Leaf Sheep Slug

The leaf sheep slug gets its energy from photosynthesis, taking chloroplasts from algae and storing them, and is thus able to survive on solar power.

More here.

THEY SEE YOUR PHOTOS

From the website: "Your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo. See what they see."

Up top, what the website gleaned from the picture I use for my YouTube channel etc.

I'm impressed!

That red marker pinpoints my home, where I'm sitting right now typing these words.

And you thought nobody knew....

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Tilting Cake Turntable

Finally.

I've never baked a cake but you don't have to be a rocket scientist or a near-brain-dead anesthesiologist who inhaled too much unscavenged waste gas over many decades to know that this is one cool toy for people who practice the fine art of cake baking.

To a serious pastry chef this device has to be catnip.

From the website:

Professional decorating is easy with the Tilting Turntable.

Secure soft non-slip grip design on top plate.

Positions any cake at just the right angle for easy decorating.

Tilting mechanism provides 18 secure plate positions controlled by large push button.

Dual rotation: turntable rotates in either direction, enabling right- or left-handed use.

Base has a balanced weight and non-slip feet to keep turntable in place.

12"Ø x 7"H.

********************

18 positions?

Push button control?

Non–slip grip design?

Duel directional rotation?

Wait a minute — I thought this was a cake platform, not a new Lexus.

Be still, my heart.

And if not, why, get out the defibrillator. 

$59.99.

Tickets to Ride

Designer and art director Daniel Benneworth-Gray's 

"compendium of transit tickets" from around the world.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

NASA Artemis Posters

Download

as many as you want — 

free, the way we like it.

Solve the Problem With What's in Your Head

Perhaps my favorite quote of all time is a variation of the headline above, to wit: 

          "Solve the problem with what's in the room." — Edwin H. Land

Since I stumbled on that line in a biography of Land (full disclosure: I've read several; he's one of my favorite people ever) decades ago I've applied it countless times and in nearly every instance it's resulted in both a working solution and a wonderful feeling of satisfaction at having figured it out.

Applying the dictum forces you to find an alternative to solutions that either require something that's not in the room (a part, a person, whatever) or simply giving up.

Whenever I get a new device with a Quick Start Guide I ignore the printed instructions in favor of getting it working on my own.

Once I succeed (90% of the time, roughly) I open the Quick Start Guide and frequently discover features that I didn't know existed, often because they're hidden from view.

What's Old is New Again: Custom Wax Letter Seal

Here's a blast from the past: Wax Letter will create a custom logo or design and then use it to seal letters you send to whomever is deserving.

Apply within.

And who's the idiot who posed for the exemplar above?

Doh!

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

The People's Clock — Maarten Baas

YouTube description: 

...............................................

Maarten Baas and Schiphol Airport present "The People's Clock."

Using almost 1,000 volunteers — most of them Schiphol employees — people literally came time.

In a 12-hour-long recording, participants formed the hands of the clock.

If you look closely, a runner in orange marks the seconds, completing one lap every minute.

This permanent art installation can be seen in Lounge 1, the departure hall for Schengen destinations.

[via dezeen]

'The Last Question' — Isaac Asimov (1956)

Many people consider this the best short story they've ever read.

Asimov wrote, "This is by far my favorite story* of all those I have written. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story."

I don't consider it "the best" — but that's only because I've read so many fantastic short stories I find it impossible to choose just one as ruling them all.

Nevertheless, I reread this one every ten years or so and have since I first encountered it when I was a kid in Milwaukee in the late 50s/early 60s.

nuf sed**

Next: 2036.

*Asimov is estimated to have written some 380 short stories.

**My rap name, invented in the early 21st century by me. I've been waiting patiently for some rapper to adopt it but so far nada.

1917 Russian Biscuit Catalog

[via Present and Correct]

Chef's Knife Earrings

Sterling silver knife earrings with black patina handles.

Punk.

$70.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Holding Hands Is Like Holding the Whole Body — Elizabeth Jacobson

Ice hangs off the roof like a bear claw.

Single drops of defrosted water

melt down long icicles which you catch

in a cup and drink with quick

licks of your tongue, pretending the taste of sugar.

You say: holding hands is like holding the whole body,

and you touch each one of my fingers,

naming it a leg or an arm.

You give each nail a part of my face.

I watch your small face at night,

green in the glow of the night-light.

