Friday, November 27, 2009

This Explains So Much

Almost every building I hate in Cambridge (and some across the Charles River) turns out to have been designed by Sert.

This includes the Holyoke Center and Science Center at Harvard, BU Law School, and Peabody Terrace.

It's appalling how much of the horrible architecture around here can be laid at the feet of one architect.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Birds that Sing With their Wings

Birds that sing with their wings. (!!!)

(Via Carl Zimmer.)

As J.B.S. Haldane said, the world is not only stranger than we imagine — it's stranger than we can imagine.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Things that go WTF? in the night

About 02:30 this morning, while dead asleep, I was awakened by some noise. The cats all leaped up at the same time that I sat bolt upright. (The cats were all curled up around me, so it wasn't one of them — which it usually is — which made me worried that perhaps someone was breaking a window or something.)

I got up and proceeded to turn on lights all through the house trying to figure out what noise had awoken me.

After five minutes of this, I finally "mentally replayed" the sound I'd heard and thought, "Gosh, that sounded like something falling in a bathtub or shower." I checked the bathtub — nothing. But in the shower, there was a conditioner bottle lying on the floor.

How does a conditioner bottle that sat, stable on the shelf, for 19 hours, suddenly fall off in the middle of the night?

WTF?

 

(This is why I'm a little groggy today. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)