The March of Science
I realize most people don’t come to sweasel.com for the latest breakthroughs in science and technology, but sometimes a generalist blogger is lucky enough to find herself perfectly positioned to break a story the specialists blogs have missed.
Such a lucky find is the self-inflating miniature whoopee cushion.
How is this possible? In my lifetime? you ask. The secret is a light polyester sponge inside the cushion.
To operate, place your thumb over the grommet and squeeze, making the expected poo, poo sound. When the cushion is subsequently released, the sponge expands, pulling air in through the vent hole and refilling the item for immediate use.
Whatever little yellow genius at the Ho Lee Fuk Toy and Novelty Company of Shanghai came up with that one, I owe him a beer.
Have a good weekend, everyone. And remember — adult supervision is required. I don’t know what kind of dimwitted rug monkeys y’all are breeding out there, but I bet one of them could put out an eye with a whoopee cushion.
May 7, 2010 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 36
Shall. We. Play. A. Game?
I was going to post tonight about how I made my first strawberry jam, but I didn’t make strawberry jam. I made a big smelly bowl of angry black napalm. Mmmm! So, seeing how much fun everybody was having geekin’ out, I dared Uncle B to dig out his old Osborne 1 and see if we could kick it back to life.
Remember the Osborne? It was the first sort-of portable computer. They called it a “luggable.” I saw my first at the very same 1985 computer fair where I bought that copy of Hack. I thought it was the most unbelievably mindblowingly cool thing ever.
All packed up, it was about the size and weight of a typical Singer sewing machine. Lay it on its side, the bottom came off and became the keyboard. There was a tiny green monitor in the middle, like an oscilloscope. There were buttons and knobs (buttons! and knobs!) and 5¼” floppy drives (Uncle B was rich enough to buy the dual-floppy model, but not rich enough for dual-sided drives. The operating system was on one floppy and the program on another). Oh, it was very. So very.
Uncle B had TWO. That’s right, beyotches; that’s how cool he was. He doesn’t know where the other one got to, but we’ve been lugging this one around from place to place. So I made a high-pitched keening noise until he let me plug it in and switch it on (I did so well with the strawberry jam experiment, why not?)
Did it boot? No, of course not. He doesn’t know where the OS floppy is (though you can bet he’s got it somewhere). But it woke up and it by-god TRIED to boot.
Anybody know where we can get a single-sided 5¼” copy of CP/M?
June 25, 2009 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 19
Visible from space
Here at Stoatiweaselco, we believe in going the extra mile. Giving a little more. Being there for you.
Sure, it took the Sun to break the story, and Drudge to disseminate it around the world. But only sweasel.com searched Google maps, tirelessly explored the neighborhood and ultimately discovered the Surrey rooftop on which some schoolboys years ago spelled out “COCK” in bricks. Just to bring you this URL.
Don’t thank us. It’s what we’re here for.
June 15, 2009 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 13
Did you know…
‘Ubuntu’ is Swahili for ‘no wifi’?
Okay, okay…Ubuntu is actually slipping into place much better than Fedora did (I hate to admit that; I was a Red Hat fan).
I nicked a castoff laptop from work which I’m trying to turn into a studio machine. But it’s 2:40 in the morning and that’s as far as I’m going to get tonight. I have come over unexpectedly shit-faced.
Ubuntu!
April 7, 2009 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 20
Pencils!
The Sanford Corporation (a Newell Rubbermaid Company) is the world’s largest manufacturer of writing instruments, mostly by way of corporate om-nom-nomination of familiar brands: uni-ball, Sharpie, PaperMate, Waterman, Parker, Prismacolor, Eberhard faber, Turquoise, Col-erase, Empire-Berol and more…more than you ever dreamed.
Doug of the Pencil Pages toured the Sanford pencil factory in Lewisburg, Tennessee in 2004 — in June, when a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of pencil — and brought back this excellent photo essay.
Because having nothing to say for myself doesn’t even slow me down.
January 1, 2009 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 12
Splashing out
Today begins Woolworth’s last, agonal 50% off sale. Or, I should say “50%” off sale. The signs blare ALL STOCK 50% OFF and, in tiny letters halfway, “up to.”
Our local Woolies is crap in good times, so we took a drive to a posher neighborhood. It also was crap, but in a posher neighborhood. I’d estimate most things were discounted by ten percent, making them a slightly less attractive bargain than the markdown bin in the supermarket. But with crazy people and very, very long lines. Still, I got a few things. Needle and thread. Clothes brush.
And this item, which floats around in the bath and displays the water temperature in degrees C and F. Now I can finally learn metric degrees, while simultaneously discovering if the water is really 200ºF by the Weaselfeets and 40ºF behind Weaselass Dam.
Uncle B says I could just feel with my hand, but That Would Not be Science.
Happy Friday, you poor ol’ working stiffs! Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition — cheers!
December 5, 2008 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 25
…stand by…
In other words, you might not hear from me again.
If my machine survives this operation — what the hell? — I might just
upgrade to the latest WordPress and try breaking the blog. Because
what I haven’t got enough of at the moment is stress.
