Author Archives: bill
Analog Memory Desk
March 11, 2015 – 1:51 pm
Beer Stein Of Science
February 17, 2015 – 2:18 pm
So you like cold drinks, especially in the heat of the summer. You also like large drinks, however, they come at a cost: unless you can drink a superhuman quantity of liquid in a relatively short period of time, your beverage is gonna get warm. This is unacceptable. Enter the “Stein Of Science“. A full metal jacket around a cryostatic dewar with a hefty steel handle.
You know you want one.
The Black Blood of the Earth
February 12, 2015 – 4:08 pm
When Subject 1’s cup of unadulterated was half empty, he grabbed his water bottle and poured the remainder into his clear glass coffee cup. He looks at it and then puts his hand up because He Needs An Adult. He said with concern, “I added water but it didn’t change color.” We all wandered over to peek into the dark heart of his mug. Even diluted to 50% of the original strength, it is still as black, oily, and potentially lethal as a tar pit.
While accurate, this can’t merely be called Scientific Coffee or even Weapons Grade Coffee. My brain went searching for terms that accurately described this creation. While the tar entity that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG came to mind, John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble In Little China” is what stuck. This coffee is the Black Blood Of The Earth (or BBotE for the sake of brevity).
With 145 cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine in 5.7 cups of volume, this is emphatically a beverage not to be trifled with. more importantly, though, it is fantastically delicious. Any comparison to regular coffee is, at best, fraught with peril. This is like comparing apples and bazookas.
Hütte Hut
February 3, 2015 – 12:57 pm
Simple, small, wooden, exposed frame, what’s not to love?
Hütte Hut.
Hair that looks like pixel-art: #xpresionpixel
January 29, 2015 – 3:52 pm
The Rat Tribe of Beijing
January 27, 2015 – 4:24 pm
“I am doing well because I’m scared of being poor,” Wei says in his apartment, a roughly 300-square-foot room he shares with up to nine other men. “Many of my colleagues live above ground, but I think it’s too comfortable; this place forces me to work harder.” Still, Wei, who now makes up to 30,000 yuan (about $4,800; 1 yuan = $0.16) a month — a drastic improvement from his initial monthly salary of 800 yuan — says he plans to move out by the Chinese New Year, in February.
These below-ground rooms owe their existence to two historical events. One is the Cold War, when Mao’s China struggled with the Soviet Union for ideological supremacy in the East bloc. In 1969, the same year the two countries fought a bloody border war along the Amur River, Mao ordered people to “dig tunnels deep” as protection against Soviet air raids. In Beijing, 300,000 people took part in the campaign, digging an estimated 20,000 underground bomb shelters.
A few years later, however, Mao was dead and his hardline ideology overturned in favor of the economics-first pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. The shelters were commercialized, and the government’s Office of Civil Defense instructed that they had to turn a profit. By the 1980s, according to a memoir of a senior official in charge of the project, Beijing had 800 underground hostels, as well as underground supermarkets, cinemas and roller-skating rinks. In 1996, the government formalized this shift, passing a law mandating that new buildings contain underground civil-defense shelters, but that they have an economic use as well. This led to the proliferation of for-profit underground housing. Over the years, government agencies contracted out the spaces to private managers, who run them for a profit.