LOST Bucket of *tools* near here

So sad, very tempted to call just to comfort the guy (or girl)

Deer crossing credit card design

Regular blog readers will know that I have this thing with credit cards. My last pizza card was a great success ... until they send me a new card with a fancy 'chip' right where I would have cut out the slice!

I used a non-mutilated version of the pizza card for a month or two (and surprisingly continued to get nice reactions from folks – just for having a pizza on the card) but I got tired of having the card without any physical damage so I created  a new one.

After doing a few tests on the old card with drills etc, the best method was to melt the holes in was to press quickly with a fire-heated nail. The card has really satisfying crater-like impressions in the back of the card which you can feel when you handle it.

So far reactions from my friends have been nice - but no stranger has commented. This is a huge difference from the pizza card where almost everybody comments. My guess now is that they notice, but because of the implication of guns they are afraid to say anything. Also note that I mis-positioned one of the holes to be over the magnetic strip and had to just scratch it on the surface instead of punching it all the way through.

As always, appreciate feedback in the comments!

Static

I recently arranged a modern art piece in the entranceway to our house:

Static, 2016

Things that naturally look photoshopped – photoshopped to look less photoshopped.

Usually on the blog we like to call out photos that are badly - photoshopped, or things that look photoshoped, but aren't photoshopped at all. But now we have a whole new category:

Things that naturally look photoshopped, and then photoshopped to look less photoshopped.

The ad looks pretty similar to these photos of an f-18 Hornit (and other flying vehicles) travelling near the speed of sound. These kinds of pictures look totally fake the observer uneducated about shock-waves, so it appears that the Navy photoshopped an (f-18?) awkwardly escaping a random smoke puff instead of using a real image.
[update from alert reader/blogger/aerospace engineer Aryeh: the shock-waves here are part of a Prandtl–Meyer_expansion_fan, and the actual plane needs only be near to, not faster than the speed of sound]

When you don't eat ice cream for 2 years

After Eli left his Tropicana orange juice in the fridge for 2.5 years and shared the results, I decided to do my own experiment and left a box of ice cream in the freezer for 2.5 years...

Actually it happened much more organically. See when I first noticed awesome ice crystals forming in the container probably sometime last winter I thought I would wait for a nice cold day so I could go outside and photograph it with my smartphone microscope, as I had been doing ... a lot. Of course I procrastinated for about a year until today when I could not hope for a better ice-cream-sublimation-crystal-photography day (-8 degrees in Boston).

Sadly it was clear that the crazy ice crystals had partially melted at some point leaving stubs so blunt they didn't look like much under the microscope.

And now for the record, the sell by date was 4/2014, and this is what it looked like on the inside, definitely see some evidence of warmer times in the freezer, very sad.

It tasted just like chocolate ice cream, but the consistency was crazy interesting. Almost like eating a cool sponge. Presumably the holes were gaps left by the sublimating water content. Because it was so dry it also didn't feel particularly cold. There was the occasional sharp ice crystal though embedded in the former ice cream though which made it still more interesting.

The endless toothpaste aisle

and I was just looking for regular toothpaste ... could not find it.

A Monumental Election

No not the presidential election ... but the local Medford elections I previously blogged about when two candidates evidently escaped prison.

I apologize to Michael for posting this too late to help his election campaign ... please put jokes in the comments if you can think of any!

It's a girl!

Last Tuesday evening, Stacy gave birth to a 8lb, 4oz baby girl. Stacy and Baby are both home and doing well.

I'll blog about her name at a later point

my Magic Eye pictures, used as album art

I was just investigating a strange bump in the number of hits to my personal website and I discovered something. Almost all of these new hits were from Google image searches landing on a page I made talking about Magic Eye stereograms.

I've always had a surprisingly large number of hits for this page and I always though it was for my most awesome magic eye... this one below which is a 3D topographical map of Antarctica and it is drawn out of penguins. It has been shared numerous places (all without my permission and most credit).

But no, by far the more popular image on the page is the one below. The base for it was drawn crudely by hand and is just a crooked spelling of my last name with some random circle blobs at the top right. Based on a few of the albums it has been shared in, it seems that the look of the picture brings back memories of all those poor quality graphics that were everywhere in the 90's. So people share it, amazingly right alongside some really well done stereograms of cool stuff!



The most hilarious location has got to be - the zooboks safari album art. Their whole site looks kind of like a magic eye and they topped it off by choosing my image for their album art.

Check it out and listen to the music here:

https://zoobookssafari.bandcamp.com/album/scholastic-book-fair-199x-deluxe