On our doorstep before 8 a.m. this morning — Frank’s brand new book, The Lightness of Being!
I decided that our family cradle, now repurposed to stuffed toy storage, would be an excellent place to take this newborn’s photo.
A thoroughly modern baby, this book even has its own website, “LightnessOfBeingBook.com, and its own Flash animation there. Some early reviewers call it lively and cheeky — others describe it as masterful and deep. Eh — it’s a particle, it’s a wave — it’s quite a book.
And what a great way for new babies to get delivered!
Hyperspace has an infinite number of symmetries, but Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has already assigned such choice names as “Hollygon,” “Poppygon,” and “The Vanilla Beer Group.” So do not delay or the name you want may be taken!! Your donation goes to help children in Guatemala through Common Hope.
Thanks to Tingilinde for the link! The image above, btw, has nothing to do with hyperspace and everything to do with nostalgia for the imperfect dot-matrix symmetries of MacPaint.
July 12th, 2008 · Comments Off on Subwoofer physics, gross and/or angelic shapes
Our kitchen has been the scene of many a vinegar-powered volcano, but here via Boing Boing is something even more wet, wild, and bewildering.
Cornstarch mixed with water has very spooky properties. It is a suspension that seems to transition back and forth between liquid and solid, depending on kinds of forces applied to it. If you try this at home, do not, do not, do NOT pour the mess down a sink or toilet once you have finished playing. The cornstarch will in time settle out of the liquid water, becoming a solid and very expensive mass in the pipes for your plumber to deal with.
Bad enough that summertime Sweden gets way more daylight hours than we do, or that its population is loaded with Legolas-lookalikes — and now I discover that new iPhones just went on sale there three hours ago, at Swedish midnight, (Boston 6 p.m.)
Sadly, we moved back to the USA six months too soon.
I never found my stress reduced by a Rubik’s cube, but then again I am no octopus. Octopi are Einsteins and Houdinis of Invertebrata. But the goal here is not to keep their giant nerve fibers tuned up — it is to find out if they are “octidextrous” or tend to favor one tentacle over the others. This research is crowdsourced, with aquarium visitors keeping track of which (labeled) tentacle gets used for which objects.
So how does this relate to octopus stress? The plan is to serve them octopus food to the favored side, assuming they have one. Interesting and maybe related fact: although most of us are right-handed, formal dinners feature food served to us from the left. Maybe that’s one reason those can be so darn stressful?
“I know it sounds ridiculous but my mother has started playing the computer game WoW, World of Warcraft … This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what’s important to me. And when she’s not at the computer she’s like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing. I’m not doing so well.”
Kids aren’t well-equipped to compete for Mom and Dad’s monetizable eyeballs. The kingdom of Bhutan was recently shocked to discover that more than 35% of parents would rather watch TV than talk to their children. What do you suppose that percent is in the US? Are more than 65% of US parents passing up Warcraft and chat rooms and prime time TV to spend meaningful family evenings with Alex and Zoe?
Could some level 70 Paladin deal with this, please?
