Archive for the ‘Curious Stuff’ Category
Our Kids' Pedigrees
Push aside those bumper stickers about kids and honor rolls, our kids' pedigrees are available online! I refer, of course, to our adopted, ex-racing greyhounds, whose pedigrees Isaac was looking up today at greyhound-data.com. (One does start to get the feeling that almost anything you can think of can now be found online.) Most of […]
Peeps Evolve
I was quite delighted to discover last night, when I stopped in at our neighborhood drugs & sundries store, that there was a new variety of Peeps evident in pre-easter menagerie on display. Perhaps it was even a new species, but it might be too early to tell. Recent times have seen the appearance of […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Food Stuff
The Conversation Sandwich Theory
This was a title for a post that I've saved for sometime; it was something someone googled that carried them here for inexplicable reasons, but I thought it a very attractive phrase to describe something. Alas, I haven't been able to think yet of a good use for it. I try to imagine what a […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
181 Bits of Lunacy
Recently I got a press release from NASA, called "181 Things To Do On The Moon" that asked the provocative — if non-musical — question: If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do? Look for a spacesuit lept first to mind to avoid having my blood boil […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Encaptionating
Thanks again to Maud Newton* comes this fun idea that blends language and not-always-so-helpful modern technology. She reports that A reader who calls himself Angry Young Man has figured out a way to automate New Yorker cartoon captions — using New Yorker short stories. It seems that Angry Young Man discovered that applying Microsoft Word's […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Earth from Saturn
This is a most unusual, beautiful, and evocative photograph — and it is an actual photographic image, albeit a composite. The photographer was the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. On this occasion Saturn interposed itself between the Sun and the spacecraft, thus creating this beautifully backlit composition. Although it is hard to make out in this small version, […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Exponential Dracula
Herewith, from the popular press, an excellent example of geometric (exponential) growth and its implications: WASHINGTON (AP) — It may be the season for vampires, ghosts and zombies. Just remember, they're not real, warns physicist Costas Efthimiou. […] Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person's blood each month […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Naked Gardening
I am not the most avid gardener at the best of times — as the state of our yard will attest. Nevertheless, I do enjoy the results sometimes of putting in the effort, and I'm always interested in seeing how plants grow. Nature continues to amaze me. So, I was a bit disappointed to discover, […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Goldberg Variations in LEGO
Thanks to a short piece at Improbable Research,* I am now aware that there exists a harpsichord, looking like a single-manual Flemish reproduction, more or less, built entirely of LEGO bricks — except for the strings that is. Made up of some 10,000 LEGO pieces, the instrument has a 61-note range, weighs 150 pounds, and […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Music & Art
Presidential Crap
Fascinating. (From Wayne Madsen Report.) July 4, 2006 — Even Bush's crap is classified top secret. According to our Austrian sources, Austrian newspapers are currently abuzz with special security details of George W. Bush's recent trip to Vienna. Although the heavy-handed Gestapo-like security measures meted out to Viennese home owners, business proprietors, and pedestrians by […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Curious Stuff
Norwegian Fireball
You know, if it weren't for the random mailing lists that I subscribe to — I mean, do any of the "top blogs" cover this stuff? — I wouldn't even know about cool things like last week's fireball in Norway (thanks to NASA's Space Weather): NORWEGIAN FIREBALL: A spectacular fireball that flew over Norway last […]
Googlettes
Continuing my morbid fascination with the search strings that people use to arrive at this blog, I feel that a word is needed for these often spectacularly odd phrases. I'm toying with "googlettes", but I'm not committed. There are, of course, a couple more odd googlettes to mention today. Strikingly, both appeared on the same […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Nevaeh: Your Go-To Girl
Things I never knew until I read this article* in the New York Times: "In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda." Nevaehs have made the fastest rise in name popularity of all names in "more […]
Class Warfare, Bit by Bit
How odd. I just read a fascinating article by Blake Fleetwood ("A Nation of Frequent Flyer Junkies–25th Anniversary", The Huffington Post, 2 May 2006) about frequent-flyer awards programs. His thesis, which seems all correct and in order to me, is that these programs have created a hidden, two-class system in air travel, working to build […]
Interactive Toys
I can always count on my friend George to keep me up on the latest currents in popular culture. Just last week, for instance, we were talking in a casual way about recent events around the country when the conversation — somehow — naturally touched on sex toys, dildoes in particular. I wondered whether anyone […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Today's Reactions
Don't you wonder how any working person in America is getting any work done? There are so many polls going on to show how low W's "approval rating" has sunk (down to 32% and dropping) that one imagines everyone spending all their time on the phone answering pollster's questions. (Love this title: "God's Foreign Policy […]
Bunpeepegg
Some years ago, I was fascinated by the experiments that some people performed on Hostess Twinkies to determine their physical properties (conductivity, Young's modulus, stuff like that). Later on, that seemed to have inspired various fun stuff that could be done with marshmallow Peeps. Although I've never tried it myself, I'm fascinated by the idea […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Food Stuff
Feeling Illiterate
In one of those moments when I thought I'd relax a bit and do something useless, I searched alexa.com for this blog. Among several expected or predictable results, I found one that struck me as unusual. It was a reference to an article that began this way: ??????? ? ??????? ?? "????????????? ???????????" ?????? ???????? […]
One Post, Two …
Okay, check out this cosmic confluence. You may — or more likely, will not — remember my post from some time back, "Sequences of Integers", about Neil1 J.A.Sloane's fascinating project, the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences2 with over 100,000 sequences of integers and lots of exceedingly fascinating details. It appeals mightily to my quirky, geeky […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Eureka!
Pile o' Primes
Some things just don't need words, and some things leave one speechless. Thanks to the ever resourceful Elayne Riggs: The Prime Number Shitting Bear.