Because i am a sucker for complicated music-making systems [reference my favorite OkGo music video (side tangent, how awesome would it be to have to take a stunt driving course for a music video?!) or pretty much any OkGo music video], this awesome, marble-utilizing music machine is fascinating to me (hat tip to NPR for the link). The band behind this is Wintergatan (the 'Milky way'), listed in wikipedia as in the 'folktronica' genre, and a few of their songs have that 'plinky' music box sound. (KellyAT and James, here is track called 'Biking Is Better.')
The city that i currently inhabit does not do well with frozen precipitation (unlike my former residence), as was illustrated when recent snow storm prompted echos of this classic SNL sketch (my favorite part? Dixie champagne, which is totally going in my lexicon). Regarding Coca Cola, last week i realized that my evening snack consisted of the old-fashioned favorite coke and peanuts, though i have no idea how this got to be quite as popular as it did. Googling around, i came across the shortest recipe ever, Coke and Peanuts, with an expected-though-probably-overstated prep time of 2 minutes. And regarding the reasoning, it is apparently considered a nascent fast food - easy to consume when your hands are otherwise occupied.
i came across the term 'eau de javel' the other day while reading. It refers potassium hypochlorite, a precursor to good old "bleach" (the common name for sodium hypochlorite), the very strongly oxidizing reagent. Eau de javel was initially prepared with chlorine gas and potash lye in the French town of Javel (now a part of Paris). This was followed by the cheaper preparation of sodium hypochlorite from soda lye instead of potash lye, but the process wasn't really streamlined until the Hooker process in the late 1800s. (Clorox is a portmanteau of chlorine and Sodium Hydroxide, the starting materials.) From the wikipedia article, " Skin contact will produce caustic irritation or burns due to defatting and saponification of skin oils and destruction of tissue. The slippery feel of bleach on skin is due to this process. ".
It came to my attention that my coworkers hadn't heard of the early-to-mid 2000s' online cartoon Homestar Runner (nor the more popular Strongbad emails). i used the quote "No two people are not on fire" in conversation, was met with blank stares, and so had to link the corresponding SBE clip. i feel like it's a pretty good example of the cartoon type. Honorable mention goes to 'Dragon', better known as Trogdor. (And, that's how i spent undergrad. Reference early blog posts here and there. i forget that i've been doing this blog a really long time.)
Little known fact about birthstones that i came across last week include their origins in religion, as being 'the founding stones of the New Jerusalem', and as such, appropriate for Christians to have all 12 and wear one every month. The practice of wearing the stone associated with a particular month (that of one's birth) started in either Poland in the 1700s, or Germany in the 1860s. To standardize the stones associated with each month, efforts were made by various jewelers, including this poem published by Tiffany and Co. in 1870. Reading it, it's interesting the contrast in modern birthstones (bloodstone v/s aquamarine, sardonyx v/s peridot, agate v/s pearls).
A recent, sad-though-informative BBC article is titled "Japan's ninjas heading for extinction", noting that this is a very traditional family apprenticeship. But, that's what they WANT us to think.
The excellent @sunrisescience linked to a Brainpickings article featuring the Ship of Theseus, as mentioned by Plutarch; essentially, how much of something can be changed before it becomes something else? This gets philosophical fast when applied to human personalities. A modern update of this is handled in Daryl Gregory's Raising Stony Mayhall, a zombie novel that directly illustrates this point by having the zombies replace bits of themselves with, for instance wooden prosthetic. Sorry this got weird fast, but it's a fascinating concept to consider: human psyches have infinite capacity for (admittedly usually gradual) growth and adaptation. Particularly interesting to consider this in an election year...
That's probably enough for today.
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