I survived. o.o;

Randomly, and contrary to common expectations, I discovered that Microsoft's newly rechristened Bing fails to suck. In fact, it seems quite decent. I used it to find my recent flights, and it dug up for me a deal on a booking service I hadn't known of which wasn't available anywhere else I could think to look, including the airline's website. And ( Read more... )

Yesterday I held a snail. It was cold and tickly.

( Read more... )

Does phenotypic evolution operate in the thermodynamic limit?

What I mean by this is, does evolution always take a given prior state and environmental input and then produce the same, deterministic phenotypic changes, modulo a tad of noisiness? This is not to say that evolution would retrace its steps given equivalent environmental inputs, ( Read more... )

I've been obsessing lately over the design of personal outdoor air conditioning garments, as inspired by ( Read more... )

Lawnmowers are vile, vile, vile things. Who ever thought this was a good idea??

When in doubt, micro-reboot:
( Finger print reader dysfunction )

Snails!
(I stumbled into what must've been the regional snail and slug convention out back last night. c.c)

Following up on this, I did some experiments doubling up the pencil leads side by side, which made them last quite a bit longer, to the point that I was able to elicit some new behaviors from molten NaCl. You first melt a tiny bit with a small, pure carbon-carbon arc and/or thin carbon resistive heating (I doubt the latter is the main player, but I ( Read more... )

Scum. Absolute scum!
(scroll down to 3.32pm, it lacks an anchor)
Assuming this source is accurate.