Can I use this eagle as a sundial?

Spent a day scanning stuff in for a friend to put on his website. It was a repetitive, slow, dull day.

But I had my distraction. I was listening to, and occasionally watching a webcam on an Eagle's nest.

The eagle was having a long dull day too. She occasionally got up and turned a bit, and then sat back down on the eggs. She occasionally called out - I thought she was asking for a break from her mate, so I watched when she was calling out, but no other eagle ever came.

So I noticed that the eagle had a favourite sitting position, and I wondered if it was possible to use the eagle as a sundial, so I took screen shots at noon, 3pm, and 5pm. And her shadow did move in quite the time keeping manner! Not that accurate... but probably about as good as a sundial wristwatch with a compass to align it properly.

So who won the dull day contest - her or me?

Do you smell something?

I've managed to avoid it since 2009, but now I had to do it. My spouse and I had to go to a... shopping mall on the weekend.

We are replacing the doors on our laundry cupboard with curtains because it was difficult for me and my walker to get around the wooden doors while doing laundry. So we needed fabric and something to hang it on. We managed to avoid the inevitable trip to the mall for a few months... but the prominent place of the laundry machines in the hallway in the middle of our condo was getting too unsightly. So we ventured out...

We buy most stuff online. Recently we got a whole pile of turtlenecks and t-shirts from an end of season sale. While I was unpacking them I read the country of origin on all the packages: Jordan, China, Indonesia, and one other more exotic country. The unsettling part about it was that all of the clothes smelt the same.

Different areas of the planet. Same scent.

I washed all of the clothes before we wore any of them. I don't know what was on all of them to make them smell the same... but, yeesh.

When we were in the shopping mall on the weekend... there was no scent there either. The fabric store is next to the food court. There was no scent there.

The stale air being forced around everyone in the shopping mall had no scent.

The noise that makes your shoulders tense was there. The bad lighting that makes it painful when you walk outside into the sunlight afterwards was there. The surfaces that look like you could wash them with a fire hose without damaging them, even though they don't look like they've ever been washed, were there.

But there was nothing to smell. All those people, all that "food", and no scent. This is artificial, it has to be. And really, really creepy.

Humans are predators. We are the apex predators on the planet, nothing can live if we want to kill it. A very important sense for predators is smell. It subconsciously helps us move around in our world when we can use all of our senses. Deadening our ability to smell our environment is just creepy.

We spent a couple of hours in Stanley Park after our trip into the creepy shopping mall. We had some coffee. We reunited with our sense of smell.

So now we are recovered from our journey to the shopping mall... maybe we can wait 5 years before the next visit. We hope.

Why am I flinching?

I do love a good webcam. Some of my favourites are:
Eagle nests from around southern BC
Bruichladdich scotch distiller in Scotland
Tofino webcam from a wonderful resort on Vancouver Island

It's nice to see people making great scotch - some of my favourite scotch is made at Bruichladdich. And it's great to watch eagles in their nests feeding baby eagles... although it can get nerve racking at the end of the season when you just want that last young bird to leave the nest and fly already!

My most frequent view is the Tofino webcam - a fabulous beach in the most relaxed place in Canada. But yesterday I was alarmed by what I saw. It was black and covered the picture... was it apocalypse? was the camera in jeopardy? No, it was a bird. A bird tail actually. A big black bird tail that looked frightening on my computer screen! It may have been from a crow, or a raven (known as the trickster bird so a likely candidate) but I think it was a bit small for an eagle (I've been close to one in flight by the water's edge - they are bigger than me).

I can giggle at it now... but it made me flinch when I first saw it. A link to an outside reality that felt a bit too close to home for a second!

I may need to get out more.

Where was this screw supposed to be?

Why is it that every time you take something apart, and then put it back together again, there is always an extra piece?

Frequently a washer, often a screw, sometimes a piece of metal or plastic that honestly doesn't look like it was part of the thing you just took apart. There is always something left over.

