I recently got my motorcycle license. I took a Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) class. It basically consisted of five hours of classroom education and then standing in a parking lot for several hours doing figure eights on my motorcycle (well, it’s theirs, but it has my name on it). Fun the first day and a bore the second, but important stuff learned nonetheless. I wish these types of things were mandatory for car-driving licenses.
Rossi and Lorenzo Speaking About Stoner
Bummed to be losing Casey Stoner at the end of the season. Raw speed…
Lorenzo on Stoner - http://www.motomatters.com/analysis/2012/10/25/2012_phillip_island_motogp_thursday_roun.html
Rossi on Stoner - http://www.asphaltandrubber.com/racing/motogp-summary-friday-australian-gp-2012/#more-36478
nybg:
Orchid lovers, time to celebrate; orchid support goes high design! No more chopsticks and banana clips. Orchid pots finally go the powder-coated steel/minimal design route! ~AR
For flowers that are so naturally elegant, domestic orchids are seriously design-challenged. Not the blooms themselves, of course—it’s that unsightly but ubiquitous stick-and-teensy-hair-clip combo that keeps the stems standing tall.
Yeonju Yang, half of London-based studio Yang:Ripol, had been regularly tending to these particular blossoms for almost five years before reaching a kind of creative epiphany.
“It’s funny how sometimes things stare at you in the face for so long until the designer mind clicks in and you realize—here is actually a problem which needs resolving,” he tells Co.Design.
nybg:
Colored Honey Made by Candy-Eating French Bees
Orange blossom honey, or clover? Maybe “wildflower.” Or how about the “colorful candy shell” blend? If not for stringent rules dictating that honey, by definition, must be made from plant nectar, you might be facing down this wacko decision right now.
As it turns out, humans aren’t the only ones wrestling with the habit of choosing artificial sweetness over the real deal. Bees, too, are susceptible. And farmers in the north of France found this out the hard way when they discovered their hives plugged up with a kaleidoscope of blue, green, and muddy red “honey.”
Sadly, they weren’t having waking hallucinations. Their bees had decided that open containers of candy coloring from a nearby processing plant put up easier fare than nearby flower fields. But this isn’t exactly a fluke of the natural world, as a batch of blood-red bee juice out of Red Hook, Brooklyn proved in 2010. Maraschino-cherry flavored honey on your ice cream, anyone?
For now, the farmers are saying they can’t sell the colorful stuff; the French laws on the definition of honey preclude them from it. But something tells me the market is there, if only they start advertising to the new gastronomy set of NYC.
I think our own honey bees at the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden do just fine with the real deal at their disposal. Click through for more on the royal blue confection. —MN
(Source: definemotorsports)
Brainwashing And The Not-So Impossible
Nearly finished reading Isaacson’s Einstein biography. Lots of interesting talk in the beginning of the book about how Einstein’s healthy disregard for authority and group-think allowed him to question some of the ‘unquestionable’ findings of folks like Newton. That was his mindset as a young man, and yet as he got older, Einstein became entrenched in his way of thinking and had trouble opening up his mind to quantum physics. While his issue with quantum physics was more philosophical than anything, it does serve as a reminder that continuing to question the status quo is hard work (and were this ability to continually question a muscle, it would need to be exercised on a regular basis).
The attached link is a highly regarded physics discovery that occurred this year, in which scientists used the classic ‘double slit’ experiment to question traditional mindsets (in truth, the results of their work are a bit lost on me ;-)
The book finishes with a description of
Let the grilling begin… (Taken with instagram)
