Tag Archives: Humor

Eggcorn collection

For several years now, I have been collecting eggcorns.  Eggcorns are words and phrases that make sense, but are not technically correct. The name comes (supposedly) from a child who asks how to spell “eggcorn,” which is how she had interpreted the word “acorn.”  Acorns look egg-shaped, and starting in the “E” section of the dictionary it would be hard to find the entry that would dispel the misconception.

So I would like to share some of my collection. I caught all of these in the wild.

  • “to rage war” (from “to wage war”)
  • “I would like to relay a story” (from “I would like to relate a story”)
  • “To breach a subject” (from “to broach a subject”)
  • “to interfear with the government’s terror campaign” (from “to interfere…”)
  • “Exception to the rulers” (from “exception to the rules”)
  • “I beg to dither” (from “I beg to differ”)

Comment and add your favorites!

-Peter

German engineering, incomprehensible bells

 

As you might have heard, I am in Germany. I like it a lot. The people here are helpful. And tolerant of my ignorance. I appreciate all of this. For the most part, German Engineering is everything I had heard and more. The trains and trams are on time and easy to navigate. The dorm room in which I am staying is nicely equipped and clearly designed to be very easy to clean – one could practically hose it out if need be. This is entirely unlike the dorm rooms I cut my teeth on in the states.

Those hexagonal beasts had so many nooks an crannies it was nearly impossible to get them clean. It was ridiculous. And two people in there! Three in some cases! Unbelievable. And expensive! almost three times the price of this little place I have rented for the month, even after the terrible exchange rate.

Yes, I will be here through August, but I’ll update as best I can.

Some fun lapses in German Engineering Sense: hotel shower faucet with a long metal handle (think kitchen faucet). It’s at elbow level, so is almost impossible to bump it when showering. Then try to reposition it quickly and brace yourself! You’re about to be scalded or frozen. Same hotel: both the room and building doors open inward and require a key to exit. The fire hazard is terrifying!

The other thing I’m not so fond of here is the bells. There’s a bell tower across the square form my room, and at totally random times (as best I can tell) it rings continuously for several minutes at a time. It’s like somebody just tells Quasimodo, “3:47? Sure, kid, knock yourself out. Good a time as any.”

I like bells as much as the next guy, but I’m thinking maybe ring it 4 times at 4 o’clock? That’s nice. Ring it off the hook for 5 min at 3:47? I don’t know. I thought that maybe it was a special occasion. Glockeläutentag or something. But no, it’s just how it works here.

-Peter

Addendum: today, the noon bell actually corresponded to noon, amazingly. What was great was that a dog down in the square below my window started to howl and didn’t stop until the bells did. It pretty much summed up my feelings.

isolating mitochondria, strange science, turkey sperm

I tried a kit for collecting mitochondria today. It didn’t work, but it failed in an interesting way, it turns out. Not interesting in a scientific way, unfortunately for me, but it ended up being… humorous…

This kit is supposed to take cells in one end and spit their mitochondria out the other. But there were no mitochondria on the other side. I don’t know if anyone else would go looking though the samples for whole cells, so maybe it wasn’t obvious to other people why it wasn’t giving good yields for the cell type we like. But I did go looking, and I found cells that were not lysed. If they don’t lyse, then they don’t give up the mitochondria.

So I went looking for ways to lyse cells in a way that doesn’t lyse the mitochondria.

Arriaga uses digitonin (detergent) and a cell disruption bomb. The Thurston group isolated turkey sperm mitochondria (I’m too tired to really appreciate how awesome that is) using a combination of Dounce homogenization and sonication. That was back in 1993.

I’d like to share a quote from their paper: “Semen was collected from turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) by abdominal massage (Burrows and Quinn, 1937).” What I want to know is: who are these Burrows and Quinn characters? And how does someone in 1937 get the job of inventing a procedure to acquire turkey semen?

There’s a story there, by god.

