Spilling some coffee is a reasonable sacrifice for the sake of pedagogy. However, sometimes these things can go badly wrong. Take the "BICEP2 bracketology" I tried this year. As everyone knows, the fluctuations in the March Madness playoffs are so huge, the idea of making a prediction for the entire “bracket”, or even just the final teams, is just ridiculous. Not one to miss out on the madness in these predictions, this year I showed the class how I was going to use the BICEP2 cosmic microwave polarization pattern (on a patch of sky that just happened to match the NCAA official bracket graphic) to pick the final matchup. (The polarizations indicate which teams advance — was Einstein ever wrong?). So imagine my chagrin when it turned out the BICEP2 data correctly predicted UConn! Creighton, the other team predicted was eliminated early. Still, it makes you wonder … -Veit On Apr 27, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Thane Plambeck <tplambeck@gmail.com> wrote:
About three years ago I looked for a video of the coffee cup double cover. I couldn't find one, so I made one myself. I should have held the handle! Here it is