Swans on Tea

Some random thoughts on coordinate systems, math-y terminology and the real world.
I went into Bed, Bath & Beyond the other day, and wondered, “What’s beyond Bed, Bath & Beyond? The name does not specify how far beyond bed and bath it goes.
As you drive through northern Pennsylvania there’s a sign that reads “Endless Mountains, [...]

Prairie dogs return to Md. Zoo. Keepers scramble as animals try to escape.
When the animals were let out of their crates into their new habitat Wednesday, not all sought to escape. More than a few seemed happy to take a noontime siesta. Others were more interested in a lunch of biscuits, kale, apples, carrots, [...]

Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and caught his can in the Bertie.
Oh, wait. Bacon in the Asteroid Belt is meant to be taken literally. Answering the timeless question of how [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Via the Heisenbergian one, I discover the Science Scout Merit Badges
The “I blog about science” badge. Obviously
The “science deprives me of my bed” badge (LEVEL II) Two week at Cornell’s Nanofabrication Lab (NNF)
The “broken heart for science” badge I just had to go to grad school …
The “non-explainer” badge (LEVEL I) [...]

instructables: Gummi Bear Surgery
NOTE: This Instructable contains graphic images of Gummi Bear surgeries.

Crappy balloon art.
Much, much simpler than “your lower intestine”

A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction
In the simplest theories of the sexual interaction, the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian describing all allowed forms of two-body coupling are identified with the conventional gender states, “Male” and “Female” denoted |M> and |F> in the Dirac bra-ket notation; note that the bra is superfluous in this [...]

Thursday is an Odd Day
Odd Day is coming Thursday, 5/7/9. Three consecutive odd numbers make up the date only six times in a century. This day marks the half-way point in this parade of Odd Days which began with 1/3/5. The previous stretch of six dates like this started with 1/3/1905—13 months after [...]

Act like a T-Rex: eat a lawyer.
May 8th is Act Like a T-Rex Day, legal issues permitting.
They have trademarked the word “T-REX”. Any merchandise with the word “T-REX” anywhere on it according to their Opposition, “is likely to cause confusion as to the source or origin” and “mislead consumers” doing damage to their business
I have [...]

The P-bomb
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Time-traveler cheat sheet
This basically assumes you have traveled through time because George Carlin handed you a time machine and you’re almost too stupid to breathe, or you went through a time rift, or some topologically similar scenario. Because if you invented a #@&^! time machine, you should know most of what’s there.
A moving electric [...]