It never stops moving.

Even the faint hairs on your forehead

seem to breathe as you dream you are

racing toward a gate swinging open.

In the morning you are up first,

going through the drawers in your bathroom

for a cloth to cover the doll house.

You rush into my room with your old baby bath towel,

the one with the turquoise trim,

and the little Carter's bow.

You say you remember this bow.

You remember that you used to try to pull it off,

that you wanted to tell me that you wanted to pull it off,

but you couldn't because you didn't have the words.

There is snow melting on the window frame behind you.

Drops fill in the tiny squares of the screen

magnifying what's beyond into oblivion.

I cannot see past you. It is you who delivered

solitude's ending.

The Most Googled Birds in the U.S.

I can't speak for you but me, I lose sleep wondering about this.

Not any more.

Data visualization artist Nadieh Bremer created Searching For Birds, a website which turns Google Trends data into a wonderfully scrollable exploration of which birds Americans search for — and why the rarest ones barely register at all.

Wrote Bremer, "As you scroll through through the following interactive graphics, you'll get a glimpse at roughly 700 North American and Hawaiian species and learn about why some of them make us fall in love."

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

A letter to the future

Okjökull is the name of a former glacier in Iceland, the first one to disappear.

In 2019 a plaque (above and below) 

was installed where it once was.

More here.

Slow Zone Pompom Beanie

From the website: "Keep your head warm with a beanie that guarantees no one will ask you s**t.

I took a flutter on this puppy the moment I happened on it.

OMG SO ME!

u kan 2!

$20.30.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

I wonder if Richard Hughes' and Hugh Everett III's paths ever crossed IRL

"

"That was the last news they could expect for many months.... But she argued, logically enough, that the time must come to an end, all time does; there is nothing so inexorable as a ship, plodding away, plodding away, all over the place, till at last it quite certainly reaches that small speck on the map which all the time it had intended to reach. Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and place, but not in degree of reality. Ergo, that first letter from England was as good as written, only not quite... legible yet."

Above, a short excerpt from Richard Hughes' 1929 best-seller, "A High Wind in Jamaica," the 29-year-old Hughes' first novel.

That paragraph stopped me cold when I read it the other night.

I wonder how I reacted to it when I first read this wonderful book perhaps 30-40 years ago, or if it even struck me as worth stopping and thinking about.

This time around I made sure to make note of it because as a result of my enchantment in recent years with Hugh Everett III's 1957 Princeton University doctoral dissertation —"'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics" — Hughes' musings on the simultaneous existence of two locations "in time and place" of a single ship clearly anticipate Everett's "many worlds."

FunFact: Everett was born in 1930, the year after publication of Hughes' epic.

Songs That Always Make Me Smile When I Hear Them

These are  the musical expressions of the late, great Kinky Friedman's remark to a Washington Post reporter in the early 1980s,  to wit: "I'm in search of a lifestyle that does not require my presence."

Just so.

Experts' Experts: How to Make Luxury Ice at Home

The headline over Jeremy White's Wired magazine article was the first time I'd encountered the term "luxury ice."

Long, detailed, and quite informative story short:

1) Buy Crystal Geyser bottled water

2) Boil it

3) Freeze it immediately in a polystyrene container or cooler with the lid off

4) Thaw to near melting point

5) Cut into cubes

This will yield ice as good as the best luxury ice money can buy, ice to rival that from 100,000-year-old Greenland glaciers sold for a comparative fortune ($100 for six cubes) in the world's most exclusive bars and hotels for practically no cost at all.

Library Card Sweater Vest

You can too!

For $6.12 you can buy a pattern and knit your own.

9 Things I've Never Done — And Never Will

• Used an ATM

• Played a video game

• Acquired Frequent Flyer miles

• Bought cryptocurrency

• Used a non-Apple computer

• Had plastic surgery

• Used a GLP-1 drug

• Gone to a funeral

• Had ECT

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Sticker Shield — One of the world's great unknown products

Whenever I show someone what this stuff does they're amazed, impressed, and say, "Where can I get some?"

I say "Right here" and give them a pack from my utility closet, where I always keep a few extras on hand.

OK then.

You know those adhesive stickers for parking, vehicle registration, car inspection, and what–not that go on the inside of your windshield?

Big-time pain in the buttocks taking them off, isn't it?

