Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Have you ever wondered what the analemma looks like on other planets? There's an app for that.
• If you want to cover screwheads or other elements of a laptop that would be disturbed by tampering, use glitter nail polish, the less common the better. The tampering may still happen, but glitter nail polish isn't easy to fake, and at least you'll know that it occurred.
• More evidence that the better part of our modern diet consists of...lies. (Thanks to neil Rest for the link.)
• The Atlantic reminds us of the 40-year war waged on coffee by Mr. C. W. Post of Post cereals, who was trying to build the market for his caffeine-free dirt-flavored cereal beverage Postum.
• Speaking of the devil, Lileks did his signature treatment on Mr. Coffee Nerves some time back. People drank a lot of coffee in the 50s to counteract all the booze that was going down the hatch to keep them from killing one another wholesale. That decade was not Arcadia. It was psychotic.
• Why did good always trounce evil in Middle Earth? It may have been the bad guys' vitamin D deficiency.
• The government of El Salvador has released a boggling video of Salvadorian volcano Chaparrastique, just before and after its recent explosion.
• Michaelangelo's grocery list...with illustrations, natch. (And does this remind anybody else of the handscript style used in the Voynich Manuscript?)
• A collection of science fiction postage stamps. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
• These semi-fossilized English words escaped total fossilization by hiding inside popular idioms. The list lacks "ilk," which sounds like it should an obscure human organ, or even a breed of horse. (Thanks to Gwen Henson for the link.)
• Both MIT and ETH Zurich have made some cool cubical robots that move and balance using flywheels. Ha! I did this in the first chapter of The Cunning Blood: I had gas-turbine powered mechanical dinosaurs that moved (twitchily) by pinching several internal flywheels under the control of a fluidic computer.
• Ceramic squirrels don't injure people. Crazy people holding ceramic squirrels injure people. No one evidently cared what happened to the ceramic squirrel. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)