But the most confusing thing is that the item that was was taken apart, and then put back together, works again. So did it really need the left over bit? Was that left over part really necessary? Did it really come from the item in the first place?

If there are parallel dimensions, is there one where something is lost every time an item is taken apart and then put back together? Is this left over screw from that dimension?

Is this the key to traveling to another dimension? Become an integral part of a mechanism, wait for it to break down, and then escape to a new world when someone takes it apart to fix it? Actually, no, that would only be from the other dimension to ours. It's our dimension where the extra pieces appear. So is this where aliens come from? Did someone in a parallel dimension already have this idea, and they managed to jump to ours using this scheme?

Is this an alien screw from another dimension?

Do mattresses have a herding instinct?

You aren't supposed to do it. It's littering. It's illegal. But most people don't know how to get rid of old mattresses, so they go out in the middle of the night, find an alley, and dump them.

But that's not the end of it. When you have one mattress... there will be more very soon.

The empty lot beside our home now has 3 mattresses dumped in it.

We saw the same thing happen in the alley behind our old appartment building.

The empty lot beside our home contained dilapidated old buildings for about a year until we made enough noise to have the city force the owner to tear the buildings down. The chances of the owner of the empty lot doing anything about the mattresses are slim to none.

So now we have a look each morning to see if there are more mattresses. It's like they have a herding instinct. Stray mattresses will find each other.

Update March 15: How much do soaking wet mattresses weigh?

They are gone! Hooray! There was a very loud truck outside yesterday. It was out there for quite a while making quite the noise. When it was gone.... so were the mattresses!

It's been raining here for... um... months. Yep, not exaggerating... too much. So the mattresses that were sitting outside for days had to have been soaking wet. That would be heavy. No wonder the truck was making so much noise.

So the rubble from the dilapidated buildings has been removed, the herd of mattresses has left the watering hole and moved on to greener pastures... if an archaeologist dug up the site in a hundred years, would they find the remains of bed bugs and deduce that the shops were actually a human dwelling?

This vacant lot is getting interesting. I wonder what's going to be out there next.

Will your reputation follow you for 100 years?

It's the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown Man. The British hoax that claimed a pre-modern human skull and jawbone were 1,000,000 years old, but were later found to be much more recent - and actually a combination of human skull and orangutang jaw.

There is an interesting news article about it here because people are bringing the evidence back out of storage for some more analysis.

Now that's a terrible way to celebrate an anniversary. Dig out the evidence of a fraud you believed in for 50 years, do more analysis to see how it was done, and publicize it again. I guess it's a British thing.

If you read the news article closely, it goes into some very interesting details about the character of many of the men involved in the scam. One of them was described as: "palaeontologist and alleged practical joker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin".

Just how many practical jokes did this man pull in is lifetime to get this reputation? How is it that many years after his death, he is still known as a "practical joker"? What do you have to do, and in what public domain do you have to do it in, to have a reputation that stretches so many years after your death?

It's not a reputation given to all the men involved in the Piltdown Man hoax, so it's not just the one infamous "practical joke" that stuck to his reputation.

"Your reputation precedes you" is often a very great compliment. Is "your reputation has followed you for a century" a compliment? I think it must be. For most people birth and death dates are what's on the gravestone, and how they are remembered 100 years later. Some people do actions which are recorded in history books, they are remembered as long as the history is read. Whether good or bad, if memory of what your personality included survives you for so many years after your death, you made quite the impact. I think it's an extraordinary statement if your personality survived the ravages of time.

So how long will your reputation follow you?

Is this a new Swiss Army Knife tool?

The big space tidy-up has finally begun! The Swiss have put a cleaning tool into orbit to grab old non-functional satellites and push them into orbit to burn up. Watch this video for details.

So how do we get them to make more of these?

Everyone who puts stuff up into orbit should have one. It should be one of the essential Swiss Army Knife tools that space focussed countries should have. It would go really well with the cork-screw and scissors. Something you won't miss until you really miss it, so you should have one with you at all times.