It's common in dog medicines to split pills since dogs come in a wide variety of sizes and the dose is typically based on weight.

First, they form deep down in the mantle around 100 miles down. The only way they get up here is through rare and violent high velocity eruption events that bring mantle material up to the surface. Most are very old, too; greater than a billion years old.

I don't recall the source of the carbon they're made from, but it's certainly not any sort of organic material like coal or dinosaurs. ;)

Or I could be totally wrong. I really have no interest in these things beyond the geology behind them and it's possible the science has uncovered new stuff since I last studied them.

Likewise, I have no idea how these synthetic diamonds are being made nowadays, but I bet that's pretty cool, too.

Sort of ironic I first read his books because of my donation of technology.

But then I noticed they had a much better series called the Hemnes made with actual solid wood shelves and legs so you can route power cords and clean under them. Nice.

So instead of a bunch of Billy's for $70 each I ended up with a bunch of Hemnes' for $350 each. We'll see if it's worth it when they get delivered tomorrow.

We were both at a startup in Portland and our office was along the railroad tracks east of the Willamette. We were up on the 4th or 5th floor right above a lot of train traffic including Amtrak.

I brought in some extra Mac gear I had including one of the early iSight cameras which back then was an external device you stuck on the top of your display and connected to the Mac via FireWire. We set it up and rolled the desk over to the window in the office and turned the camera around pointing down at the tracks and Ward got to work hacking something up to do a slit scan.

It was a fun little project; the speed of the trains affected the horizontal compression of the images. We could tweak the software to expand or contract the size of the image by adjusting the number of slit scans per unit of time. Of course, that affected the exposure but I recall the camera having some automatic adjustments that gave us trouble.

That's about all we did with it. Just a quick afternoon hacking project. Neither of us thought much about it at the time so we didn't save anything.

And rumor has it some of the nuclear subs may work with a Stirling engine which can operate systems on heat alone.

The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)

I've been doing doing it that way for so long I still often use the "--" construct from way back in ascii email days.

At least I've gotten past the two-spaces after a period I learned from the typewriter. Most of the time, anyway.

Mostly he worked at the local 16-lane alley with ancient AMF machines. The logic was all relays in a "chassis" on each machine. Relays would fail, pins and balls would end up where they're not supposed to be, folks would roll the ball into the sweep. All kinds of stuff. As a kid was was fantastic to see. A pinsetter machine is a real Rube Goldberg type contraption. Probably lead me to being an engineer.

We had the several opportunities to buy a small-town bowling center, but looking at the economics -- even back in the 1980's -- wasn't good. Most of the operating profit back then came from alcohol sales and that's a totally different business.

Good luck! Recently Facebook has been showing me a lot of bowling content. Be cool if it's making a comeback.

My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.

So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.

It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.

When I was in high school the drinking age across the state border in Kansas was 18 so every weekend we'd all go over to the night clubs in Galena.

For folks interested in such things, Joplin has a Mineral Museum in Schifferdecker Park that has tons of info and exhibits on the mining that went on in this area. Has some pretty impressive (and massive) mineral samples, too. It's worth checking out if you're ever in the area.

Things that are tested/validated in wind tunnels nowadays: effect of different paint and coatings, engine inlet flow, noise, tunned mass dampers, effect of placement of sensors, control surface flutter.

And I have a pretty good idea of heights around here. I mentioned I work at Boeing on flying things so I track the ones that fly over me. They're usually about 1000 to 1500 ft. AGL on approach when they go over my house and about 200 knots. Southwest has the most flights into and out of St. Louis so it's usually a 737, and those have a wingspan of just over 100 feet on the newer models.

So yeah, I'd say these fireworks were going up at least 300 feet.

Luckily it's so wet here at the moment the fire risk is minimal.

The fireworks last night were insane. All around me folks were setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking, my dogs were freaking out, one of them had a seizure. The air was filled with smoke and smelled of gun powder. It was one of the craziest things I've ever experienced.

Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.

I don't know what the planes were doing; I didn't hear or see any landing with all the smoke and noise.

Check it out starting on page 2240 of your McMaster-Carr 132 catalog. They have all kinds of things you can mount up like monitor arms. It's an erector set toy for engineers. ;)