A little zen to start you off whether you are still recovering from family, food, and/or football. This is an installation of hundreds of aluminum weather vanes on the side of the Randall Museum in San Francisco. Entitled Windswept, these vanes capture the wind patterns over the building both large and small. Artist Charles Sowers aims to create works "that allow us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena." My take: the wind patterns illustrated by these vanes are both useful data and abstract beauty.
"Happy Dinosaur Dissecting Day" is the new "Happy Thanksgiving."
Think the turkey made you sleepy yesterday? Think again.
In other turkey news, wild male turkeys can gobble on cue. Check out this recording with 300 turkeys as the back up singers.
The physics of "Punkin Chunkin," that annual tradition of flinging orange gourds through the air. [VIDEO]
At least one Thanksgiving dinner yesterday was out of this world, on the International Space Station that is. [VIDEO]
And speaking of dehydrated food, test subjects will eat nothing but in service of research into how to feed astronauts on a mission to Mars.
The delicious science of caramel.
More science of food: how to tell the age of an egg (scroll to the first comment).
Earth's tilted axis, responsible for our seasons, is potentially the result of a gravitational interaction with another star - a galactic drive-by, if you will.
If you go ice-skating this holiday season, you are continuing to baffle scientists every second you are on the ice.
Lastly, some non-holiday related geek, but too good to pass up:
South Pacific island on Google Maps found NOT TO EXIST. [VIDEO]
WWII carrier pigeon with encrypted message no one can crack found in chimney in Southern England.
Dr. Who turns 49 today! Celebrate with the endless fun content on the BBC's official website. As my favorite Doctor would say, fantastic!
Keep on geekin' on.
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It's the picky English teacher in me, but the word is "caramel". Carmel's a town in California.
I shall now return to delighted lurker status. Happy Friday!
Nice for San Francisco, but here in my city we have installed hundreds of Mitt Romneys on the sides of our buildings to use as weather vanes. So far so good...
LOL! I read this comment out to my husband. :)
Eating a large amount of anything makes a person sleepy.
Not to mention the wine or other alcoholic drinks many people have with (and/or before or after) their Thanksgiving meals.
...and most of the "what have you been up to all year" conversations....zzzzzz
The Chief technology guy at a large map company in Scotland told me that one of the ways they protected their IP was to intentionally introduce false information of no consequence- such as a non existent dead end road in the countryside. You take the plagiarizer to court and show the judge the multiple identical errors, and it is game over for the data thief.
It may be the less likely hypothesis in this case of Sandy Island, but it is a side note about a centuries old form of IP protection.
Hasn't anyone noticed the shape of that "island". It is suspiciously similar to that of a large cruise ship, although WAY too big!!
So!! Two birds with one answer... The pigeon is carrying a bogus message..
Caramel/Carmel? And what about "threw"? We all know threw/through, don't we?
"[O]range gourds threw the air" ? Not really. Not even on Black Friday . . .
Well, aren't we Net Nannies having fun today?
What would we do without these folks who are grammatically sloppy?
Good catch, LadyEdy. I was about to wag my finger too but you got there first.
You left out thru.
On the same subject, LadyEdy, how about earth's "titled axis"? I didn't know that an axis could be so noble. And to answer your question, Edy, without folks who make errors we grammar/spelling enthusiasts would not have the opportunity to squawk (or gobble).
There are a lot of teachers who are on this blog. You know what I mean, you know what I mean? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink,.pop, pop fizz, fizz you know what a relief that is.
Thanks for the heads up on the Randall Museum wind vanes. Will check that out soon.
I could watch the wind vanes for hours. Very Zen. :D
Me too. I have to build one of those!!
Whereas wind chimes are presumptious. Fortunately they must break all the time as you would think every third neighbor would have some tiresome cowbell trip always banging away..
Yes, and there is nothing un Zen about other kinetic art, like flying punkins. Of course there are a few more neighbor complaints in some of the snobby neighborhoods....
Me, I sit wondering if I could grow pumpkins in bullet shaped molds- using varieties that make super dense rinds. You get a rifle spin on one of those, gradually accelerated over a long distance and you could probably get it up to a couple mach, right? And with a good spin it would go miles.
I make my own wind chimes out of old kitchen utensils, they make for excellent Christmas gifts, that and my hogcorn pillows, you can use hot or cold.If you can bake, you can give your cookies away in decorative tins. I tried that once, they didn't turn out so good, the wolf liked them. I thought about giving them to my neighbors, but, my neighbors are too nice, they don't really deserve my cookies, plus they would never speak to me again.
Putting all pickiness aside, I, for one, would like to thank Summer for taking some time from her Holiday celebrations to share some of this tasty Geek with all of us...
:-)
Thanks Summer........it's a wonderful way to spend an hour or 2.......I love your submissions to the blog.Hope your recovery is going well......saw the pics on your site.....fascinating & frightening all at the same time.
We will always have Autumn, to look forward too. Also, isn't it true that the real Smashing Pumpkins crashed the Punkin Chuckin Concert?I heard it got pretty ugly, especially when they let all those rats out of their cages.What lengths people go to, just for purely entertainment value. No, toilet papering this year, even better, it's getting too expensive.Flying lawn chairs is still an option.
