August 26th, 2010:
- In my last very mobile couple of years, I’ve had some of my best ideas while driving across the featureless plains of Nebraska, including a way to solve a plot/tech issue that had prevented me from further progress on The Molten Flesh: How Protea sampled the powerful and very paranoid Sangruse Device. In looking back, this has been a pattern: In times of enforced boredom, ideas happen. Here’s some insight on that issue, which matters a lot to me, who loves ideas but loathes boredom.
- Here’s a very good tutorial on how to take photos of electronics projects, and by implication any small object shot for detail on a neutral background.
- The causes of “the French Paradox” (the French eat loads of fat and yet have little heart disease) have long been argued about, but it may simply be due to the fact that the French government makes sure that its pregnant women are well-fed, and has been doing so since the 1870s. (See next link.) Low fetal weight (often caused by poor maternal nutrition) correlates strongly to heart disease, diabetes, and much else later in life. Modern declines in heart disease may have nothing to do with red wine, dietary fat, or even smoking. Pregnant women may just be eating better.
- Sometimes a simple animation can explain a difficult mechanical mechanism. Hey, how many of you dudely dudes really understand how a sewing machine works?
- Grab a look at this bogglingly clear close-up of a sunspot, taken with an Earth-based telescope. The key is the deformable mirror and its overall mechanism of adaptive optics, which continuously corrects for atmospheric turbulence and other disturbing factors.
- Google’s spider evidently crawled Contra thirty seconds after I posted yesterday’s entry. Not complaining, but…how often does that damned thing come by?
- Here’s everything you’ll probably ever need to know about four-leaf clovers. It confirmed what I knew from experience probing our lawn in Chicago as a kid: five-leaf clovers also exist (I found more than one) even if they’re not as legendary.
- Double resistor color codes! So intense! What does it mean? (It means 230K.)