October 14, 2008 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 15
The stealth fighter that almost torpedoed a weasel
The research and engineering company I work for really didn’t need Xtreme image processing technology to do boring old science. Computers that could do graphics cost gigantic bucks in the ’80s and, really, the ink-and-vellum we’d used for a hundred and twiddly-two years would do what needed doing just fine. The purpose of all that expensive computer graphics tech was marketing. It was worth a few hundred thousand corporate bucks for pie charts that made prospective clients go, “holy farging shift, what consummate geeks!”
So Weasel got excellent toys to play with.
We started with a turnkey business graphics system. Then, in 1987, when Photoshop was just a gleam in Thomas Knoll‘s eye, they bought me (me! Mine! Mine, I tell you!) a digital image processing system. Um, a thingie that did Photoshoppy stuff.
I had worked with photos for years before that, but even I have trouble remembering now what life was like before Photoshop. It was hard, slow and expensive to alter a photo in any way, and even the most skillful job usually looked like shit. People took for granted the accuracy of photos, because that was the correct thing to do.
All that changed with digital image processing, and I had a blast giving people their first taste of it. My workstation was a standard stop on the company tour. Typically, I would take a snapshot of the man standing in front of me and merrily erase his mustache, give him a third eye and make his ears the size of dinnerplates, in real time. Oh, to see the sweet innocence fade from a middle-aged businessman’s eye!
Another cool thing we could do, because we did all our film processing in-house, was create nifty graphics and produce slides (remember slides?) while a meeting was still in progress. My favorite was the time we captured a picture of the client’s corporate offices from the back page of his annual report, and I used my P’shoppical skills to set the building on fire. I’m told several old guys in rumpled suits leapt up and dashed for the phones when that slide came up. w00t!
So this one time, shortly after we bought the image processor, we were in talks with Lockheed and the salesdude wanted me to make him a nice title slide beforehand. I was given a photo of a plane that was just crap. TOTALLY blurry and out of focus. I couldn’t believe it; it was the shittiest photo I’d ever been given to work with.
Scandalized, I set about cleaning it up. I mean, it was pretty easy to make out what the thing looked like under the blur, if you were a highly trained professional artard like what I am. And so, using my mad illustration skillz, I basically did a light, semi-transparent drawing on top of the photo. It was coming along pretty good, too — downright photorealistic-looking — when my boss walked in and shrieked like he was a little girl and I just dropped a frog down her blouse.
Yeah, see, the F-117 Nighthawk was still highly classified in 1987, and that blurry, deliberately fucked-up photo was the only one that had been officially released — and then only to Lockheed’s technical partners. Who knew? Not this weasel, for sheasel.
So, back in the days when photos never lied, what were my chances of explaining to the nice men from the FBI or the CIA or the Secret Service or whoever how I came by a nice, clean photo of their sooper-secret stealth dingus?
July 1, 2008 — 11:28 am
Comments: 31
Kids! Be the first one on your block…!
Sometimes, listening to NPR pays off.
In 1933, Leo Szilard patented the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard was a physicist and his patent was highly theoretical, but he tried to use it to gain clout in the Manhatten Project later. The government faced him down, but the issue was worrying. What if other scientists tried to control the project through the patent office? What about scientists in other countries?
So the government decided to file patents on the components of the bomb in the name of the individual inventors as the project progressed.
That presented a different set of problems. The whole project was extra-super-double-dog secret. Plutonium was called “copper,” the bomb was called “the gadget.” But patent applications are as clear and as explicit as the applicant can make them.
So the government invoked an obscure rule already in place: an application marked “secret” would be looked at by no-one in the patent office and filed away in a vault un-approved, forever pending.
Harvard grad student Alex Wellerstein has been looking up these old patents. Turns out, as individual components are de-classified, the individual patents have been granted and published. A lot of it is still secret, but thousands of techniques and methods and bits of hardware are now public.
One patent was issued 60 years after the application; that’s the longest he’s found so far. The applications are still reviewed annually. A lawyer for the Department of Energy told Wellerstein:
“Our feeling has been that a significant taxpayer investment was made to create the inventions and to prosecute the patents so that payment of the issue fee finalizes the effort to provide a property right arising from the government funding. Of equal merit is the recognition provided to the inventors. When the patent issues we make a small good faith effort to find the inventor or a surviving spouse and notify them of the issuance of the patent. When notify someone, they are usually deeply moved by the recognition provided for their long ago secret efforts.”
That’s kind of…touching. Of course, a lot of the old coots are dead now, but a tribute is a tribute.
You know what else is kind of touching? Right in the middle of the Big One, dubya-dubya-deuce, the government didn’t write any special laws or invoke any extra-legal war powers. The department that makes war knuckles under to the rules of the department that files papers. They’re building this huge fucking doomsday weapon in the middle of the bloodiest war in the history of man, and they’re worried about violating international patent law.
I don’t care what the lefties say, the American government makes a lousy supervillain.
March 28, 2008 — 9:23 am
Comments: 11
Give the people what they want
Tractor porn, apparently.
See, yeah, I knew there was a lot of free-floating testosterone wafting around this blog. I just didn’t know so much of it belonged to the guys.
January 23, 2008 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 12