Last week I heard a piece on NPR about alpine cheese. In particular they were talking about a cheese producer in Vermont who was making Beaufort cheese, which is typically made in France. They also talked to some French cheese makers who said it was getting harder to make their cheese due to global warming. In addition to the pastures growing different types of plants for the cows to eat, the hotter weather has made the cows thirstier, meaning they drink more water, and the milk they produce is less concentrated, requiring more milk to produce the same amount of cheese. Stupid global warming.
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One Thousand Google Dollars
At the very end of August, I passed $1,000 in lifetime (just over three years) earnings from Google. I had already broken that with Amazon, but I’m halfway through a 4-month hiatus with them, so I won’t start earning from Amazon again until November 1.
I was crazy to make note of how regular Google is because immediately thereafter monthly earnings dropped way off and it took me 4 months instead of the normal 3 to earn another check.
New iPods come out on Wednesday . . .
Fibonacci’s Pine Cone
Yesterday some of us at work were walking back from lunch and I mentioned there were rumors of a new iPod. It was going to be as thin as a nano, but the size of a squat 5G. Already people were saying how ugly it was and part of that is because it isn’t a golden rectangle where the ratio of the long side to the short side is 1.618:1.
Plasma
Recently I borrowed The Prestige from Netflix. While I wasn’t crazy about the movie (B), one of the side characters was Nikola Tesla. I knew he was an important guy in the history of electricity, but his story really is interesting (not as interesting as the movie would have you believe). He is famous for Tesla coils which create huge lightning bolts in science fiction movies. On a practical side he was a proponent of AC electricity for home use despite Thomas Edison having everyone convinced that DC was the way to go. There is a monument to Tesla at Niagara Falls since his work turned their otherwise useless waterfall into a money-making electricity machine (see a NOVA episode dedicated to him).
Anyway, there were some really neat Tesla coils in the movie and it reminded me that I was interested in getting one of those plasma lamps. Since I had recently won a $25 gift certificate for using transit to get to work, I thought that the time had come. So the lamp is pictured below:
Bridge Collapse
A couple of people on the bulletin board asked me what I thought about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and what caused it. I wrote the following, which provides very little insight, but I haven’t posted anything on the blog in a while. We were kidding on vacation that I would need to get back to help fix the bridge, but I was at least able to scan the documents I mentioned below which were requested by the investigators. Every bridge collapse causes engineers to change how we do our work, and this won’t be any different even though it isn’t known what caused the problem yet.
Here’s what I wrote about why the bridge fell: