Go take a look at Pete Albrecht's blog, where he's posted some of the most dumbfounding amateur astrophotographs I've ever seen. Pete tries to put it in perspective by comparison to how he took astrophotos at Northwestern University 25 years ago, but he doesn't mention the most remarkable thing about his photo of M27 (and the others you can scroll down to): He took them from his back yard in the middle of frakking Orange County, California, under some of the worst supposedly "clear" skies I could imagine. Wow.
I recently ran across a species of flatware that I had never heard of before: The "food pusher." This is actually something children use: It looks a little like a rake with a solid slab instead of teeth, and it's used to push food onto a fork. I think the pusher was invented so that manners-conscious parents (do these exist anymore?) wouldn't have to yell at small children for picking up peas in their fingers. (Me, I'd be glad that they were eating peas at all.) I think it's significant from a table manners standpoint that I've only seen them in sterling silver patterns (old ones, at that) rather than Wal-Mart stainless steel. Our parents were sticklers for table manners, for which I'm glad, but I don't think we were fancy enough people to have food pushers in the drawer. And the engineer in me sees the food pusher as an elegant solution to a problem that vexes adults as well: Getting certain quantized food elements from the plate to the fork without misusing a knife or just trying to stab them. Could food pushers make a comeback? Why don't I think so?
In one of the cleverest anti-terrorism technologies I've seen yet, San Francisco is continuously piping city water from the pumping station through a tank full of bluegills. Bluegills are apparently very sensitive to chemicals in the water, and if they sense something they don't like, they start a motion that's a little like coughing through your gills. Officials hope that if anybody tries to dump something noxious into the city's water, the fish will spot it before it gets too far out of the pumping station.
