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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Eli's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:35 pm | worms plant ragweed seeds http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gen Led by weed ecologist Emilie Regnier of Ohio State University in Columbus, researchers conducted field experiments to determine how exotic European night crawlers, Lumbricus terrestris, affected the survival of the seeds of Ambrosia trifida, giant ragweed. Do they plant other seeds too? We want to know. Maybe worms like ragweed seeds as gizzard stones. I was hoping this could be a deep-dyed plot between Lumbrici to spread the seeds, and trifid Ambrosia to... strangle competitor worms with its roots, or something. But ragweed is exotic to Europe. ETA: sock puppets! mouth suction! | ||||||||
| Friday, June 27th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 12:21 am | |||||||||
| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:44 pm | booknotes: Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful 16 - Turing's sexual pleasure in mathematics [Hodges, Turing, p. 127] 20 - young children experience their effectiveness through creating chaos out of order 21 - a six-week-old with a sucking mechanism to drive a projector 37 - "You can't imagine," he says, "the silent fun I have at dinner parties while eating my food and dissecting a beautiful muscle. How I enjoy the spinalis dorsis -- largely constituting a lamb chop." 100 - "Levi-Strauss also discovered in old navigation treatises that European sailors were at one time perfectly able to discern Venus in daylight." 151 - American newness -- "when no man shall build his house for posterity" (in Hawthorne) Grudin, Time and the Art of Living (http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/e The Hydrological Cycle and the Wisdom of God Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture | ||||||||
| Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:22 pm | THE GÖMBÖC http://www.gomboc.eu/site.php?inc=0&menuId=8 Convexity and homogeneity are crucial properties of Gömböc. Weebles are straightforward examples of inhomogenous objects with Gömböc-type behaviour. Similarly, it is easy to create homogenous but concave Gömböc-like forms due to the fact that concave bodies cannot roll on all points of their circumference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomboc Gömb in Hungarian means "sphere", and gömböc refers to a sphere-like object. (It is mostly known in the folk culture as kis gömböc, a round creature in the loft that remained from a killed pig, which swallows everyone one after the other who goes to see what happened to the previous ones.[4]) | ||||||||
| 10:26 pm | the Mundaneum The NYT article about the Mundaneum: In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. John Crowley comments: The article naturally describes it as a precursor of the Web, but it's also a direct descendant of the Memory Theaters of the Renaissance, at least one of which was actually constructed in much the same way as this card-file system was supposed to be, with large categories governing sub- and sub-sub-categories. It's hard for me to get a solid idea from this article of what the thing was. Or really there are two things -- the Mundaneum actually built and operated, and the unrealizable electronic system described in the book. The Mundaneum sounds a good deal like a card catalog with cross-references, or like Yahoo as it began. The cross-references are metadata applied by the cataloguer, rather than links from text to text? This earlier and longer article by the same author points out two interesting features of the Mundaneum: It indexed to a sub-book level. And it used a "facet-based" classification, rather than hierarchical. | ||||||||
| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:34 pm | how to sew a bat holding bag These bags are for holding bats after they are captured for research. All the seams must be outside the bag, so the bats do not get tangled in them, as they will be released after they are weighted, measured and banded. These bags will be washed in bleach after each use to prevent disease transmission. | ||||||||
| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 12:42 am | arugula capers Arugula buds taste like they would make good capers. So. | ||||||||
| Sunday, June 15th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 9:29 pm | notes Impossible thing of the morning: to clean aphids off an eryngium flowerhead by hand. We have two varieties of wineglasses. The bowl of one resonates a major third higher than its foot does, and the other's bowl is a second higher than that, and its foot is a fourth down, so ending a fifth down from the first's bowl. | ||||||||
| Thursday, June 5th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 12:18 am | epitoky http://depts.washington.edu/fhl/zoo Epitokes are benthic worms, or parts of worms, that swim to the surface and release eggs or sperm. In one family of polychaetes, the syllids, the posterior (rear) portion of the worms is modified to carry either eggs or sperm. This epitoke eventually breaks off from the main part of the worm, and swims to the surface to reproduce. After the eggs are fertilized, female epitokes brood the embryos in sacs on their stomachs until they hatch (see photo on left, below). The remaining benthic worm is called an atoke, and will continue to feed and grow, eventually producing new epitokes. Syllid epitokes have been observed to periodically form immense swarms of reproductive individuals in surface waters. This interesting behavior is thought to be regulated by the lunar cycle, with a peak near the full moon. | ||||||||
