Month: June 2014

“Rat Girl”, Rat Reproduction, and the Scary Side of the Secret of Nimh

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First: she’s 43. Surely “Rat Lady” or “Rat Woman” is more appropriate now? Still… brrrrrrr: The whole news article is here. That 15,000 rats from one breeding pair in a single year sound impressive till you grasp that it’s asimple logarithmic progress. One breeding pair become a bunch of breeding pairs which then breed a ton of breeding pairs which end up being 15,000 in a year. This is going to sound weird, but, okay, whatever… Rats of a special kind play a role in my current writing project, and my time at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop instilled in …

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Isinglass

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There’s some wonderful information in Peter Mathias’ The Brewing Industry in England 1700-1830, especially if you’re looking for funny details about the world of London brewers in the 1730s that could be hacked into alchemical-industrial conspiracy. For example, isinglass: It’s basically made out of fish bladder, and it’s used as a “finings”–that is, you dump some of it into your finished beer (in powder form, I think, though I’ve never used it myself), and it pulls the yeast to the bottom. In other words, it clears up your beer, and it was the main way of doing so prior to mode recent …

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Would Your Dad Make a Good Superintendent of Education?

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What do you do when your father is running for the position of Superintendent of Education in Seoul?  That depends: was he a deadbeat dad who never supported your education, who in fact cut you off as a child after he divorced your mom, never called, never emailed, never had anything to do with you at all–not a single email, not a single phone call? Or was he an inspiring example to you, difficult at times to live with but someone who instilled you with good values and taught by example what dedication means? Either way, you share your opinion …

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He’s No Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but…

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I know, I’m late to the party, but lately I’ve been reading Sydney Padua’s the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (coming soon as a book, apparently?), and, well: Everyone loves Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and for good reason: though he was more like the Tony Stark of his age–“accomplished” barely touches how important an engineer he was during his short but influential career in early Victorian London–the Wolverine-like look he gets in Padua’s comic (and, well, in the photos, really) is, er… I’ll put it this way: as Padua has noted, he’s an extremely popular character. He even got …

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