The Artichoke: The only food that takes up more space after it's been eaten?

If anyone here is interested in alternate reality games, there's apparently a humdinger going on in San Francisco right now. There are flyers up all over town for the Jejune Institute, which looks like the kind of thing you might have gotten if Richard Feynman and Kary Mullis had become scientologists, attracted their own founders, and ended up ( Read more... )

I was just making a comment in which I ironically referred to something as "Teh Cute," but I made a typo and wrote "The" instead of "Teh." Now I'm just sitting staring at that and I'm not even sure what words are for anymore.

A little while back, I noticed that when I'm looking at a white part of an LCD projection -- either at the screen or (sidelong) at the light coming out of the projector -- something odd happens: If I move my head, I get tracers that very clearly decompose the image into red, green, and blue copies ( Read more... )

The MRI today went off very smoothly. I had a contrast agent injected, and afterwards I looked at a little more information about that online. It fascinates me how gadolinium is massively toxic and lethal if you have severe kidney disease, and evidently completely harmless if you don't. That appears to be the case, though. In the process of ( Read more... )

When I walk down the street, as far as I know everyone I pass is a stranger. But when an old woman stops me and starts chatting, it's clear she must know me. So, while we're making small talk, I'm desperately searching the conversation for clues, to narrow down who she could be. It seems rude to interrupt and say, "Sorry, do I know you?"This is ( Read more... )

Holy cow, it's 2:30 PM.

Those sleep meds sure do work when you give them a chance.

Just ten or twelve years ago, it might have been very unsettling to get a hang-up phone call in the middle of the night from an impossible telephone number (914636260245). Now, not only can I learn in a matter of minutes that someone in Sankaran Koil, Tamil Nadu, India probably dialed a wrong number, I also know how India's national telephone ( Read more... )

A few blocks from my house is New Way Mah Market, a largely unanglicized Chinese supermarket. You can buy fresh seaweed in bulk. It is the saltiest thing I've ever put in my mouth, and it tastes like the ocean.

(euziere loved it, of course.)

Do you ever get the thing where you stand up too quickly and you start to pass out? It happens to me when I'm dehydrated. Usually I just get a little tunnel vision, but there have been times when I've basically experienced ego-loss -- no sense of where I am, how long I've been like this, or what life is like outside this universe of unsteadiness ( Read more... )