Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason recently endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance will be held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May (1 May 2003). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason - a concept all Americans can support - and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship." -- From "Why a National Day of Reason?"

Thank you Lord for making the universe so funky and science so entertaining!

(Part of my reaction to a comment someone made about a thermoacoustic chiller on a mailing list.)

It's raining in Baltimore. Not storming; just a slow, steady rain, but with large raindrops (making that special "big raindrops" sound). I just wandered upstairs to have a look, and heard Perrine jump off the radiator as I climbed the stairs.

When I got to the doorway of the back room, I saw a patient, uncomfortable-looking, damp, grey cat sitting on the windowsill. I moved slowly, so as not to startle him, and spent a while just watching. He was looking a different direction at first, but he did turn to look into the room again and our eyes met. Perrine, who had met me in the doorway, returned to a spot in front of the window, gazing up at her suitor. The grey tom sat there, almost looking as though he expected to be let in. I felt sorry for him, sitting in the rain.

I wondered whether, if I were to open the window, he would flee at my approach or come inside to get out of the rain and into Perrine. I wondered, but my curiosity (and my sympathy for the rained-upon) was not enough to tempt me to perform the experiment.

It was a sweet tableau, a cat on each side of the windowpane, but my nearest camera was two floors away, and I knew the pose would not last long enough for me to fetch the camera. After a little while, the tom turned to jump down to the roof (showing me in the process that my guess of his sex was correct), and Perrine leaned forward to watch his departure. Then she followed me back downstairs to sit in my lap while I wrote this.

• The Shakespeare Programming Language is the first langauge I've seen more verbose than COBOL, but it's far prettier. "The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. There are no fancy data or control structures, just basic arithmetic and gotos. You could say we have combined the expressiveness of BASIC with the user-friendliness of assembly language." There's a Shakespare to C translator (because the folks who designed it were in a Syntax Analysis class, not a Compiler Design class), so it's possible to actually compile working programs it it. Constants are enumerated by a rather quirky system, but as the authors point out, "As you see, this way of writing constants gives you much more poetic freedom than in other programming languages." String I/O is a bit awkward, but hey, more room for poetry in the source code. My favourite remark in the documentation: "Trying to pop when the stack is empty is a sure sign that the author has not yet perfected her storytelling skills, and will severly disappoint the runtime system."
• Israel's first sadomasochist restaurant, where the waiters and waitresses wear black vinyl, there are shackles attached to the tables, and complaining about the food can get you whipped or put into an iron cage hanging from the ceiling.
• Dark Dungeons: a "Chick Tract" gets the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, complete with silhouettes of the hecklers in front of the "screen". If you're not already familiar with the work of Jack Chick, this is actually a pretty good example of why so many people who disagree with -- are often quite annoyed by -- his theology and reasoning, still can't resist picking up one of his pamphlets when they find one they haven't already read.
• Ben & Jerry's demonstrates thermoacoustic chiller from Penn State, "technology that substitutes sound waves for environment-damaging chemical refrigerants". (Or, as Doug DeJulio put it, "I just love that someone made a refrigerator that works by filling a chamber with gas and then yelling at it.") This looks like the same principle described on the (unfortunately vanished) [EDIT 2004-05-06: page has been restored in a new location] page about the HumCooler that I linked to on 2003-06-10, but is news because it's considerably more compact than previous thermoacoustic chillers.
• An enigmatic machine at Amherst College -- they're soliciting guesses as to just what the heck it is. I especially like the Bose-Einstein guess. (Reading the rest of the guesses, it seems they've gotten a real answer. My own guess was way off.)
• School in Birmingham, England teaching Sindarin: "The children really enjoy it. It breaks the idea that education should simply be aimed at getting a job." And, "It's also very useful if they want to go on to university to study, as it involves looking at some of Tolkien's old manuscripts. This develops some very complex skills."
• Using a tiny corkscrew to pull blood clots out of stroke victims' brains: "In our trial we had patients completely paralysed on one side of their body who returned to normal almost immediately after the clot was retrieved. How often do you get a chance to reverse a patient's stroke on the operating table?" The technique involves a 2.6mm catheter with a miniature corkscrew on the end, guided to the clot with the help of X-ray imaging, screwed into the clot, and pulled back into a larger catheter to be removed from the body. Using a corkscrew to pull a plug out of something: ultimately low-tech. Making an itty bitty corkscrew and guiding it through someone's body to pull a clot out of their brain: I think that counts as high-tech. Love the juxtaposition.
• To bridge the medical science of the previous item and the sex of the following one: Russian Museum to Exhibit Rasputin's Penis (guess what's in the photo at the top of the page.) The museum's founder "told the newspaper that museums of sex and erotica exist in many European countries and he wanted Russia to be a civilized country with a view on the future and with correct views on erotica." On the subject of Rasputin's penis, he said, "Having this exhibit, we can stop envying America, where Napoleon Bonaparte's penis is now kept. ... Napoleon's penis is but a small "pod" it cannot stand comparison to our organ of 30 centimeters ..." Somehow the notion of museum curator penis envy was just not a meme that had crossed my mind until now.
• I was recently searching for the lyrics to Diana Gallagher Wu's "A Reconsideration of Anatomical Docking Maneuvers in a Zero-Gravity Environment" so I could link to them in good conscience without infringing copyright by transcribing them myself ... Despite failing to find that song, I did run into "Making Love Weighing Nothing At All", by Bob Kanefsky, and being unfamiliar with it I figured many of y'all might be as well.
• Abusive rubber stamps from ThinkGeek, included here partly because I know some of you have workplace-idiocy issues to blow off steam about, but mostly because I was amused by the disclaimer: "ThinkGeek is not responsible should you lose your employment by utilizing these fine stamps on the wrong document, in the wrong place, or with the wrong person. You must choose your circumstances to stamp wisely young padawans."