Good evening, Kibitzers! Happy spring!
So, Monday I was eating some almonds, and suddenly one mouthful had this weird little hard nugget in it. If you’ve never broken a tooth, I will tell you that this often means you’ve broken a tooth. In this case, it is a bicuspid on the upper right, tooth #5, I believe. It had a big filling, and I think it weakened where it was filled and the back part broke off. I am not a dentist, but my guess is that I will end up with a crown there.
The complication is that I’m not in New Jersey, and had no plan to be there until after Easter. But I don’t want to take up with some random dentist for a thing of this scale, when I have one I trust. She has small children so she only works Tuesdays and Thursdays now. That means as I write, on Monday night, I haven’t talked to her office yet and am just assuming she’ll squeeze me in on Thursday, but there was no way I was driving half of Monday night on the chance she’d have time today. (Update: yes, she can see me on Thursday.)
It doesn’t hurt; it’s just kind of disconcerting. And I am really hoping I don’t need a root canal. As it is, if I indeed need a crown I will have to appear again in two weeks when the crown is ready, so do I then want to stay in New Jersey through Easter, or do I want to drive back to Boston and then drive back to NJ? Teeth are so annoying, but they are good to have.
Anyway, I’ve been a little distracted, and the more coherent diary I had in mind is not coming together. So here are some things I found on YouTube YouTube decided I should find.
I need to open with this, because I was so pleased to happen upon it. I have driven past this “telephone pole farm” in Chester, NJ countless times. The extent of it is not obvious from the road, but the first rows of stubby poles are. “What the hell IS that?”, I used to wonder. Now I know: it’s a telephone pole testing ground, and like many residents of this part of New Jersey, when I learned that Bell Labs was behind it, I just went, “OH, okay, got it.” [2:23]
This company, NODE, is prototyping flat-pack, affordable, carbon-negative houses that could be shipped cheaply and assembled quickly on-site by only a few people. It’s a very interesting idea! More info at their link. [5:10]
This video from the scientific journal Nature shows a clever little device that autonomously drills itself into the ground. It can be loaded with seeds or other cargo, even sensors, and then strewn over a large or remote area to plant whatever it’s carrying. Nature requires a subscription, but you can see the abstract of the paper without a paywall. Or just watch! [2:29]
Puppeteer Barnaby Dixon started out as a stop-motion animator, and that led him to develop his unique puppets that have remarkably fluid motion. [9:09]
According to the video’s title, Caltech seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones tells you “how to prepare for a major earthquake”, but it’s not “here’s where to hide when the shaking starts” — it’s more like “here are all the ways infrastructure needs to change now”. It is, however, extremely informative, if alarming. [14:07]
The Brick Experiment Channel is a guy in Finland (we see a lot of them, don't we?) who says, “I do nerdy experiments with Lego bricks :)”. Here, he has assembled 20 different machine elements (e.g. a universal joint, a rack-and-pinion, a camshaft) out of Lego. He briefly demonstrates how they work, and then adds them to his machine, which does… nothing, really. But it’s fun to watch! [7:20]
I know I’ve put this in a diary before, but I recently had occasion to put it into a comment under a diary about Woody Guthrie, who wrote it (folk tune, I think, but he wrote the words), and I feel like it’s time for it again. This is the awesome Rhiannon Giddens and the Resistance Revival Chorus. I warn you, you’ll be singing the chorus of it for days. [3:21]
If you are having a difficult day, perhaps you’d like to stop for a while at this quiet cafe, which is also full of books and birdsong and, inexplicably, large flowering cherry trees. (I’m told that large flowering cherry trees that grow inside towering library cafes emit no pollen, so no worries there.) [8 hours]
🌼 Monday late: Mercy Ormont took some pictures of the Superbloom in Arizona, and posted some in a late comment. If we’re nice to her, maybe she’ll post some more!
I need to toss in this tweet, for those who missed it Monday morning in Cheers and Jeers. You can also see it on YouTube, but I chose the tweet because it has some text saying what on earth this is. [2:19]