Back at the bench The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!"), but rather "hmm....that's funny..."- Isaac Asimov

I ran across this quote just now and it struck me as very funny after having spent a morning at the bench saying "hmmm... that's odd...", which is somewhere between "hmm... that's funny..." and "Oh, crap!".

When things go wrong in the lab (as they inevitably do on occasion), I have to remind myself of Alexander Fleming, who turned his repeated 'contamination problems' into the discovery of the antibiotic agent penicillin.  ¶ 9:45 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Woman shoots intruder; then has gun stolen by police "I think he's hanging onto it just for the hassle factor" says her attorney.

"I didn't feel like a victim the first time, simply because I had a firearm and I knew how to use it, and that at least made us equal," said Buxton, who has completed the training and testing to receive a state-issued concealed carry permit. "But I feel victimized by my own police department because they won't return my property."

  ¶ 3:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Sentiment/sentimentality This is a quote from one of the Dune novels (by Frank Herbert). I think it was one of the last two. The word 'roadway' was, I think, 'glazeway' in the novel, but that doesn't make much sense in the non-SF context, so I changed it.

"The difference between sentiment and sentimentality is easy to see. When you
avoid killing somebody's pet on the roadway, that's sentiment. If you swerve
to avoid the pet and that causes you to kill pedestrians, that is
sentimentality."  ¶ 1:32 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Survivalist stuff
This is more the sort of thing suited to my husband's blog, but Tom Leue, who is on a biodiesel list I'm on offered this pic and some comments about the stove Bill and I use for most of our cooking now and I thought I'd post it. Here are his comments:

"I have been able to operate a brass stove from India called the Butterfly on both kerosene and biodiesel. This is a comparison picture of the two flames - The stove on the left is on kerosene, the one on the right is B-33 (1/3 biodiesel, 2/3 petrodiesel). My stove has to be cleaned at the orifice before every use. I also can't get it to restart until it has thoroughly cooled after the first use, which takes an hour or so."

My experience with the Butterfly is similar to Tom's, although we have tried a wide range of fuels and mixtures, including kerosene, kerosene/biodiesel mixes, (no petrodiesel yet), lamp oil, and even straight veggie oil (which did NOT work well at all). Our experience with B100 (striaght biodiesel) is that the orifice clogs DURING burning (which does not happen with lamp oil, B50 mixes, or kero) and basically the stove needs to be babied along while cooking, which is a pain in the butt (and stinks up the house when it goes out and needs to be relit).  ¶ 7:07 PM 1 Comments Links to this post