An excerpt from The Perfect Edge, The Ultimate Guide to Sharpening for Woodworkers:
Rust
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Author Archives: gmcdavid
“…to spite your face”
About Bank Transfer Day….
You do not hurt large banks by withdrawing your own (small) accounts. Really. On the contrary, you’re doing them a huge favor, and making them more efficient and more profitable.
More details at Why Bank Transfer Day actually helped banks.
This is consistent with what I learned in the 18 years I was employed by large banks.
Cute problem in rocket science
Ixnay on the iPod:
I actually did have an iPod once, a sleek 30-gig number with a brilliant video screen and space for nearly half of my comically large music collection. I watched a video on it exactly once—Breaking Bad, season one—cringed with horror every time I dropped it and felt the $400 hole in my wallet for longer than I’d owned the thing when I inevitably lost it.
[My Coby MP3 player is] worth next to nothing so I’m virtually assured never to lose it—unlike apparently every iPhone prototype ever—and I don’t cringe at all when my toddler flings it across the room. And because the next Coby is sure to be just as mediocre, I’ll never need to upgrade—I’ve stepped off the escalators of feature creep and planned obsolescence, and all the expense and toxic e-waste that come with them. Crap technology, it turns out, is green technology.
On a related note, see All aboard, and hold onto your phones.
Sine of the times
From the Bad Astronomer, with the comment:
Some people might consider this a sin, but hey: I’m no angle.
… and if you don’t get it, this might help. Or you could try searching on it; secant you shall find.
A woman of renaissance Italy
Salad Bowl
Once on Iron Chef America one of the chefs was using an electric drill. Alton Brown commented that he loves to see stuff from the hardware store in the kitchen. I don’t think he has seen this yet :-)>
New measurements and what they mean
Noted planetary astronomer Mike Brown wrote:
One of the nice things about science is that no matter what you do, eventually, someone is likely to come along and make the same measurement more precisely than you did, and you will get to learn whether you were right or whether you screwed something up. When you screw up, you do so in a very public manner. Everyone knows. You don’t look so good. It’s best to not screw up.
Monday Night Irish Class, October 24, 2011
Irish Class, October 24, 2011
Rang Gaeilge, an 24ú lá Mí Dheireadh Fómhair 2011
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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ
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Will was out, so we joined Mary’s class for the
evening. Mary was also out at another class for the first 45-50 minutes. This was prearranged, and
JS and I had been asked to run the class in her absence. I was a little scared of this, but it actually was
OK.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 