Big–time understatement, wasn't that?

Well guess what?

You can avoid ever again having to waste time and energy removing and replacing those stickers.

Sticker Shield is a transparent plastic film that adheres to your car's window and makes your sticker look just like you applied it directly to the glass the way you're supposed to.

But here's the small miracle: you can peel the sticker off easy as pie, without tools or misery.

It makes any sticker reusable.

Beyond great.

I'm reminded of its excellence every year, right about now, when it comes time to put a new Albemarle County vehicle registration sticker inside my car's windshield.

A moment to prepare the new sticker with Sticker Shield, then out to the car to peel off the old one and affix the new.

Watch the video below and see just how easy it is to use.

Two 4" x 6" sheets of the stuff, enough for plenty of stickers, cost $9.99.

Bonus: if you've got two cars and work somewhere that only allows you one parking sticker, with Sticker Shield you can effortlessly switch the sticker between vehicles and beat the system.

You know, of course, that you're not supposed to do this.

You know how much I like hacking all areas of life.

w00t!

Here's a Dustbuster Design Flaw That's Been Driving Me Crazy for Years!

Videre est credere.

True, the Dustbuster model in the video must be 15 or more years old but it still works fine — albeit optimally only after I put gaffer tape or duct tape around the intersection of the (mostly transparent) lower motor housing and the upper intake portion.

But wait — there's another FAIL designed into this version along with the many iterations that have been introduced in the decade or two since: the extension portion of the intake, though engineered with what purports to be a locking function, FAILs miserably if you ram the end of the device into a wall or hard surface.

Instead of staying locked, it recedes into the fixed portion of the intake.

This can be remedied by, once again, employing circumferential gaffer or duct tape to increase the friction between the moving and fixed parts to render them static.

My belief is that Black & Decker has a whole succession of improvements ready to bring out on a regular basis such that the company can proudly claim that every year its signature machine gets better.

No matter where you go, your DNA is there for the taking

Below, highlights from an informative and surprising (to me) just published Nature article:

.....................................

The Air is Full of DNA — Here's What Scientists Are Using It For

Airborne genetic material can be used to paint a picture of ecosystem health, watch for invasive species, and even identify humans.

... the idea of continuously collecting airborne DNA in public spaces troubles some scientists, who raise concerns similar to those about the sampling of DNA in waste water. [I'm surprised they didn't mention Meta's AI camera glasses, which are capable of instant facial recognition and identification, so far disabled by the company but that could change at any minute.]

Breathe out on an evening walk and your DNA could waft into a discreetly placed urban sampler. Shotgun sequencing, using rapidly emerging, cheap, portable techniques that can generate the type of read-out that helps to identify individuals, could produce results in the field, in near real time.

"People who have been recently in a building, within a day or so, you can certainly pick up their DNA" from the air, says University of Oslo forensic geneticist Peter Gill. For a longer-term record, he says, there is airborne DNA on surfaces. "You can take the dust from on top of a door sill, where people don't normally clean. And then you'll have a sort of mini-historical record of people who have been in there."

.....................................

But it's not just for propeller head scientists, not by a long shot: You can too!

For a mere $3,150 UK-based Oxford Nanopore will send you your very own state-of-the-art pocket-sized DNA sequencer (top).

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Wheat Thins Are The New Saltines

Those readers who grew up in the twentieth century will remember how — when as a kid you you were recovering from being ill or had an upset stomach — your mom would give you some saltine crackers as a first step toward rejoining the family at the dinner table.

In recent years I've turned to Wheat Thins — the original, not one of the dozen variations that festoon grocery store shelves now such that you have to pay very close attention to not purchase Wheat Thins Crunch Stix Fire Roasted Tomato or some such variation — as my go-too restorative cracker.

They're still bland and salty enough for this purpose and they are excellent with butter when you're feeling better.

Space Junk — 'A Magazine for Earthlings Who Dream of Outer Space'

"SPACE JUNK is a brand new publication examining the intersection of youth culture and space exploration. Bringing together voices from across science, art, and speculative fiction, it positions itself as both document and provocation — a record of a generation reimagining humanity's relationship to space."

Pilot Issue: $42.

I learned of the existence of SPACE JUNK in an April 9, 2026 New York Times article by Steven Kurutz.

Read it here.

Wait a sec — what're those songs I'm hearing?

So many!