The Chemistry department invites applicants for an assistant professor whose research requires the outdated and esoteric equipment we have sitting around in our labs.
Links
Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.
Torrey’s costumes are often some of my favorites at Norwescon, and it’s nice to see her featured in The Stranger!
In today’s offering of “weirdly cute”: a snail playing with a carrot. At least, that’s sure what it looks like is going on, at the risk of being too quick to anthropomorphize snail behavior.
I don’t think I’ve seen any of Billy Porter’s work, don’t really know who he is, but that is one hell of an outfit, and I really like what he has to say about it.
Bed used in hotel honeymoon suite for 15 years then discarded in a parking lot, rescued by an antiques dealer, and initially believed to be Victorian, turns out to be Henry VII’s marriage bed.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had 6.4 inches of snow Friday, according to the National Weather Service. It’s the second most snow recorded in the area in a day for the past 20 years, and nearly beat our yearly average (6.8 inches) in a single day.
I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of four-wheeling as a recreational activity; it seems to me wasteful and often damaging to the environment. That said, I can allow a little leeway if you have the chance to do it on the moon (gorgeous stabilized 60FPS video).
Linkdump for January 11th through January 23rd
Sometime between January 11th and January 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- A meteor hit the moon during the lunar eclipse. Here’s what we know.: “In what may be a first-of-its-kind event, a flash of light seen during totality has astronomers on the hunt for a new crater on the moon.”
- DuckDuckGo Taps Apple Maps to Power Private Search Results: "We're excited to announce that map and address-related searches on DuckDuckGo for mobile and desktop are now powered by Apple's MapKit JS framework, giving you a valuable combination of mapping and privacy."
- To save the sound of a Stradivarius, a whole city must keep quiet: “Cremona is home to the workshops of some of the world’s finest instrument makers, including Antonio Stradivari, who in the 17th and 18th centuries produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made. The city is getting behind an ambitious project to digitally record the sounds of the Stradivarius instruments for posterity, as well as others by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two other famous Cremona craftsmen. And that means being quiet.”
- An Idea for Electoral College Reform That Both Parties Might Actually Like: “As long as we continue to have the Electoral College, we should make it work as intended. This means bringing it back into compliance with the majority-rule principle.”
- The oral history of the Hampsterdance: The twisted true story of one of the world’s first memes: “What started 20 years ago in Nanaimo, B.C. spawned hit songs, worldwide LOLs and a giant hairball of drama.”
TIL: Titivillus was the “patron demon of scribes”, blamed for causing typos.
I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus … I muste eche day … brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes.
National Geographic: “Before we explored outer space, we tried to paint it: In 1939, artist Charles Bittinger imagined worlds we hadn’t traveled to yet—sometimes with impressive accuracy.” Gorgeous artwork, from a time when we knew far less than we do now.