Odd Lots
- Have you ever wondered what the analemma looks like on other planets? There’s an app for that.
- If you want to cover screwheads or other elements of a laptop that would be disturbed by tampering, use glitter nail polish, the less common the better. The tampering may still happen, but glitter nail polish isn’t easy to fake, and at least you’ll know that it occurred.
- More evidence that the better part of our modern diet consists of…lies. (Thanks to neil Rest for the link.)
- The Atlantic reminds us of the 40-year war waged on coffee by Mr. C. W. Post of Post cereals, who was trying to build the market for his caffeine-free dirt-flavored cereal beverage Postum.
- Speaking of the devil, Lileks did his signature treatment on Mr. Coffee Nerves some time back. People drank a lot of coffee in the 50s to counteract all the booze that was going down the hatch to keep them from killing one another wholesale. That decade was not Arcadia. It was psychotic.
- Why did good always trounce evil in Middle Earth? It may have been the bad guys’ vitamin D deficiency.
- The government of El Salvador has released a boggling video of Salvadorian volcano Chaparrastique, just before and after its recent explosion.
- Michaelangelo’s grocery list…with illustrations, natch. (And does this remind anybody else of the handscript style used in the Voynich Manuscript?)
- A collection of science fiction postage stamps. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- These semi-fossilized English words escaped total fossilization by hiding inside popular idioms. The list lacks “ilk,” which sounds like it should an obscure human organ, or even a breed of horse. (Thanks to Gwen Henson for the link.)
- Both MIT and ETH Zurich have made some cool cubical robots that move and balance using flywheels. Ha! I did this in the first chapter of The Cunning Blood: I had gas-turbine powered mechanical dinosaurs that moved (twitchily) by pinching several internal flywheels under the control of a fluidic computer.
- Ceramic squirrels don’t injure people. Crazy people holding ceramic squirrels injure people. No one evidently cared what happened to the ceramic squirrel. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · hardware · health · humor · robotics · sf
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I use tamper detection paint on certain filters I build and sell. These are narrow band top coupled resonator designs with trimmer caps that must be sweep aligned in a test fixture and will likely not meet spec if disassembled to “see what is inside.”
The tamper detection paint comes in a small plastic tube and is relatively thick, almost a paste consistency but it shrinks and becomes brittle as it dries — it can easily be removed to back the screw out but leaves no doubt that the seal has been broken.
It’s available in a variety of colors at around $3 per tube. See http://www.mcmaster.com/#torque-seal-vibration-lacquers/=q2prkr
Back when I was a Xerox tech rep in the 70s, we used something called Glyptal to keep screws in certain locations from shaking loose. It also showed us sometimes that, yes, somebody had adjusted that screw in the past.
Glyptol is still available – if you are a traditionalist you will wish to purchase the red version. Look for MG Chemicals 4228 Red GLPT Insulating Varnish on Amazon. About $9.50 for 55 ml.
I bought a bottle (55ml) from Allied Radio a couple years ago and the shipping charge was $20 or so because it’s considered a hazardous substance and must ship with special packing. (It’s flammable.) It’s good to hold the copper windings to a coil form or to retain BNC lock nuts if you are out of locktite.
Hot rod engine rebuilders use Glyptol to seal the inside water passages in the engine block and you can buy a quart of it for $40 or so.