Small acrylic Tesla Coil

Might try this one at home...

Tesla Guitar Suit

Don't try this at home!

NASA Johnson Style (Gangnam Style Parody)

Painful, so painful...

Now I have to learn this dance.

Live Webcasts: 18 Great Stages of the Path (Lam Rim) Commentaries - English Language | The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Not really Physics or Astronomy related, so feel free to pass!  I respect the heck out of the Dalai Lama, and hearing him talk about one of the great works of Buddhist thought is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.


Live Webcasts: 18 Great Stages of the Path (Lam Rim) Commentaries - English Language | The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Found It in the Lab #2

Here's another oddity I found gathering dust in my lab.
It is vaguely spherical, and has a pretty herky bolt closure at one end.  Definitely not something I'd bring on a plane!

Plasma Speakers

Just had a visit from a former student (now a college prof himself) and a future student, who told me about something called Plasma Speakers.  I'm hardly the audiophile, but they sounded interesting.

Plasma Speakers at instructables.com

Found it in the Lab #1

My lab space was used for storage for I don't know how long.  I've been steadily cleaning it out for a couple of years now - a little bit at a time.  Sometimes I find pieces of equipment from the long long ago, the before times, and I feel a little like an archaeologist.  Here's my current puzzle:

There is a tube on the backside with an eyepiece - if you look through the eyepiece you can see into the cylindrical chamber.  The hatch on the upright cylinder opens to a chamber of some sort, but it doesn't seem to be open to the top assembly.  Oh, and there's a light bulb on the side.  There appears to be a filament of some sort inside the top assembly, and its position can be tweaked by the variety of knobs seen in the photo.

Any clues?