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 10:45 pm | "Chemistry of Chocolate" night at Theo notes: Maillard reactions, okay, but what's different in chocolate than other roasted protein/sugar? Timo Stark papers on cacao chemistry and organoleptics.1 photo of a scientist with one nostril hooked up to a gas chromatograph to smell the fractions. radar diagrams of liquid-phase and gas-phase components. no phase diagram of cacao butter. :( glad to see that their "why people crave chocolate" slide, which I had been dreading, in fact rubbishes anandamide and doesn't even mention the phenethylamine silliness. the unconched Madagascar tastes spectacular! fruity aldehyde explosion! ship it! this Ghana liquor tastes like barbecued meat; it would make a powerful sauce. whirlwind tour of the factory floor. 1 Sensory-Guided Decomposition of Roasted Cocoa Nibs (Theobroma cacao) and Structure Determination of Taste-Active Polyphenols HALF-TONGUE TEST | ||||||||
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 12:34 am | http://www.hafniumisomer.org http://www.hafniumisomer.org/ Critical Issues remaining. * Confidence for Hafnium isomer triggering in our research by faculty and students is better than "odds" of google:1 in our favor. | ||||||||
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 10:44 pm | aerial root The downstairs philodendron sent out a long downward-probing arc of aerial root, which we stuck into a little secondary pot. Now a new root has come straight up out of the soil, and is feeling about. Is there a U-turn in there? What would it like to find in its tertiary pot if it is to settle down?  | ||||||||
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:58 pm | possible applications of the digital picture frame Life pattern display a clock, with "tick-tock" mp3 track a nixie-tube clock a calendar | ||||||||
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 12:27 am |  | ||||||||
| 12:24 am |  | ||||||||
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 10:29 pm | Colorado bindweed gall mite smugglers wanted http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite/Ag Aceria malherbae feeds on leaves and stem tips, inducing gall formation and leaf distortion. All life stages of the mite occur within the folded and distorted leaves. Adults are present on the plant from May to November. Aceria malherbae overwinters as an adult or nymph below ground on rhizome buds. Eggs are deposited within the galls. Several generations can be produced each growing season. Heavy mite infestations can result in reduced plant vigor and flower formation. "$100.00 -- 1 cooler (approximately 15-20 releases) of bindweed mites sent to a partner institution. (If the institution is interested in establishing a site for future collection, please contact the Insectary directly before ordering.)" Colorado residents only. | ||||||||
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:52 pm | The ternary calculating machine of Thomas Fowler  http://www.mortati.com/glusker/fowler/i A large, wooden calculating machine was built in 1840 by Thomas Fowler in his workshop in Great Torrington, Devon, England. In what may have been one of the first uses of lower bases for computing machinery, Fowler chose balanced ternary to represent the numbers in his machine. Very little evidence of this machine has survived. There is, naturally, a http://www.thomasfowler.org.uk There is, charmingly, a http://www.ternary.info , but I only can get at it in the cache. | ||||||||
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:10 pm | spring and flying machines (If these jar your sense of Seattle phenology, don't worry, they're a couple of weeks old.)
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nineweaving posts:
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| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 11:07 pm | interests pleonastic picked these five interests from my profile for me to say something about:arp 2600 The electronic music lab in college had two ARP 2600 semi-modular analog synthesizers, side by side, so you could wire them together. I have never with any other hardware found it so easy to get sounds that surprised me, that I almost but not quite understand what was making them sound like that. And they were so often beautiful. I should go hook up the synthesizers. They aren't 2600s, but they do all right. high winds Why is wind exhilarating? I and the air are touching. We always do, but I have no awareness of it in ordinary air (except briefly after I'd had a beard and shaved it off, and could feel the currents of air in a still room). The air is all over me, pressing the windward side and wrapping around the lee, and I hear the rush of the atmosphere everywhere engaging the landscape. kathleen raine There shall be no more seaThese rolling flowing plunging breaking everlasting weaving waters math and mysticism (i especially like that these two follow each other) When I was creating the LJ account, I remember taking some care in the ordering of interests in the form field, so that neighbors were connected together in a wandering chain. And then when I clicked "submit" LJ alphabetized them. But these two landed well together -- they remind me of the cartoon by Rudy Rucker: Willie Wheeler(?) thinks of nothing, an empty thought bubble {}, and in the next frame thinks of thinking of nothing, a thought containing an empty thought {{}}, and then one containing both of those {{},{{}}}, in a construction of the numbers 0, 1, 2..., and the frames are now halving in width each time, to the edge of the page. Then he is thinking infinity (and I forget how exactly Rucker placed his ellipses for that), with a big cartoon smile. | ||||||||
| Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | |||||||||
| 10:51 pm | organlegging Has there been reported a larger direct quote from which this came? I never like to think that anybody is capable of such orson.1 http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.o Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. 1 "a frothy mix of social commentary and fecal matter", of course. | ||||||||
