From the category archives:
The tradition of a restaurant charging you a fee when you bring your own wine to their establishment (using their glasses and not buying their wine) is commonly known as “corkage.” As you wine drinkers know, many vintners are turning to screw caps, citing the high failure rate of corks as their motivation. What do [...]
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Despite lusting after all of the items enumerated below, what do we get? Our dear friends Damon and Jane gifted us “Brain Age”– game software for the Nintendo DS. Not just another video game, software to help us aging baby boomers keep our brain muscle. There is no lengthy exegesis about the concept of the [...]
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This just in from washingtonpost.com. Professor Barbara Block at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station has been tracking migration patterns of various creatures over the Pacific Ocean. The image was seductive. There is so much information in it. I didn’t see the key to which colors are birds and which are whales and which are seals, but [...]
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Visit Speech Accent Archive for an overwhelming study and aural museum of speech accents.
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Today Tom threw away 7000 cassettes of music. These were cassettes of music put ON RESERVE for UCLA undergraduate music majors required to listen to them for their music history classes or music theory classes. I was called in because there was an entire box of cassettes from classes I taught in the 1980s. There [...]
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It is always interesting to me to see how sound effects the world around us. Here is an experiment called a Ruben’s Tube.
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Check this out: here is a robot made by Takanishi Laboratories made to play the flute. S/He even has lungs. And lips, if you can call them that. And, well, there are all these other robot parts that if you are in the in-crowd in robotsville, you know what they mean (”5-DOF” means lips in [...]
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Looking for a VERY cool gift to give to an inquisitive child with latent herding tendencies? Look no further! Some of us old timers remember those plastic see-into ant farms. Well, times have changed and this little invention takes us to the next level. Think geek will sell you a space age ant farm for [...]
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Bruce Shapiro was a doctor for the first part of his life, and apparently now has turned artist. And an excellent one as well. Here is one little amusing aspect of his output from his website called “The Art of Motion Control” — drawing on eggs.
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This fascinating invention courtesy Pink Tentacle.
The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number [...]
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