50/50 Sheets
50/50 Sheets - With a lovely red line down the middle, so you never have an argument about who is stealing covers.
50/50 Sheets - With a lovely red line down the middle, so you never have an argument about who is stealing covers.
Mortuary humor - The set-up here is quick: some random guy with questionable motives supposedly was responsible for a signed affidavit opened after his death, which disclosed outrageous details about the true nature of the Roswell incident. This comment followed:
“I’d be laughing all the way to the mortuary, if it were me…
And I’d be really creeped out if I were the coroner…”
Coolest. Lamp. Ever. - Call it a stupid idea, but I feel that if we choose to spend our hard earned money on something, it should jive with our artistic sensibilities. Nobody buys curtains they hate—why buy other things whose appearance we loathe? This approach, however, quickly can become impractical.
Enter the coolest desktop lamp you’ll ever see. These things are handmade by what seems to be an art-house type place; the price isn’t even listed. Regardless of what I can only imagine is a prohibitively expensive price, this is a man’s lamp if ever I’ve seen one (and I simply refer to the angular, steampunk, nature of the styling). The artist, Frank Buchwald, has produced some amazing pieces, be sure to check out “The Series” to view them all.
Exploding clocks - Looking for the gift for someone who has everything? How about these one of a kind exploding/asploding clocks by Roger Wood. They look like cartoon clocks flying apart, yet they still work. Not a gift I could afford to give anyone in the next, oh, 10 years or so. Always good to keep on the back burner, though.
“The Line Experience” - Good observations about the Apple modus operandi, generally:
My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has - point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you’ll find that Apple’s product is almost infuriatingly superior.
Funny comic, too (not like I have to get the word out on that one, after all these guys brought us Jesus throwing up the horns).
Wardway Fuels, Inc. - One of Ars Technica’s writers was able to cram iPhone purchase and a wedding into one weekend. One of her pictures shows a sign: “NO I PHONES HERE BUT WE HAVE PLENTY OF PROPANE”
Cold brewed coffee - Apparently, this type of coffee is absolutely delicious because it doesn’t have the undesirable side effects that occur when you expose coffee to boiling water. The process reduces the need for cream and sugar to almost nill. The recipe:
You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done.
(thx, megnut)
Zucchini buckled up - This is the largest piece of produce I have ever seen.
Mykala and I saw some great science demos on Jay Leno; they were centered around a chemical called sulfur hexafluoride. Heretofore, I hadn’t heard of it. It has some really unique properties - for one, it’s a super dense gas, and so it flows like an invisible liquid. You can float boats (well, makeshift aluminum foil rafts) on it when it’s in a fish tank, and it puts out fires like no one’s business (which is the reason it is used in electrical installations). It is extremely non-reactive, not unlike Teflon or other perfluorinated hydrocarbons (though, it’s a sulfur compound). Anyhow, I got to looking it up on Sigma Aldrich, which is the chemical company I ordered chemicals from when I worked organic synthesis at St. Thomas. So, the 99.75% pure form of sulfur hexafluoride clocks in at a smidge over a dollar per gram. Mykala estimated the fish tank filled with the stuff was about 50 liters. So, let’s see… at STP, one mole of an ideal gas takes up about 22.4L… which means they probably used about 3 moles of the stuff. It weighs about 146 grams per mole, sooo that’s north of $450 in sulfur hexafluoride. I guess they don’t skimp for Late Night science demonstrations.
That said, there is one final property of sulfur hexafluoride that makes it pretty phenomenal: it deepens your voice. A lot. I didn’t believe it, but further research confirmed this to be the case. Watch the Jay Leno clip for yourself. They cut the explanation a little short, but David Willey (the scientist doing the demos) said the gas filters out the higher frequencies of your voice. He went on to talk about a Helmholtz resonator, which is not something with which I am too familiar. I can tell you, however, that resonance occurs when wavefronts reinforce one another. In the case of a Helmholtz resonator, this phenomenon can result in amplification of waves, due to sound pressure in an enclosed cavity (I think). What I can give you for sure, however, are examples of Helmholtz resonators, and trivia surrounding the term. For example, blowing air across a bottle, the body of a guitar, and those annoying mufflers that your neighbor installs on their car to deepen and enhance the exhaust note of the vehicle are all Helmholtz resonators. Furthermore, in Kurt Vonnegut’s book of short stories “Bagombo Snuff Box,” the band director’s name is Mr. Helmholtz, which I think is hilarious.
And now you know.
David Pogue: iPhone Review - A great video review, in funny narrative format, from David Pogue of the New York Times—the Apple iPhone. It’s nice to see the iPhone in real settings, without all the digital retouching done on PR photos. It truly is tremendously thin and sleek.
You can get online in a wireless WiFi internet network, which is fast and satisfying, or via AT&T’s cellular internet network, which is slow and horrible.
I really like the style of this video—particularly the crowd chasing him at the end. I’ll have to check out some more of Mr. Pogue’s stuff in the future. From the printed article:
If Verizon’s slogan is, “Can you hear me now?” AT&T’s should be, “I’m losing you.”
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