Starship Asterisk*

I sniffed cilantro today and it does kind of have a soapy scent. Hmm.

Just a horse saying "NOPE" with body language that amuses me.
http://i.imgur.com/s4X6o5u.gif

The mystery of the satellite receiver box: When it rains, the thing turns on. I do not understand why. I thought that maybe it turns on by itself by a more random chance and that maybe I was bias confirming it only happening on rainy nights, but I don't think that's the case. It only turns on by itself when it rains. Maybe I should make a log of it to be sure. The first time I learned that it did this, I was home alone. I heard voices downstairs, which was unnerving. Turns out it was just the speakers playing whatever the receiver was sending them.

geckzilla wrote:Just a horse saying "NOPE" with body language that amuses me.
http://i.imgur.com/s4X6o5u.gif

That is a VERY clear NO to domestication, I'd say.

Some fun facts to help the day go by.
http://www.robinsweb.com/humor/strange_things.html

Beyond wrote:
Some fun facts to help the day go by.

http://www.robinsweb.com/humor/strange_things.html wrote:
There are no words in the dictionary
that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.

One can envision an alternate universe in which the ditty started:

• Roses are orange, violets are purple...

and the lack of any rhyme stopped Western Civilization dead in its tracks.

Strange noisy chemical reaction.

A little something about mercury. No... not the planet, the element.

Ya always gotta keep an eye on your goldfish. They're smarter than you think they are.

What moves the rocks on the racetrack playa? Wind. But not just wind. Sheets of ice, breaking apart, wind blown, help push the rocks along. Directly observed!
http://www.nature.com/news/wandering-st ... ed-1.15773

Castle for Sale

Yes, one town over from me, In Woodstock Connecticut, there is a very nice castle for sale, with moat, for only $45,000,000.
Here is a short video. You have to wait for the commercial to come up and get out of the way.

http://www.wfsb.com/video?clipId=105708 ... start=true

I can't remember if it was at this forum or somewhere else but at some point a discussion about squares in nature was had. It is admittedly hard to find naturally forming squares. Tonight I saw this and was taken aback just a little. Well, that's about as square as I've seen. Interesting plant.

Eucalyptus tetraptera - Four-winged Mallee by aviac, on Flickr

The crystal lattice of many molecules is cubic (face centred or body centred). But my, that it an interesting plant.

Yeah, there are cubic crystals. Salt or some other rock is generally where to look for natural squares. After that, though, especially in the living natural world, if measuring by frequency, squares are decidedly unnatural. Well, unless you consider the things all the humans have built. Then they are the most natural things in the world.

I'm trying to avoid posting a lot of random videos but I think this one is worthy and appropriate for this forum. It's a kind of Rube Goldberg machine that utilizes a beam of light and a lot of lenses to accomplish its goal.

Automatic selfie taker.

Weak nuclear force affects chirality of molecules in life... so says the 13 year experiment.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... y-of-life/

Ever feel like you're not quite yourself when you get up in the morning?

The Green Snot is taking over the world's rivers.




http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140922 ... lds-rivers