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All I want for Christmas is . . .
All I want for Christmas is an appendectomy ( Read more... ) -
Dull drills and titanium sheet
So. Did you know that if you have a piece of titanium sheet, and you want to drill a hole in it, and the drill you choose is a bit on the dull side, and you don't use any lubricant because hey, it's only 1/16 inch thick so how hard can it be, and you put it in the drill press and keep bearing down on it figuring that it will have to go through * ( Read more... ) -
Groundhog Day! Candlemas!
OK, so it's Groundhog Day. I always hear "If the groundhog sees his shadow, there will be 6 more weeks of winter", but the prediction stops there. What if he doesn't see his shadow? Does that mean winter will only last for another month and a half? [1] Having lived in Michigan all my life, I was never quite sure whether 6 more weeks of winter was ( Read more... ) -
A note on the quality of halloween candy
Hardly any kids come trick-or-treating at our house, but the ones who make it to us get pretty good stuff - usually full-size chocolate bars. So, when I took Sam out on Friday, we ran down Old Mill Hill Road and into Atlantic Mine, and I was looking to see if it was typical for rural houses to have better candy ( Read more... ) -
The Little Red Hen
Lately, Sam has been having me read her "The Little Red Hen". You know, the one where the hen finds a grain of wheat, nobody will help her plant it, harvest it, make it into flour, or make bread out of it, but they *all* want to help eat it. And she tells them "no", and eats it herself. This story has always bugged me, that just isn't the way I ( Read more... ) -
Why I rarely watch Internet videos
You know, I'm getting increasingly annoyed by the "constant-wait" feature of the Internet: no matter how much you increase your connection speed, the people posting content on their web pages keep larding on bandwidth-hogging "features" to keep page downloads consistently slow and flaky. Right at the moment, there is a strong tendency for people ( Read more... ) -
Thoughts on "super pheromones"
So, "Torchwood" has finally come out on DVD, so we got the first two episodes from Netflix. And in the first episode, they had as kind of a throwaway a "super pheromone" spray where, if you sprayed it on yourself, it made the person next to you immediately want to have sex with you. Regardless of their sex, or normal preferences. And the ( Read more... ) -
Arise, my mutant army!
You know, the big problem with being a mad scientist has always been that you have to spend all your time fiddling around trying to actually do the grunt work needed to get everything to work, leaving no time at all for properly scheming, plotting, and carrying out your nerfarious plans ( Read more... ) -
So *that's* what people there do for a living!
I was preparing some samples to send out for chemical analysis to Activation Laboratories, a company that I had not dealt with previously but was recommended to me. So I go to their "contact" web page and see that they have a bunch of locations; in Canada, Mexico, South America, Asia, Greenland . . . wait, what was that last one ( Read more... )
