The title of this post is taken from a statement made by Dr. Richard Miller, professor of pathology in the Geriatrics Center of the Medical School, as quoted in an April 2004 U. Mich. press release (World’s oldest mouse reaches milestone birthday, via this Reddit thread). One of the Reddit posters found Yoda the mouse’s […]
It seems a heckuva lot easier to find old books that are worth reading than to choose new (newly-published) books that won’t trigger buyer’s/reader’s remorse. In the Track of the Bookworm is a book published just before the end of the 19th century. The author, one Irving Browne, dedicated it: To book-worms all, of high […]
Tonight, on my way to the supermarket to replenish our household’s egg and milk stores, I noticed a large praying mantis on the sidewalk. Fortunately, I was en route to rather than returning home from the grocery store, so I could pause and observe this individual of what I believe to be the species Hierodula […]
Clicking through some of the photos I took of some of the micro-terrains of a sunflower, I found one that featured something that very closely resembled a creepy staring eye: Instead of being disappointed that there wasn’t a tiny human face beneath the mass of immature sunflower florets looking upwards toward the lens of my […]
First, for the sake of comparison, here’s what the edge of one of the green bracts ringing the back of the sunflower’s head looked like through my 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope: Now here are two bract-edge photos taken with my 200x-500x USB scope (it’s a Measurement eScope DP-M07) at 500x magnification: I didn’t get around to […]
An inexpensive 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope like the one shown above can be a shed load of a lot of fun. Last Friday, I spent one of the shortest hours of my life (because TFWYHV) exploring a sunflower, one which I’d just lopped off its stalk, from a bunch that had brightened our home for the […]
There’s tons of Pepe the Frog merchandise on Taobao. I stumbled across a listing for a Pepe-themed tissue dispenser, showed it to my wife, and she lobbed back a link to search results for products making use of his likeness. Below are a couple of rows from the first page of results for “Sad Frog” […]
Tab sweep numero uno
Categories
FRICTION A blog post about how Harry Potter sustained the author during America’s immediate post-911 mass-psychological dark mood titled The Importance of Fiction. A good read. My mind initially saw, instead, the title The Importance of Friction. On Hackaday, Jenny List asks Whatever Happened To The Paper Mobile Phone? A Lemelson-MIT Program profile of Randice-Lisa […]
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]