Slow news day. But I did find this LAT article interesting: Goodyear has commissioned three new blimps.
I wasn’t aware you could get 54 mph out of a blimp, much less 73 mph. (According to Wikipedia, that’s close to the cruising speed of a Piper Cub.)
I’m sure it comes as no great shock to anyone except me that ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik has a web site. At least, I think that’s their web site.
Check out the link to Zeppelin Hangar FN. Their online menus even have prices!
A casual conversation on our way to dinner led us to this Wall Street Journal article about Crayola’s Washable Colored Bubbles product.
Crayola figured out a way to make colored bubbles (excuse us, “bubbles of color”) on demand. This is a pretty hard problem if you understand anything about the physics of soap bubble formation; you’re talking about surfaces thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Conventional dyes won’t work, so Crayola’s invention is kind of a big deal.
Crayola’s invention also stains things. Permanently. At least that’s what some parents are claiming. (A quick look of my own at the Amazon product reviews suggests that the WSJ may have slightly overstated the number of negative reviews. Or Amazon may have pulled some.)
Why are we reminded of the classic phrase “hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers“?
We briefly considered picking some of this up for our younger relatives, but then had second thoughts; we much prefer our spleen where it currently is, on the inside of our body, as opposed to having it yanked out violently through our nose.
I have a long standing fascination with homebrew radiation detection and measuring equipment, so the concept of the iGeigie (a Geiger counter that connects to your iPhone) intrigues me. (The iGeigie website doesn’t appear to be working at the moment, but here’s a link to a Make: Online blog entry.)
I’m also pretty fascinated by what Safecast is doing.
And by this older Make: Online homebrew Geiger counter schematic.
And this summary of Geiger counter kits and projects.
Yes, I think I will throw a few dollars at Safecast’s Kickstarter project, thanks for asking.
(Hattip: Wil Wheaton.)
And the first FORTRAN compiler comes to Westinghouse-Bettis on this day 55 years ago.
(Hattips: TJIC on the Twitter for the link, and the title from here
By way of the LAT, we have learned of a new book: Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game
Barry’s book is about the April 18, 1981 game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, which went for 33 innings, the longest game in baseball history.
We’re not sure if we’re going to purchase this or not. On the one hand, it does push some of our hot buttons (failure, Rhode Island). On the other hand, it sounds like the kind of lyrical baseball horseshit we hate. If any of our readers purchase and read Barry’s book, we’d welcome a review.
Edited to add: Lawrence pointed us to a review of a new Richard Feynman biography, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science
Okay, that title is misleading. The Library of Congress did not pick “Pena” as one of the 25 recordings added to the National Recording Registry this year.
They did, however, pick “The Blimp”.
Here’s a link to the complete list with audio samples.
A few things that jumped out at me:
recording.Things that have made me laugh today, as of about noon:
EFFector 24.11. “…undergraduate degrees in Facebook Privacy Settings”.
The PLAYMOBIL ™ Apple ™ Store playset.
The new project from His Scalziness. (The prologue is up at Tor’s site.)
The NYT falls for another April Fool’s joke. Popehat has the details.
Paolo Bacigalupi and the bacterial colony formerly known as Peter Watts are collaborating on a new shared world anthology. “‘We expect suicides,’ said Watts. ‘And maybe a Nebula.'”
Updated about 1:30 PM:
“‘Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark’ Gains Sentience, Hungers For The Flesh Of the Living“. (Hattip: Pope Scalzi the First.) Mostly because this line had me rolling on the floor:
The Tasmanian Devil is in trouble. Specifically, the population is being wiped out by a form of cancer that causes “…tumors [to] sprout around the devil’s mouth, quickly morphing into bulbous red pustules that eventually take over the animal’s entire face, leaving it unable to eat or drink.”
What’s particularly unusual about this cancer (“Devil facial tumor disease”, or DTFD) is that it’s one of only three known forms of cancer that’s infectious; in other words, the Tasmanian Devils are spreading the cancer to each other.
From a marketing standpoint, the Tasmanian devil is no koala.
Well, yes: as a family member of mine would probably point out, the Tasmanian Devil is capable of reproducing without help.
I generally don’t talk about my work here, but I’m making an exception in this case.
As of today, I am officially a Commvault 9 Certified Engineer (and also a Commvault 9 Certified System Administrator).
This almost certainly means nothing to anyone outside the world of data protection, but hey, it’s kind of a big deal to me.
Also, it gives me an excuse to embed this earworm from the 1980’s.
I had not originally planned to comment on this story, figuring that I would leave it up to Mr. ZunePony himself.
However, I was just mucking out the Akismet spam filter, and got to wondering; does this mean an end to the endless Zune/iPod comparison spam? Those of you with WordPress blogs and Akismet know what I’m talking about.
Sorry, the pi related content is a bit thin this year; instead of researching the state of pi, I spent most of the weekend banging on MySQL and Perl for a project I’m working on. (I expect that folks will see some of the results of that project in an upcoming “Talking GPS Blues” post.)
In the meantime, there will be pie.
Watch this space for updates.
Some things worth noting in the NYT on this fine day:
Michael Ruhlman reviews Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider
Never mind.
You may ask yourself, “Why would someone pay $20,000 for a replica of an Eric Clapton Stratocaster, ‘complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton’s belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes’?” You would probably answer that question, “Because they’re a moron.” The NYT would like for you to know that evolutionary psychology suggests you’re wrong:
Yesterday was election day in Bell, California. How did things go?
Noted: Austin now has a Peruvian restaurant. (Okay, technically, Pflugerville.) Yes, I’m thinking Saturday Dining Conspiracy. No, not right away; we generally give places three months after opening before reviewing them.
Three quick links that appeal to my somewhat geeky side. The first two are from Derek Lowe:
A recent case of thallium poisoning in Jersey.
Top 200 drugs (by various measures), in poster form from the University of Arizona. Including chemical structures (at least, for those “drugs” that have chemical structures: check out numbers #130 and #187 on this chart for examples of “drugs” that don’t): some of these structures, like Sevorane, are fascinating, while others like Xolair and Novoseven make you go “What the heck is that?”
Remember the berserk squid? LabRat over at the Atomic Nerds site picked up on that post, and offers an excellent dissection of the article, including some possible directions for additional research. Thanks, LabRat!
CSM headline: “Scientists discover how to make squids go completely berserk“.
We still have no cure for cancer, or ALS, but we’ve figured out how to drive (some) cephalopods crazy. Go science. I’m sure this will come in handy next time the SyFy channel wants to make a movie.
To be honest, I’m more than a little skeptical about this article. I’m hoping someone with a stronger biology background (like LabRat) picks up on this.
(Hattip: Dinosaur Comics, the go-to comic for biological news.)
Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, has passed away.
I came in right at the end of the DEC era, and never really had a chance to work on a PDP-anything, a VAX, or a DEC-XX. (There was, at one point, a scheme to purchase a used PDP-8, but nothing ever came of that.)
I still smile, though, whenever I see a reference to one of those machines (or, for that matter, one of those machines in person at DEFCON).
In honor of the late Mr. Olsen, here’s a link to SIMH, which will let you emulate much of the DEC line.