bunsen_h

It seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, that when a Bell or Rogers technician does work in my house, they will negligently disconnect something that happens to be in their way.  Today's Bell guy was no exception.  The thing that he disconnected was just an extension cord that, at the time, had nothing plugged into it.  But given that it ran underneath a couple of things, there was no way that he could have been sure of that, nor that it couldn't have been important that I be able to plug something into it without having to search for why it wasn't working.

... Bell or Rogers?  Whichever one you've most recently had to deal with.

One of the sillier tropes of science fiction is the race of beings who "age backwards", who somehow come into existence as elderly and feeble and then become younger and younger.  If they are not literally going backwards in time relative to some other standard — moving backwards, perceiving in reverse, etc. — there are some obvious paradoxes.  The Red Dwarf episode "Backwards" at least had a degree of internal consistency, but the Animated Trek episode "The Counter-Clock Incident" was just silly.  (Alan Dean Foster's novelization of that episode lampshaded some of the problems.)

I had a strange thought: an interstellar empire of such beings.  Their starships' engines are driven by antenatal infants' being yanked back to their mothers to disappear.  Utilizing the power of paradox.

I had a weird dream this morning of playing a role-playing game in which all of the player characters were dragons.  Typical adventures involved things like pushing back against human incursions into dragon territory, and fighting antagonist dragons who were trying to muscle in.  Player dragons could have a variety of alignments, skills and abilities, dragon type, and so forth.

See also: Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw.

There's a bug in Musescore's web interface that I'm seeing quite consistently, which their developers seem not to be able to reproduce. I have several scores on their server which are quite short but which feature many repeats, resulting in a fairly long play duration. That duration is shown at the top left of the score, as displayed in a web browser, and should be 3:19:48.  But every browser I've tried, with a variety of setup options, on two machines at home and on one at my library, shows it as 27:19:48 -- that is, an extra day tacked on.  The pieces are monotonous, but not that monotonous..!

If you wouldn't mind, would you please take a look at: https://musescore.com/user/28554317/scores/9087566, and let me know what duration you see just above the upper left corner of the score?  (At the library, I had to expand the page to "full screen" mode with a button at the top left in order to see the duration display.  I don't know why that was different from my machines at home; it may be a matter of screen resolution.)  It might also be useful to me to know what operating system and browser you used.

Thanks!

I've been playing with copper compounds for the last few months.  The goal is to work out good methods of plating copper onto stainless steel, so I can make a sturdy electrical connection to it, so I can accomplish a project I've had in mind for a few years.
 
( Details of the chemistry and process... )

What I got was this:



This is a thin surface crust on the solution, and I think that it consists of dark-blue copper/ammonia salts, with veins of light-blue copper hydroxide.  The veining appears to be increasing over a period of days.  It shows best if the jar is strongly lit from the side, minimizing highlights and reflections from the dark areas.  This is a temporary state, since the crust is thin and fragile, and the veins should eventually spread to cover the surface as more ammonia evaporates.  All of this is a fortunate accident resulting from my desire to play further with a "failure".

This ad has been popping up in a few places recently.



Well, it would certainly reduce a car engine's gas consumption. That much is true.

Their intention is that people will click on the thing, and their browser will follow the link to a scam for one of those fake devices that supposedly lets an engine run on less fuel.  But how many people will simply do what the picture shows?

Young idiots were disdaining the real courts even back in good Queen Victoria's glorious days.

I continue to sleep very poorly. Part of the problem is long-standing, and part is due to ongoing pain from adhesions from my bike accident last summer.  I get enough hours of sleep, but not enough deep sleep.  Even if I add a couple of hours to my sleep time, I'm no better rested.  My sleep study of a decade or so ago showed no indication of sleep apnea, so that probably isn't an issue.

There's a tendency for my sleeping brain to come up with something weird in a dream, and then try to hash out the details. This brings me to a not-quite-asleep state. The night before last, there was an interesting topological concept, a rainbow-coloured three-dimensional analogue of the classic Möbius strip.  Trying to capture it in words alone would be challenging; trying to render the images is a project for a better week.

Last night, there was a card game -- or meta-game -- called "Sorry Fish Poker".  The basic idea was that a number of classic card games, in which play passes from player to player around a circle, would be combined.  With each play hand-off, the game would be changed, in strict order, so the players would know in advance what the rules would be with each step.  For m players there would be n games, where m and n have no common factors.  This would keep things relatively fair, as each person would have to play under each game's rules with equal frequency.  One advantage to the meta-game is that a hand of cards that would be unplayably weak under one game's rules might be quite strong under another one.  Overall, it's a game that might be an interesting challenge for those who find simple games like "Crazy 8s" or "Hearts" too easy.  Playing it would be far beyond me at this point.

And of course sorry and poker wouldn't be good candidates for inclusion in this meta-game.  Fish probably wouldn't either.  This is the kind of thing that ruins my sleep, as I try to analyze things that don't quite make sense.

This is supposed to be a 3D print of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. When I saw it, I thought that it looked very familiar from 25 or 30 years ago... and should for any SCA member of about my vintage.



No?

Perhaps if I shift the colours a bit...
( Shifting the colours )

Getting there...
( More colour shifting... )

A Mary Sue should be able to raise a perfect family, lead an invasion, teach all of the people and animals of the world to be vegetarian, command a fleet, design an architectural wonder, write a world-changing book, obviate the need for money, build an impregnable defense, cure an incurable disease, restore the dying to health, re-interpret "orders" to mean what she wants, give orders that save the day, show them show them all, overcome a tragic past, solve problems that have stumped experts, outsmart any attempt at trickery, change her eye colour, destroy a computer with illogic, create a food synthesizer from pocket stuff, defeat the villains, outshine the heroes. Anything less is for background characters.