There is a new Time Travel Mart in Echo Park (Los Angeles). They’re advertising for a store manager. The Daily Monster reviews the grand opening here.
Here is a portable sudoku game. The colored plastic pieces fit into slots on the board. You could work the puzzle on a plane and the pieces would stay put. What I like about this version is that I can ignore the numbers and solve the puzzle using only the colors. It’s more convenient than juggling nine colored pens with a paper puzzle, or using a mouse and keyboard for a computerized color sudoku.
Another advantage of colors is that two people can work on the same puzzle and no one has to read the numbers sideways or upside down. This board is about seven inches square, which is not so bad for two people, but with three or more, people’s hands would get in the way. I’d like to see something like this, but the size of a Monopoly board.
The “Rubik” part is just branding. This is a standard sudoku, with no connection to Rubik’s cube, other than the brand.
This Common Waxbill, Estrilda astrild, was sitting in the driveway of a parking garage. Frequent commenter CET stopped by for lunch, and we found the bird on the pavement. The bird showed no obvious signs of injury, but it seemed lethargic and didn’t resist being picked up. Perhaps it was stunned after flying into a windshield.
We put the bird in a two-quart sprouting jar with some shredded sudokus and covered the jar with a towel. The bird just sat there. The mouth of the jar is about 3 inches, so you can see that this is a tiny bird. My guess is that it is a juvenile, fully fledged but not adult size yet.
After a couple of hours, we took off the towel and it had recovered enough to try to get out. After a photo shoot, we put the jar next to a hedge and the bird hopped out into the hedge and flew away soon after. All in all, the whole experience was probably pretty traumatic for the bird, but we got a close look and the bird didn’t get run over by a car.
A little more information is available. Here is a PDF from Los Alamos. A Green Freedom plant producing a million gallons of gasoline a day would cost about $5 billion to build, half of which is the nuke. The carbon dioxide in the air (about one part in 3,000) combines with potassium carbonate and water to produce potassium bicarbonate:
CO2 + H2O + K2CO3 –> 2(KHCO3)
Then the potassium bicarbonate is electrolyzed to extract the carbon dioxide, now concentrated. along with some hydrogen. The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are combined to make methanol, and the methanol is used to make gasoline. None of this is rocket science, and most of the pieces are available off the shelf. What is new here is the combination of the pieces of technology in a financially practical way.
Climate Progress calls it a new way to waste energy, and suggests that it would be much more efficient to use the nuclear power plants to run electric cars. Which is true, but the point of liquid fuels is not energy efficiency, but energy density, ease of refueling, and the existence of infrastructure.
Another criticism is that Green Freedom is too expensive… not true at all. That’s like saying if gas is worth $5 a gallon, we can’t afford to make it for $4.60 a gallon. The $4.60 already includes the cost of capital.
Green Freedom just might be part of the energy solution, maybe not here, but in countries less squeamish about nukes.
Cognitive Daily has an article about the “contrast asynchrony illusion”. It looks like the donut holes are out of phase with each other, but they’re not.
Music using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP.
From Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:
Recently on the Dilbert Blog, I mused about the seeming randomness of the lyrics of popular songs. And I challenged my readers to submit random lyrics of their own that could be combined into a song.
Lots of people submitted their random lyrics, and German band RIVO DREI put the best ones together, added music, and created a surprisingly great little song.
One of my blog readers took it an extra step and made a music video using nothing but images from the Internet. You might be surprised how well it came out:
Here is a story about hiking the Mt. Huashan trail in China. I don’t think so. This one is a bit outside my comfort zone. I get dizzy just looking at the pictures.
