Category Archives: cool living things

On this Mother’s Day, my true love gave to me….

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…. a lilac in a front yard.

Yeay!

Lilacs are my favorite flowers.  I love the fragrance that knocks you off your feet, the gorgeous colors, the poufy bloom bunches and the fact that they are only around a really really short time.  So beautiful and so short-lived and so like spring itself.  I love having been born at the same time as these flowers; I just adore them.  I have desparately wanted to have some lilac bushes growing around our house for years now, but I’m not much of a green thumb and it seemed like an overwhelming project.  Also, large lilacs can pretty much take over a yard – they grow like a tree with roots that spread far and wide.  So for the last few years I spent my early May standing in yards of other people that grow lilacs and sniffing their flowers.  No one has ever questioned my behavior, probably because with flowers this gorgeous, who could blame me?

In Russia, we used to break whole branches of lilac bushes and bring them home and make gorgeous boquets.  Friends always brought armfuls of lilacs for me for my birthday.  I miss having lilacs in my house terribly, but something told me that snapping the neighbors’ bush branches would definitely be not welcome.  Even sniffing might have been borderline, I’d need to check the HOA regulations.  So I could not have lilac goodness in my house and of course, I felt deprived.  And of course, I stoically kept it all inside.  Ok, I may have mentioned it to my husband.  Once or twice.  A day.  Moderation is my middle name.

And this year my wonderful husband got me a dwarf lilac bush!! We will have it planted in our yard, and I am BESIDE myself.  I cannot wait.  Huge grin.  For now I am staring at these lilac photos and imagining them in my house each spring. Joy!

Detailed report of lilac bush planting is coming up.  Squeal!!

Two cool videos

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Even though I gave birth to a kid, and am expecting to have another one soon, I honestly have no clue how these kids come about.  I mean, I logically understand it.  I can recite the process of cell division, specialization, the whole thing, I get it.  But I just don’t REALLY get it.  I mean, how can that be? How does something come from what used to be nothing?  It’s all just cells dividing, really?  For a while, cells divide, and then you get a little person saying “ffffff-uck teeee-ruck”? WOW. 

I don’t get it.  It’s like a sci-fi movie plot.  So cool it can’t possibly be true.

That’s why this video of cell division is so awesome.  It’s only zebrafish (no insult to zebrafish), and look how crazy complicated it is!  They were able to capture the first cell divisions for the first time ever…. you can watch the little zebra fish in the making!  And, our babies start out the same way.  Amazing.  It’s awesome, but still doesn’t make it more believable.

And, of course, when the thing gets built and gets bigger it can do all sorts of cool stuff. Like chasing after butterflies. Oh, and “the thing” happens to be a penguin.

How cool is that?

Learn something new every day

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Two completely unrelated, but rivaling in coolness pieces of information:

1.  Brainless slime mold makes decisions exactly like humans do.

It makes decisions by evaluating its options comparatively, rather than absolutely.  In other words, when presented with a $5 bottle of wine and a $25 bottle of wine, the mold chooses the cheaper one.  However, when a choice of $500 bottle of wine is added, the mold goes for the $25 one as it looks like a relative bargain. Except, in the case of mold, wine = oatmeal culture.  For humans, the wine story holds exactly as told.  :)

Economists refer to this as ‘irrational behavior’, and behavioral economics is the hot new field figuring out why humans do the things they do with their money.  It turns out that the older ‘rational agent’ economic theory is bust.  It also turns out that we are not unique in our irrationality – or, even more profoundly, it turns out that biological systems are irrational.  I mean, the mold doesn’t even have a brain.

Read the entire article on Not Exactly Rocket Science. 

2.  A Tilt-Shift Tutorial!



Have you wondered how to take pictures of real, large, everyday objects in a way that makes them look miniature? The technique is called tilt-shift, and basically involves changing the focus and the perspective simultaneously to create an illusion of smallness.  Specialized lenses to do this can be very expensive, but there is a DIY Guide to creating one.  And, the same site also has an excellent explanation of How Tilt Shift Works.  Awesome.

I posted a NYC Tilt Shift video a while ago, and now there is also a San Francisco one.  Funny, the miniature versions of these cities are more like I remember them than the real pictures.  


Plungercammed: Tiny Fishermans Wharf from Bhautik Joshi on Vimeo.