moved to platinumless media -- the whole filament shards itself as it apparently undergoes all of its divisions at once. 3) Jonathan Blow, the indie game designer responsible for Braid and, more recently, The Witness, has a fantastic website. It is ancient and ugly, but it has some of the highest density of interesting content I've ever seen on the web. Some of it I've seen before ("The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"), most of it I haven't ("The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics"*). I have not agreed 100% with anything on the site yet, but just about everything has given me a new way of looking at something I'd thought a lot about before. Speaking of which, it's time for me to go into unpaid advertisement mode -- The Witness is really good. Really, really good. I'm not done yet, but if it's going where I think it's going, it's one of the best-executed pieces of psychological manipulation I've seen in the medium. *Not a typo.