-Peter

Durable goods, maintenance, the maker ethos, and the first inroad to voluntary simplicity

Durable goods:

Real durable goods last and can be repaired and maintained.Then there are consumables, things you use for a while then throw away.The problem is that some things, in order to be competitive in price, look like durables but actually are designed to be consumables.Take air conditioners for example.

The laboratory where I work bought a a consumer-quality air conditioner for ~$500.It was supposed to run in a hot lab to take the thermal stress of some of the equipment.Within a year it had failed.It seems that the fail point was a single motor among 3 or 4 of the motors in there.Now, there might be a cascade failure situation.But in the end, it’s probably one motor replacement and the thing is back in shape.But we can’t get that one motor.The company won’t sell us just a part, and they want $75 plus transportation to have a rep come look at it without any guarantee he will be able to do anything.

So, what we have here is a disturbingly common situation of a consumable product masquerading as a durable product.What that means is that AC units used to be considered something you install, maintain, fix and keep around.It was durable.Maybe it cost $1000, but you expect that with $100 per year maintenance, it will last forever.Well, this AC unit only cost $500! A great deal! Except it wasn’t a durable good.It doesn’t cost $100 per year to maintain, it has to be fully replaced every year.

This is a different business model.How this works: produce the cheapest possible product in order to compete for foolish consumers’ attention.People are going to impulse buy on credit, so they are not investigating what is the best deal.So the lowest sticker price is going to get the sale.And, if the product is cheap and breaks, that’s all the better.Since it had a very limited warranty and no plan for maintenance (this thing doesn’t even have screws – it’s snapped together) it was virtually guaranteed to produce a second sale quite soon after.

Now I’m far from being the first to notice this trend; there is a growing subculture of people who are saying they want to be anti-consumers.They want to conserve and maintain.It’s a service-oriented culture that looks at making things last rather than making more things.I like that mentality for lots of reasons.It means more thought has to go into the product.It means less stress on the environment.It makes people more aware of their purchases and happy with their decisions.It’s a lower stress, higher reward lifestyle for more people. The people involved are contributing directly to the quality of each others’ lives rather than trying to produce as much crap as possible and trick each other into buying it.

-Peter

P.S. Here’s the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping to break it down.

Inventions, patents, and how ‘great’ minds think alike

Years ago, I lived with a bunch of roommates in order to save money. It hurt my dating life, but they were a good bunch of guys. Over the course of the five years I lived with them, I had a number of epiphanies, and I would like to share two of them; both concerned dishes.

We moved out of a dilapidated cabin of a house (in which I lived in the partially finished basement) into a much nicer place we named the “Bagley Estate,” in honor of it being on Bagley street. Amusingly, I also worked in Bagley Hall at the U. of Washington. It was like I could never quite escape his legacy, this “Bagley” person. In any case, whenever roommates are involved, dirty dishes (almost) inevitably pile up due to the lack of accountability that comes with anonymity. This is related to a general school of thought about what happens without accountability (NSFW).

I hated the dish situation at the old place, and so I “invented” a “novel” solution. I gave away every piece of flatware and silverware that didn’t fit in a single load of the dishwasher. If the dishwasher was full there were no more dishes. As a consequence, there were very few dishes abandoned in the sink.

It got me to thinking, however, about the possibilities of a dishwasher designed for bachelors. It would have two halves. As dishes were used, they would be transfered from the clean compartment to the dirty compartment. Then, when the dirty compartment was full and the clean empty only one compartment need be run. Once it was clean there would be no need to unload it! Just start the process of transferring the dishes into the now empty compartment. I drew a crude schematic of the device. I considered applying for a patent.

Like most ideas, it had already been both invented and perfected. It is called a Double Dishwasher and there’s a stealth model that looks like two drawers.

If you don’t have $1000, or you don’t own your home, I have another idea. It’s a magnet that attaches to the front of your existing dishwasher. You only use half of the dishwasher and transfer dishes from the clean side to the dirty side (rinse them, of course). Since it will never have a full load, only use the “light wash” feature so you won’t feel guilty about wasting water. Pick one up for just 5.99!

-Peter

A little image of the Bachelor dishwasher magnet