DIY QTip

My ears were all clogged up with wax, to the point of itchiness. My pinky is too big, so I tried to steal a q-tip from my roommates without their noticing, but they didn't have any. Ear candles are a little overboard, so I tried a toothpick but that is scary, poking around in your ear with a toothpick.

How can I make it less scary? I took the toothpick, dug around for a cotton ball, and rolled the toothpick against the fluff of the cotton. It turns that that this was nothing less than reinventing the qtip, the exact qtip!

It worked? Of course it worked, that is what a qtip is, they are so inconscpicuous, and so complete; they are so There, that I never thought of them as something that can be *made*. Not so mystical. No patented qtip technology. Why did I never know that? How did that knowledge get lost to humanity? Well, I guess that with both ends cushioned, noone heard this presumably timeless knowledge drop and slip through the cracks of time.

Making them gives you a steady hand and an intuition for fluff, you are basically spinning thread, but only a few inches of particularly fluffy thread. And I broke off the sharpest bit o' tip from the carefully machined splinter that served me, (otherwise its still just a tiny bit scary).

In Your Ear!

Splashback

If you are having problems with splashback, try dropping a square or two of TP in the bowl. You can see it as increasing the surface tension of the water. Help if you squat instead of sit, but thats a different post.

Two thumbtacks and a piece of string
little words have meaning.
Bead them on a length of line, say them like they're food;
A link, a bean, meaning, steam,
two thumbtacks and a piece of string

my favorite things

Here are eight of my favorite things in life:

-being in any part responsible for someone getting genuinely excited about something
-mutually unbearable sexual tension
-the clever use of language
-building something that works
-people smiling unselfconsciously, only to themselves (especially pretty girls)
-being with soft naked bellies
-the people who feel comfortable touching me without asking
-slowing down enough to let trivial things become magical

Know it all

As of Monday I'll have given four talks in two weeks, and each on a topic totally unrelated to the last. I spoke to friends for 10 minutes on simple properties of numbers that result from the base system used to represent them, than I spoke to a class of first graders on what Dr. Seuss was like as a person. A few days later I gave a talk to artists on why Dirt is Fascinating and on Monday I'll be talking to a few of my peers with physics backgrounds on what they need to know about graphic design and visual communication.

Do I love the sound of my own voice? Do I love acting like I know? Or is it how I usually tell myself, that I love to share things and to facilitate people in being excited about this world? How about all of the above.

I'm Easy, you're Easy (Animateur)

Hello Folks, for the second installment of the Animateur lecture
series, we will give the floor to an expert on "Easy Rider", the 1969
counterculture prerequisite, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and
with a good bit of poor poor Jack Nicholson. After the talk, we will
watch the movie in giant screen.

Our guest is Drew Hannon, American Studies hotshot. Drew sat on the
"Motorcycle Life and Culture" panel at a recent American Studies
Conference and will be starting at Yale this Fall.

Expect Awesomeness. Bring a Friend.

When?
Friday, March 23th, the second to last Friday of the month starting at 7:00.

Where?
The Shangri-Loft
129 Franklin St. Apt 213
Cambridge, MA 02139
right behind the Middle East on Central Sq.
857 928 1699


We will start with a few talks, perhaps:
Do It Yourself Tampons
Why GMO Designer Pets is not an Evil Idea.
David Bowie
or even
Leveraging Human Flaws for Fun and Profit.
and then at 8, the main act, talk and movie.

If you want to give a five minute talk on something fascinating,
anything, write me a note and you're in.

WIth love,
-seth

Miss Information

One factor that determines our level of alertness from moment to moment is the number of safe assumptions that we can make about our environment. The more secure and stable your environment, the less you need to attend to it. The more unpredictable your environment, the more alert you have to be. There is no right or wrong level of alertness. In fact, you can change the level of uncertainty in your environment to match the level of alertness you would like to maintain. The Lil' Miss Information Clock provides a time that is incorrect, but within 10 minutes (by default) of being correct. It is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, so you'll just have to rely on yourself.

#!/usr/local/ruby

#Lil' Miss Information Clock
#because whoever missed just a *lil'* information?
#Seth Frey 
#enfascination.blogspot.com
#2007/03/02

$Offseth = 10                           #time is wrong by up to +/-
$Offseth seconds

while true
 time = Time.now
 mins = (time.min + (rand * 2 * $Offseth).round -
$Offseth).modulo(60)    #make minutes plus or minus actual time within Offseth
                        #modulo 60 accounts for roll over to next minute
 hours = time.hour
 if time.min - mins > 60 - $Offseth   #this if and elsif account for minutes rolling over (or back)
   hours = hours + 1
 elsif mins - time.min > 60 - $Offseth
   hours = hours - 1
 end
 hours = hours % 12                    #no military time
 hours = 12 if hours == 0              #side effect of eliminating
military time with mod
 puts hours.to_s + ":" + (mins < 10 ? '0' : '') + mins.to_s
# the if statement is for single digit minutes.  4:02 instead of 4:2
 Kernel.sleep(50)                      #wait just less than a minute before refreshing (one less safe assumption)
end