{"id":126,"date":"2009-09-17T06:02:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T11:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2009\/09\/17\/090917_randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2022-03-13T20:12:18","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T01:12:18","slug":"090917_randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/09\/17\/090917_randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some random thoughts (hey, it&#8217;s what we do) while contemplating what I&#8217;d do with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/autopia\/2009\/09\/audi-e-tron\/\">an electric car that generates more torque<\/a> than an M1 Abrams tank (well, other than pulling my house &#8211; slab and all &#8211; to the vacant lot across the street that has a better view of the pond).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I got another of those African scam emails this week, and I decided that the world&#8217;s most difficult job would be a new account marketer for the Central Bank of Nigeria. I mean, how would you ever convince someone that you&#8217;re on the level? I&#8217;m pretty sure that emailing potential customers would be <i>verboten<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blackbag.nl\/?p=940\">This is pretty cool<\/a>. Some dude took a digital photograph of a handcuff key hanging from a policeman&#8217;s belt, then used a 3D &#8220;printer&#8221; to create a plastic replica. Turns out that it actually worked. (H\/T <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schneier.com\/blog\/archives\/2009\/09\/printing_police.html\">Schneier on Security<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">At dinner last night, we were discussing whether you could actually explode a nitroglycerin tablet. That made me think of this video (H\/T <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geeksaresexy.net\/2009\/09\/16\/the-most-dangerous-way-to-light-a-grill-ever\/\">Geeks are Sexy<\/a>):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SS7n4kVL5kA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>To be honest, I didn&#8217;t know anything about liquid oxygen (aka &#8220;condensed oxygen&#8221;). Googling it turned up some misleading ads for a kind of sports or health drink. But the real stuff is used for rocket fuel, and, according to Wikipedia, was discontinued in weapons production due to excessive &#8220;accidents.&#8221; But, if you&#8217;re serious about LOX, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allatoms.com\/LOXpage.htm\">you can make your own<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Are you a baseball fan? Even if you&#8217;re not a rabid fan, you might enjoy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cup.columbia.edu\/book\/978-0-231-14794-1\/live-all-you-can\/excerpt\">this account of the first baseball game<\/a>, played on a sunny afternoon on June 19, 1846. (H\/T Columbia University Press via <a title=\"Follow CUP on Twitter\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/Columbiaup\">Twitter<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">And, finally, <a title=\"Plucking Pomegranates\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/09\/15\/090915_pomegranates\/\">having seen its fruit<\/a>, some of you were wondering what the pomegranate tree looks like. Your wish is my command (for a sense of scale, the brick wall in the background is about 7&#8242; tall):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #cccccc;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/pome3.jpg\" alt=\"Photo - Pomegranate tree\"><br \/>\n&lt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some random thoughts (hey, it&#8217;s what we do) while contemplating what I&#8217;d do with an electric car that generates more torque than an M1 Abrams tank (well, other than pulling my house &#8211; slab and all &#8211; to the vacant lot across the street that has a better view of the pond). I got another&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/09\/17\/090917_randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8760,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/8760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}