David Custis Kimball - blog

micasaessucasa:

(via Nobis House by Susanne Nobis)

Design, Real Estate, Hazard Mitigation

A good example of using dual purpose; structure adds function.  The bookshelves at lateral strength to the building.  This is always the case in shipbuilding (almost), but not often seen in home construction.  This example could well be downsized with good results. Other material could also be used, esp. concrete and steel, those magical twins that expand at the same rate with heating and cooling…. Bravo.

thetaoofdana:

Do you eat enough veggies? (the recommended daily allowance in the USA is 5 cups total for the average person per day!!!) If you are not a vegetarian (and even if you are!) its pretty tough to consume all 5 cups of veggies and fruit.  Unless, of course, you get creative.  Put half an avocado (promise its not gross, its awesome) in your smoothie in the morning, eat spaghetti squash instead of pasta, make a bowl of fresh  fruit your centerpiece in the living room as well as the kitchen… and try cool things that are super easy like roasting veggies… or really luxe-versions of roasted veggies like these toasted coconut brussel sprouts.  Again, I know it may sound sketchy, but you won’t be sorry!  

Food, Health, Hazard Mitigation, Humor

I always feel better eating a salad, even if it’s pulling a few of those ‘baby Frankenstein’ carrots out of their bag, grab a tomato, wash and cut or grab a few cherry tomatoes, wash and dump.  Oh and lettuce: you know those plastic containers the size of a shoe box that fancy lettuce comes in… well get one of those… it makes a perfect place to keep lettuce.. and it keeps well, even after washing. I always just wash and shake… forget the collander.  Left over frozen peas (never cook, just warm them), celery (you can keep it in with the lettuce)  and don’t toss the green leaves… they really are good.

Add some chicken left overs and in 10 minutes tops, you’ve got it… Dressing, one needs to ‘dress’ properly.  I like those refrigerated yogurt based ones, but Ken’s is alright.  And at the end, don’t forget to add a little water, shake it around and use it UP. It might not be ok with ketchup running all over a beef patty and sogging your buns, but ‘sogging a salad’ is just not an issue.

Wallah.. enjoy.. think different …. think saladly.

Next, upon request, I might just give you my recipe for ‘Ground Chuck Farley ala DuChamp’, which if you must know, I invented at the Snow Chase kitchen at the foot of the great Aspen Mtn., that’s in Colorado in 1972,  like that great Boston seafood restaurant advertises on their menu cover after ‘When founded’… ‘Before You Were Born.’

Physics, Humor

The same analogy can be maid (pun) for a cloud.  Why not random invisible gasses everywhere.  Well enter the ‘Nucleator’.  That’s a salt compound, like Mg… something or other and it attracts the gas molecules into bunches and then the sun strikes and heats them up and WHEEE they all go ‘tripping the light fantastic’, sts.

Now is this ‘Nucleator’ like a Higgs on steroids?  Or are we just waiting for our own Princess At A Party to gather an opinion.  I’m ConCERNed, that’s all.

marineknowledge:

What The Higgs Boson Does

Art, Design, Theology, Science, History, Psychophysics, Humor

The ‘Shuuh’ is to keep quiet that Charley Boy was a deep seated theist.   Yeah, maybe like ‘g-d’ made the Model T and Henry evolved it into the Edsel or on a bright note the 4 speed automatic 1954 Lincoln Capri (Ford’s 50th Anniversary Edition) which I could have bought for $200 in 1969 but didn’t have the cash.  It could still go 100 mph, leather interior, electric seats and antenna, two-tone exterior.  Ain’t evolution grand?  But man, if you miss it, it’s gone.  

Not entirely, G-d provides us this blog to document our meme or memories. (OK maybe this is just an evolution from those pictures on cave walls.  Picky picky.

paxmachina:

chARTist - Charles Darwin (Charleston, South Carolina)

(via fuckyeahartandscience)

Physics, UncommonSenseVsCommononsense, History, Humor, Mathematics

Please, a theory of ‘particle justice’, that equal amounts of anti and positive matter were created; this is a bogusly supported theory. Humans or any animal is not even bilaterally symmetric from left to right; how can anyone support ‘equality’.  Is there sum Cass Sunstein g-d feeling creature out there counting ‘+’ beans and ‘-’ beans as they are squirted out from a singularity overload, only to see them equally destroying eachother like GOSHDARNIT, not G-D is a huge fireworks freak?

My suggestion that they need to play ‘Down By the Riverside’, when U of California gets it together to have some announcement as to the beginnings of the universe.  Oh yeah, there were probably equal black and white particles as well, you know like salt and pepper, Obama’s mama and his Kenyan Polygamist papa, etc.

How do you think this will play on Big Bang Theory, eh Sheldon fans?  Bazinga!

As my good buddy PAM Dirac (1932 Nobel Prize for proving Antimatter exists) once advised me ‘Show it mathematically, and it will be so.’ I’m sure that means that Goedel has some input as to initial conditions, aka ‘assumptions’ to any mathematical proof.

Wish Winston Davids, who graduated from Trinity College in 1970 with an 11.6 grade point in Mathematics, then went to Princeton’s School of Advance Studies for a year, could give me a booyah here.

alchymista:

Anti-Matter Atoms to Address Anti-Gravity Question

For every particle in physics, there is an associated anti-particle, identical in every respect that scientists have yet measured, except that it holds an opposite electric charge.

