You bring the bagels ...
Of course, to get my delicatessen joke, you'll have to recognize the icy, bluish liquid in the test tube above as liquified oxygen, or LOX. I made this sample by submerging a test tube in a styrofoam coffee cup half filled with liquid nitrogen (which I bought at the local welding store for $20 a gallon.) A tube was attached to an oxygen cylinder and the gas was slowly let out into the test tube, which quickly filled up with yummy looking, liquid oxygen. The tube of liquid was taped to the slit entrance of a 'Project Star' spectroscope, and a regular microscope light was shown through it:
Producing this spectrum:
There's a lot of detail in that spectrum, including molecular orbital banding in the red and blue-green, but the major features are wide bands - gaps in the continuous spectrum - at about 620, 570, 525 and 470 nanometers (reading from the bottom scale.) It is the widest of these absorbtion bands, at 570 nm that is responsible for the blue color of liquid oxygen.
I hope to use this spectrum to dissuade a colleague of the notion that the color of oxygen makes the sky blue. These absorbtion bands do not appear in astro-spectrographs shot through hundreds of miles of oxygen containing air, here and here.
The sky is blue because of wavelength dependent scattering of sunlight.
Scripting News' new website is (mostly) up. Dave says that some people have complained that his Amsterdam picture isn't work safe.
Y'all gotta get yerselves a new vocation.
Gammatron (phaseii) links to a cell phone jammer. Man - I want one of those real bad, but damn, I guess they're unethical.
Gray Davis does his exit interview in the New Yok Times.
18 - 23 ...
Swimmer
