Category Archives: Frivolity

Procrastination is important to a well-balanced mind.

I am the Atom!

My friend mdvlst just reminded me that there is actually an obscure DC superhero with my name, and moreover, she’s a scientist superhero: Jessica Palmer is the costumed super-hero known as the Atom and hails from a parallel reality known … Continue reading

Posted in Department of the Drama, Frivolity | Comments Off

Sneeze In Your Sleeve!

I’ve had the sniffles now for a few days, and as always, I feel self-conscious about where my germs are landing. This little tutorial combats wayward nasally-propelled microbes with the Sneeze-In-Your-Sleeve strategy. Very amusing – and it suggests another possible use for the tentacle arm.  … Continue reading

Posted in Biology, Education, Frivolity | 3 Comments

The Making of a LEGO

Businessweek has this little slideshow of a LEGO factory. Neat. Apparently the system is so precise, only 18 in a million LEGO bricks are defective. Which sounds about right; I’ve never found an irregular LEGO, and I’ve handled thousands. Still, … Continue reading

Posted in Frivolity | 2 Comments

Tentacle Arm

  What more is there to say, really? It’s a tentacle arm. A friend of mine told me I need “at least two” of these. . . . . . at LEAST two???? What?? And once the first one’s on, … Continue reading

Posted in Cephalopodmania, Conspicuous consumption, Frivolity | 1 Comment

Who’s your daddy? Ask PCR

Ah, I have the warm fuzzies now for my eppendorfs and thermal cycler. . . but I’m sure it will pass.

Posted in Biology, Film, Video & Music, Frivolity, Science | Comments Off

3-D Textual Spirographs!

. . . or something like that. Courtesy of JK Keller, these Volumetric Redundancies represent the number of times a word appears in a given text. Red cubes represent non-unique words, with size depending on number of occurrences; blue cubes … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Frivolity, Words | 3 Comments

This would be my third-favorite show

Geoffrey Chaucer is back on his blog after a hiatus almost as long as Lost‘s, with a comment on the television writers’ strike. He proposes some shows of his own which sound a tad familiar, perhaps – but in literature, … Continue reading

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Frivolity, Littademia | 2 Comments

Virginia battles indecent trucks

Tragically, the epidemic of hanging artificial genitalia from truck hitches has spread, prompting still more state legislation, this time in Virginia (as I posted in 2007, Maryland already tried to ban them). We are a really bizarre species to find … Continue reading

Posted in Frivolity | 5 Comments

Awwwww

National Geographic  I used to have a pet hooded rat, which is why I think the giant rat recently discovered in Indonesia is actually kinda cute. Plus, it’s almost as large as my cat! It would be hilarious to get … Continue reading

Posted in Biology, Frivolity | 2 Comments

London signage

Is there some sort of typological standard for disembodied medical hands? I took this picture in London, and thought nothing of it at the time – but it does strongly resemble the hands in Nicole Natri’s collage, and the descriptions of … Continue reading

Posted in Destinations, Frivolity | 2 Comments