Author: Mr. Entropy

A great counterbalance to the common (and, I think, still a good thing to remain critical about) distrust of fast food. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten.… Continue reading In Praise of Fast Food

Clever people can make a hobby out of anything that exists. In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Åkesson unveiled a playable accordion—called “The Commodordion”—he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. -Ars Technica

Disturbingly cool. AI Yōkai (AI 妖怪) is a dictionary of monsters from Japanese folklore, whose images have been generated by me using the artificial intelligence program Midjourney. Maciej Lipiec

Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence

The Oakland Public Library has a fun, voyeuristic, website where they showcase items found n library books. Well, if you leave them in an OPL library book, or around the library, you might find them featured right here, on our website. Oakland Public Library They have a Twitter and Instagram feed, too.

Poets.org, a site by the by the Academy of American Poets, offers a wonderful email service called “Poem-a-Day.” Today’s offering was right in my wheelhouse: poetry AND Yellowstone? In the YellowstoneHarriet Monroe – 1860-1936 Little pin-prick geysers, spitting and sputtering; Little foaming geysers, that spatter and cough; Bubbling geysers, that gurgle out of the calyx of morning… Continue reading In the Yellowstone

I had no idea that ketchup has seen so many versions and iterations! The word ketchup is derived from the Chinese word ke-tsiap, meaning a pickled fish sauce. This mixture was mainly added to recipes to season a dish, versus served as a condiment. Peggy Trowbridge Filippone at The Spruce Eats. Update: I was looking… Continue reading The History of Ketchup

Perfect.

I am not a knowledgeable car person (although my excellent friend Sean, who forwarded this article to me is), and yet I still found this a delightful and hilarious essay. This is a Porsche 914. It has a mid-engine layout. The transmission is in the far back of the car, and the shift linkage’s main… Continue reading A few things to know before stealing my 914

Physicist Richard Feynman describes fire.