Tuesday  28 Apr 2020           comment?

For several weeks, this jackrabbit enjoyed the shade of a boxthorn shrub in my yard. He* was in the same spot faithfully from about 9‑to‑4: his day job, so to speak.

His regular schedule made it easy to film him. I thought it might be entertaining to watch him settling in to his preferred spot. Maybe he would look around first to see if the coast was clear.

I did take video but it was nothing special. The first thing he did upon arising in the afternoon was eat.

The surprise was that he hasn't come back after I filmed him. I don't know if he found a spot he likes better, if he got eaten, or what.

My not-special video of him is on YouTube.

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* or she, I can't tell

Saturday  18 Apr 2020           1 comment

female Anna's hummingbird, this morning

Tuesday  14 Apr 2020           comment?

It didn't occur to me in advance that clamping this glue joint in three mutually orthogonal directions would not be straightforward.

Monday  13 Apr 2020           comment?

You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It's the stuff we can understand. It's cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.

‑ John Horton Conway (1937‑2020)

Sunday  05 Apr 2020           comment?

I still operate an ADS-B receiver. The graph below shows how many aircraft it has received signals from for each of the past 30 days.

Saturday  04 Apr 2020           2 comments

There hasn't been any brown rice at the supermarket for weeks. I ordered a 15 pound bag of rice through Amazon and it arrived today. The rice--produce of California--was shipped from Florida.

This got me curious about what weight limit applies to USPS flat rate boxes. For domestic shipments it's 70 pounds, so shipping 15 lb. of rice isn't even close to getting maximum value from the service (although it did fill the medium flat rate box with little room to spare).

For the small flat rate box (inside dimensions 8⅝"×5⅜"×1⅝"), the USPS could just say there's no weight limit for a domestic shipment. A brick of osmium that filled the box would only weigh about 61½ pounds.