Did you know you can balance an egg on the Equinox?! Wow!! And this year, with the gravitational pull of the “super Moon”, or something, the powers should be even stronger, or something, and eggs should be balanceable even more easily!
Well, the Bay Area Skeptics in the Pub for March 19 — OK, the day BEFORE the actual card-carrying equinox — found egg balancing possible, but something of a chore. This picture shows three eggs balanced at the same time, which I think was a record. The dozen eggs we had to work with seemed almost symmetrical, with none of the “bottom heavy” morphology most eggs have. Balancing them was much more difficult than other eggs at previous BAS spring rituals.
At the next SitP, we’ll try again to balance eggs, and I’ll report back.
(Because indeed, one can balance eggs on the Equinox, and any other day, as well. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog discusses Martin Gardner’s history of how this Chinese folk ritual became an American urban legend: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/egg_spin.html )