The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense
An actual periodic table, i.e. the phenomena as you move down columns are related, for the most part, which is a concept lost on many makers of spoofy so-called periodic tables (Or is that tables made of spoofium)
A number of places on the web have pointed toward “I Write Like,” a site which analyzes your writing style (assuming you have a style) and vocabulary, and compares that to a somewhat limited database of authors. According to the algorithm, I write like David Foster Wallace1 (with one Dan Brown outlier; apparently some find a Dan Brown comparison to be off-putting). Or, from another perspective, my writing least resembles the other writers.
The only David Foster Wallace I have read would be short snippets from things posted by DFW fans who write blogs I read; I get the impression that it’s a highly nonlinear effect — if you like DFW, you really, really like DFW. And he’s been in the news in recent years: his death (a great career move for so many) and subsequent discovery of unfinished works.
1I am told his works are heavily footnoted
However, I do alright with tabletop-ish atomic physics, which is literally very cool.
Almost as funny as George C. Scott getting hit with a football. My groin!
NPR: Look Up! The Billion-Bug Highway You Can’t See
You can see them launching themselves, says entomologist Matt Greenstone:
“They just stand straight up on their little back legs and just by doing that they can get part of their body up into this layer [of air] where it’s more turbulent and then, if you can get a ride on a parcel that’s going up, you can get off the ground and then if you’re lucky you can get carried aloft.”
When they screw us, the earth doesn’t move.
A little earthquake this morning, a 3.6, at a smidge after 5 AM. I didn’t feel it (don’t flatter yourself, Otter, it wasn’t that great), but was probably in my car by then.
Rectified Flowers, and the flickr set
Comment by kottke
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first.
The year.
A year on earth is measured by one complete trip around the sun. Seems simple enough but there is a problem. The earth doesnt travel in a path around the sun that returns it to its starting point. So how do we know when the year starts or ends?
Chicage Sun-Times curmudgeon Terry Savage had a recent fist-shaking post about kids on his lawn giving away “free” lemonade, in which he points out that it’s not really free (the parents paid for it), that giving away a product will lead to negative profit margins and how this is a terrible business lesson for the kids, and now he has a followup in which he points out, again, that it’s not free, et cetera, et cetera.
My recent column about teaching children how to run a lemonade stand seems to have caused quite a furor. In case you missed it, I explained to the young girls — who were giving away their product — that the whole idea of having a business is to figure out your costs and then set a price that gives you a profit. In fact, that’s the basis of our American entrepreneurial, free-enterprise system.
Maybe that was the lesson of his lemonade stand as a child, or would be the lesson if Alex Keaton was your father, but I think he’s just overthinking the problem, or overestimating the teaching value of it. I thought the point of a lemonade stand was to teach kids a lesson about working to earn money, above and beyond taking out the trash, rather than just (possibly) collecting a small allowance. When I was a kid, we charged 2¢ a glass (yes, this was back in the more recent good old days, though I think it went up to a nickel by the time I retired from it and my little brother and his friends took over the business.) There were no discussions or calculations about cost of supplies, profit margins or privileges at the executive wading pool. I was six or so. Teaching us to be entrepreneurs wasn’t the point. The point was that we were going to have to sit out in the hot sun and take turns holding up the sign advertising the stand, and try to get people to stop and buy our product. Exert ourselves, sweat a little and in the interim, be bored. IOW, teach us what an average semi-skilled job was like, and make us not want to do the adult equivalent, so that would be on our minds whenever the ‘rents were convincing us that we needed to do well in school and go to college, so we would have something better to look forward to.
Or maybe they just wanted us out of the house for a few hours, and this was a cheap way of doing it.
