1) lost souls cafe
2) stairwell in new astro building

My wordpress cred has doubled since mdawaffe got me a cool wp skin for my phone.

The Huntington has a cool new history of science exhibit. One of the displays consists of about a hundred historical light bulbs, including three test bulbs labeled by Edison himself. They constructed a case filled with Nitrogen (in case the seals on the bulbs were broken) and put a few watts through some of the old bulbs. It’s interesting that Edison’s and many others’ bulbs were designed to maximize the length of filament that was inside the bulb, by looping the filament up and down in a circle. Modern day light bulbs are made with very thin filaments in tightly packed coils. That would seem to concentrate the heat, leading to faster sublimation and weakening of the tungsten. So my question to the blogosphere is, why doesn’t this happen, or why is the modern design better?

Historical light bulbs on display at the Huntington Library

I finished my wordpress plugin, and, after fixing a few bugs, I think it’s at a usable version. Here is the plugin page, including source code and theory. The basic gist is that it creates a sidebar in your blog with links to some of your posts. At first, it experiments by displaying random posts, then it analyzes the resulting data using a bayesian learning algorithm to determine which post titles are most likely to get clicked. Why am I not using it on my own blog? I’m hosted at wordpress.com which doesn’t let you add your own plugins. Also, there’s nothing of general interest on my blog.

I’ve been combing craigslist for a throne to complete my office. Today was the day of anointing.
Continue reading ‘Throne’