About that carrier pigeon, it's a code that only 2 people can de-code, You assign letters to numbers and you switch the letters with the made up alphabet. It looks like they were trying to report how many casualties there were.
Huh? How did you figure that? (Color me impressed.)
Danger Will Robinson
http://chucksmomentoftruth.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/the-fiscal-cliff-danger-will-robinson/
The weather vanes are hypnotic! We need a winter project so I'm going to suggest to my husband that we build a smaller version with smaller vanes. We live on a windy corner so we could be zenned out all the time LOL
The perfect word - hypnotic. I could watch them for hours - soothing as watching fish swim but with more info - the definition of "winds variable" - the shifting patterns blended with no pattern at all. Oh, yeah...
My alphabet soup is encrypted! And so are my Alpha Bits! And I have tried using my computer but it doesn't have enough bytes to digest the information!
The vanity of it all! I hope they are very well attached, if not the wind could be in the NEWS! And I remember when they used pointers to point out the direction of the wind.
And Ms. Ash, I also compliment you on the excellent job you have done providing us with interesting reading today. We all do flubs and dubs and it is fun to get back at those who have pointed a finger at us -- what goes around . . .
BTW, my granddaughter and her husband are post-docs at UCSF and were looking for something interesting to do tomorrow -- my email about the museum answered that question for them. Thanks.
It really doesn't matter about the age of the egg its how it tastes! And that's no yoke!
It wasn't the turkey that put me to sleep it was the Jets! Another thing that can't fly!
I thought I heard the sound of 300 turkeys before! It was at the RNC!
I was amused that Mr Martin chose to interpret the undecipherable pigeon message as am indication that his government was hiding something particularly sensitive. One-time pad encryption uses a sequence of random letters that was sent out well in advance of the final message, and a message that "adds in" that patternless noise at both ends is truly unbreakable without the pad. Could this particular message nonetheless have been something uniquely sensitive, even after all of those years? Well of course it could have been. But Occam's Razor says that taking the simpler explanation is more likely to be right more often.
I think that the Carrier pigeons were trained in New Jersey, Englands' sister island, and that they both were reporters, commenting on the war. I'm going to try and write only the letters missing from the pigeongraph, then using my Jumble skills I will decipher the message. To indicate the number 27 is interesting, there are only 26 alphabets, so by writing the missing letters down, might be the answer. Also, there's a hyphen missing. It could have been criminal because alot of inmates had carrier pigeons too. An autopsy on the pigeon might prove useful. Numbers are usually backwards in mysteries too. So, they were also looking for 72 virgins at that time. The number could mean an actual age of someone, or year, or even bottles of water. It gets too complicated after that.
I do hope you realize that if you really wanted to, you could leverage that kind of insightful analysis to get a job at Fox News?... :)
The picture looks more like a bunch of tiny arrows or acupuncture needles that were shot into the back of a very hairy monster, Chubacka . Just saying, that's what it looks like to me. The brown could be recognized as a big dirt hill, and the weather vanes represent new stars or odd shaped icicles or snowflakes. They kinda look like tiny trumpets, you can use them as windchimes, or Christmas ornaments. The largest pair of earrings ever? I just sent my stunt double to investigate weather vanes for me. I'm not going to say another word about it, I need more info.
Rooster weather vanes represent Christianity, the 3 strikes you're out law.The largest is in Spain.Why do we need to know which way the wind is blowing, they come with a compass. All Christian churches are supposed to have a rooster weather vane. For sailors weather vanes are imperative. There is a special one dedicated to the Battle at Normandy.Yup, I can see it now, the weather vanes are going to replace the stars that are on houses now, or they can have both. They need to build them Made in U.S.A.
Windswept was worth a small donation to the Randall Museum, just for the pleasure of seeing it in action for 88 seconds. Now if we could just persuade them to post a live link for continuous viewing.... I'm afraid I don't know from Zen, but it sure is hypnotic and peaceful.
Thanks so much, Summer!
Happy birthday Doctor Who! M y favorite Doctor was Tom Baker.Like the original star trek Doctor Who was entertaining rather than too cerebral.
How to tell the age of an egg?-I love you guys.
I have to agree with Tom Baker as the best Doctor Who. Although the series was designed for children, it attracts a large adult audience. I discovered it on the local PBS channel because it ran after Monty Python. Both are still my favorite British series along with Fawlty Towers which had two short seasons.
South Pacific Sandy Island
Shows to pictures titled:
Exhibit a: snowy forest on sandy island
Exhibit b: foggy forest on sandy island
While this is inconsistent with the latitudes, and plant species.
What we have is Atlantis or perhaps Australis, this would allow time travel technology, that could explain these visitations.
Brigadoon?
Bird Codes Read Here:
"Says stay away from chinmey, the air in there is terrible!", Unfortunatey it was not wearing its spy glasses.
Hmmm, I read it as "Santa to be delayed stop Need more reindeer stop