Current theory holds that, at the birth of the Universe, matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts. When they meet, however, they destroy each other in energetic flashes of light. The question has remained, then, why did any Universe come into being at all, and why is the one we see overwhelmingly made of normal matter?

One of the characteristics that may differentiate anti-matter is its gravitational behaviour. Most scientists believe that anti-matter will be attracted to normal matter. Others are not so sure; anti-matter may repel - it may “fall up”. That has implications for the question of why the Universe didn’t disappear into a grand flash of light just as soon as it formed. It also might help explain why the Universe is expanding ever more quickly.

It has simply been impossible to test the idea, but researchers at the University of California Riverside are getting closer to addressing the question once and for all.

They have created electron-positron pairs that are in stable orbits around one another - the result is called a positronium. The pairs are kept from bumping into and destroying each other by carefully dumping energy into them to create what are known as “Rydberg states”. 

Like the lanes of an automotive test track, particles can move into different orbits around one another if they reach higher energies, and these Rydberg positronium atoms are spun up to high energies, lasting for a comparatively long three billionths of a second. The team hopes to extend the method, up to a few thousandths of a second, preparing a beam of the artificial atoms and seeing just which way they fall.

(via scinerds)

Environment, Science, Technology, Hazard Mitigation

Bravo.  I bought a 4k watt generator after a 200x hurricane here in Florida, and then had to use it.  The noise, the fact that you had to schlepp fuel and fill it, etc. was a real pain.  The only mitigation was that I wired it into my dryer 220V plug and then switched off my outgoing main panel switch to keep my circuits isolated from the outside wires, then switched off AC, stove, and water heater… the rest were ok.  So I could walk around the house and switch on lighting as if nothing were the matter.  A small window AC could run in a porch area and kept us cool, and the refrig. had enough power for the 6-8 hour run time per day.  But every day as a fill up of about 4 gallons of gasoline.

Now with LED lights, I could buy a big inverter, and attach to my diesel truck, use the same entry thru the Dryer and then switch off all the same circuits and have a successful time.  If I only used the lights using strings of white Christmas LED lights, I could switch off the diesel engine and have all the lighting I wanted for hours and hours.

Moral of story:  buy up some of those holiday LED lights where 50 bulbs use about 4 watts, and then buy a small inverter for your car, and even an extra battery, where you could attach with jumper cables (for apartment dwellers) and schlepp the battery up and down the stairs or maybe if elevator works during storm or disaster or like England during black out periods.  You can charge your laptop in the car daily, and then connect the modem to the battery - inverter with the LED lights (even the CFL’s are 13 watts for a 60 watt bulb), so a few of those are ok, too.

And don’t forget a few glass containers for drinking water from the tap or where ever, put out in the sun of 2 or so days, and you might just make it.

Survival, 21st century luxuries, esp. lighting included.

electricpower:

Solar power cheaper than fossil fuels for 1.3 billion people

Here in the U.S., we’re used to thinking about solar power as one of those happy eco-friendly things that we’d all totally be using except for the fact that it’s so much more expensive than fossil fuels. In the developing world, though, it’s exactly the opposite: solar power is gaining ground with 1.3 billion people simply because it’s the cheapest way to go.

 

Let’s just forget about the fact that fossil fuels are all extracted from the Earth by evil corporations controlled by evil states and that they do evil things to our atmosphere. Thereal problem with fossil fuels is that unless you have a ton of infrastructure already in place, getting, refining, distributing and using liquid fuel is stupidly inefficient and expensive. And we’re not even talking about cars: millions of households in Africa rely on kerosene lamps to provide light at night, which is important because (among other reasons) it extends the amount of time with which people are able to work or study.

Kerosene, like any fossil fuel, is expensive. In fact, it costs twice as much to use a kerosene lamp as it does to use a small solar panel, battery and LED lights, and it’s cleaner and safer at the same time. Plus, with a solar panel, you can charge your cellphone too, which otherwise might cost you more money since (in Africa) you might have to rent a charger.

There’s a whole new industry springing up to meet this demand with cheap and efficient microsolar systems. For about $10, you can buy a solar lighting system that includes a 2.5 watt solar panel, two LED overhead lights and a battery pack. Every week, you pay a small fee (about $1) to use the power the solar panel provides (offsetting the subsidized up-front cost). After about 18 months, the system has been completely paid off, and you can upgrade it to a larger solar panel with more lights and battery capacity. Eventually, it’s even possible to work your way up to a system than can run a sewing machine or a refrigerator.

All this time, you’d be helping to both save the environment and fund a green tech industry, but again, that’s really not the point. The point is that sometimes solar power really does make the most sense, both socially and financially, and if companies can leverage this developing world market to help make solar power more attractive and affordable to those of us who are stuck living in the first world, everybody (in every world) might just come out a winner.

Eight19, via MIT

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DVICE

Humor, Physics, Design

As nothing is possibly completely static, except at 0 Kelvin, as I-Me approaches one door or the other, it has an attraction or repulsion, time slows and what is particle becomes wave or visa versa, and I-Me slips in and plasters itself on the opposite wall (hopefully of urinals if + or another door problem if -… you can’t bee 2 Shure).

This proves building upon dumb, is dumber and if someone does it again it will be dumbest. Hence the 1st Trilogy of Dumb.  (there I did it.)

ichrider:

This is great because it’s so dumb.