notes from past week

[eub]

In the Arboretum we noticed lots of these things on posts, upright black cylinder with four perhaps-nozzles, or sensors, or cameras. On posts of varying height, some a good twelve feet tall and sturdy six-inch wood, others just on a pipe out of the ground, some right at ground level. What are they?

"Chassis" is cognate with "capsicum".

Urinal usage quiz.

Winter-squash latkes work well.

My Cheese of Many Colors, even after cutting all the *visible* infestation off, was also of many tastes -- some parts sharp Cheddar, some parts nutty, some buttery.

Chickadees can get through the squirrel barrier to the feeder. They have an easier time getting out than in: going out they hop from the feed and land sitting half-through a hole, with their center of mass over a wire; then they fall forwards and fly from there. Going in they land on the outside of the cage, dangling from a wire, and then the difficult step is kipping themselves up over their feet, from which point they can hop onto the feeder. Why don't they land on the outside body-over-feet? They can do it from flight onto a twig. Well, here they have to get their head and forebody through the hole, which is a very tight target to hit (a couple of mm radius, given that when they try to fit through a slightly-squashed hole they barely do), and maybe they can't hit that at speed, or flinch from the onrushing cage.

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

And thank you for the urinal usage quiz.

I think perhaps I have been warped by living with mostly women and/or extremely modest men my whole life, and have a urinal/dealing-with-men's-bathrooms boundary that would seem unusual given many of my other stances.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I don't actually see most of these subtleties in action. This is maybe the urinal etiquette of the court of Louis XIV. The buffer zone of one urinal, yes, and some one-step lookahead to optimize for that.