It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Quickies

It's been a long time coming, so lets start off the quickies with some acts of senseless damage. Old Wolf sent us a link to a bunch of pictures of someone Defrosting a Freezer in the best way ever, and an anonymous reader sent in a site that shows what happens if you put a CD in Microwave. Don't use AOL CDs., send them to this lady who collects them (from gr8fulnded). On to the sex! An anonymous reader submitted a story about the Robot Pet Vibrator which is I guess AIBO gone wrong. elkm discovered Computerized Contraception. And with all this digital doin' it going on, its good know that MITs Erotic Computation Group is here to research it (thanks Chris Moon) The world is full of strangeness, but little of it is as scary as MissNachos's link to the Hello Kitty laptop, srini's link to the Single Pixel Webcam, and aneanti's link to a collection of the strangest canned foods you'll ever see. Finally, since it is the holidays, check out mrv's link to LED Christmas Lights which sure beats the hell out of finding the broken bulb.

Comments

Freezer defrosting

[Jucius Maximus]

That link is probably slashdotted by now. It shows pics of someone using a flame torch to defrost the ice that builds up on the inside of the freezer.

Contrary to that method, the traditional action involves putting a boiling kettle into the empty freezer. This removes the ice quite nicely. If you ever try to de-ice an upright freezer by any method, MAKE SURE you put some sort of vessel in the bottom to catch the water dripping, otherwise you'll turn around and see water flooding out of the freezer and ruining the floor. Yes, this is from experience ;-)

Canned food? PORK BRAINS!

[stefanlasiewski]

How can you include an article on strange Canned food that doesn't include my all time favorite (I have a can sitting atop my monitor): PORK BRAINS in Milk Gravy.

Yes, this little 5.5 oz can has a whopping 3500 calories, and over 1000% (Yes, one THOUSAND) of your RDA intake of cholesterol.

The recipe on the back? Pork Brains and Scrambled Eggs. At least Eggs have alot of the 'good' cholesterol, otherwise you'd have a heart attack halfway through your second can! Yum!

Pink Hello Kitty Laptop has **Moved**

[TheMCP]

The new URL is http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/.
Please use the new URL. The owner of the site of the old URL would probably rather not be slashdotted.

Incidentally I know the guy who did this, he's utterly cool. You should check out some of his other stuff at http://www.exonome.com/fj/ such as ToriAntiTori and Virginity At Last. (ObDisclaimer: I had a hand in the latter.)

Robot Pet Vibrator?

[jackal!]

So who comes when this thing is called?

Measuring the speed of light with marshmallows

[Brant]

I've actually done this with a first year physics class I taught. They thought I was a bit loony, but it worked.

Take a bunch of mini-marshmallows and spread them out evenly on a plastic tray, covering the whole tray with a single layer. Put this inside a microwave, making sure that the tray doesn't rotate. Turn the microwave on for ~30 seconds on low.

Now, take the tray out of the microwave. You'll see a repeating pattern in the marshmallows, going from puffy to flat and back to puffy again in an array. What you're seeing is the standing wave of the microwaves reflecting off of the sides of the microwave.

Now, measure the average distance between peaks in the standing wave. This is the wavelength of the microwaves. Now, here's the cheating part. Look on the back of the microwave for the frequency of the microwaves. It's usually around 2540 MHz. Calculate the speed of light from

c = frequency x wavelength

Heh. Now that I've written that all out, I've found a link. Here's another, very similar method on : bowle's physics.

Brant