Recent content by FainAvis

On building sites we often get vehicles stuck in the mud, sometimes because it rained after the vehicle was positioned. Rain water is especially soft and makes some muds very slippery. But a neat trick is to dump lime in the rut. Lime "hardens" water. The vehicle can get better traction.

Neoteny. The retention of juvenile features in the adult. Among the first things a newborn mammal seeks is the nipple. At first we humans nuzzle about with our mouth. Later, we become adept at gathering information with our hands. On occasion, I have probed the interest of a female with a gentle...

And even if you can keep all dust out and not touch the platters with greasy fingers, how are you going to refill the hdd with helium? (Rhetorical question.)

See dynamic range in Wikipedia. Moonlight to sunlight is a dynamic range of a billion to one. But can you go from sunlight to moonlight (or a dark room of similar light intensity) and immediately see details? No, because it takes a while to become dark adapted. The photographer using film has...

My daughter asserts that her mother is the most reasonable person she knows. Since that is not my experience of her I can only conclude that she has undergone a complete brain transplant.

As a native English speaker I assert that a continuous vowel undertone is bad diction. That applies to whispering, singing, shouting or normal speech.

In kangaroos, it seems the paternal X is inactivated. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1044578183710145

In welding school they taught us that sniffing the pure oxygen from the welding oxygen bottle will send you dizzy. However, they also cautioned that it can kill, by suppressing breathing. The reason is that breathing is a response to CO2 concentration. So medical oxygen has a small amount of CO2...