I will forgo cat pictures this week because this picture (from yahoo news ) is just SO CUUUUUUTE.
(I got it from Tild ~.)
Its been 100 years since Albert Einstein had his annus mirabilis, the miracle year in 1905 when at the age of 26 he published no less than five papers that revolutionized physics, all written in his spare time.
There’s a lot of discussion about Einstein going on this year. NASA suggests jokingly in a very friendly, well-written and approachable article that Einstein was so brilliant, so creative, so unusual, that perhaps he wasn’t of this earth at all.
(I got it from Science Blog.)
Woman Finds Human Finger In Her Chili.
Oh, yawn, yet another human-body-parts-found-in-fast-food story. Someone had a lot of fun writing this article, though:
The chili was made from scratch at midday on Tuesday and served for five hours before the finger was discovered. Health officials say it is cooked at 170 degrees.
Well OK then. It may be a torn off human finger tip, but its COOKED at the approved food-safe temperature.
Officials have launched what they call a trace-back. They are going to contact all of the food processors who made the ingredients. Somewhere, someone is missing a finger.
Of course what happens if they don’t find the finger’s owner? In which fast food product can we find the rest of him?
“…and the strawberries were pretty nice at the Farmer’s Market today,” I babbled to Eric, unloading my bags, “but the arugula was kind of yucky-looking, so I didn’t — OH MY GOD LOOK! There’s a GIANT BIRD on the lawn!”
The giant bird in question was a wild turkey. I’ve seen them once in a while down in the valley and in grassy areas while I’ve been out cycling, but never around here. Its supposed to be too wooded up here for them. And they normally wander about in packs. But this was definitely a turkey, it was definitely alone, and as we watched and I madly took pictures it very casually walked all the way across the lawn, up the driveway, and down the hill past the barn and out of sight.
It was a really really big bird. And I was thinking as it walked away: “I’ll bet its really tasty.”
At the book warehouse. Part of
Sob Story, a very well done comic by Ed Brisson.
Of course I am guilty of asking librarians and bookstore clerks really dumb questions myself (“I’m looking for that book about tuscany…”) because most of the time they can actually answer them. Sometimes they even like it.
I was in Seattle this last autumn with my mom, and we took a tour of the new Seattle Public Library. Its an incredibly gorgeous and weird building and definitely worth a trip if you are in the area. As part of the tour the guide explained that they were particularly proud of their reference librarians — that they could answer any question about anything. Anything at all.
Well it so happened that there had been a particular book I had read when I was a kid that had deeply freaked me out. I had been looking for this one book ever since but I had forgotten the author, the title, and most of the plot. Others had read this same book — I had had conversations about it on usenet and on various BBSes and I was not the only out who had been way affected by it, but none of us could remember any details about it. I had done web searches about it over the years and nothing had turned up. So when the Seattle Public Library bragged about being able to answer any question, I immediately thought of my mystery book.
We were staying at the hotel across the street from the library, so I went back on a quiet afternoon and wandered over to the children’s section. “I’m looking for a book,” I explained to the librarian. “Published probably in the 70’s, about a psychological experiment done on teenagers. They are imprisoned in a maze and have to dance in order to get food pellets. It was a really dark book. There were escher-like stairs on the cover.”
The librarian tilted her head sideways for a moment and said “That sounds like William Sleator.” She typed something into the computer and then read off to me: “House of Stairs: Five sixteen-year-old orphans of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in a house of endless stairs as subjects for a psychological experiment on conditioned human response.”
Well, I’ll be damned. Less than a minute to solve a problem I had been working on for twenty years. Score one for the Seattle Public Library.
The book, by the way, is not nearly as terrifying as I remember it (I mean, food pellets, right) but one is much more easily traumatized when one is ten.