How to Tie a Bow Tie

Bill Nye the Science Guy teaches you how to tie a bow tie.  Awesome.

Seven Minutes of Terror

This video had been floating around the internet for a while, but with less than one week to go to the Curiosity Mars rover's landing on the red planet, its a great time to take a second look (or first if you haven't seen it yet).  The events of the video should take place next week, Aug 5 at 10:31pm PT (Aug 6 @ 1:31am ET).  We'll definitely have our fingers crossed here at Digital Diner.

Lakes on Titan

In this fascinating video, physicist Brian Cox describes some interesting features discovered on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.  Very inspiring stuff and worth your time to watch.

How Brave Are You?

This is pretty impressive.  Some folks were apparently kept up a significant portion of the night by the sound of some bear cubs whining because they got stuck in a dumpster.  Apparently they were able to climb in by finding footholds on the outside of the dumpster, but the inside didn't have anything to step on.  Mama bear waited all night beside them.  This brilliant and brave camping couple came up with quite a plan.  They backed up their dump truck and stuck a ladder in the dumpster so that the bears could climb out.  Watch the video and see how well it worked.

Squirrel Feeder

Ok, so it seems to me that squirrels just sort of spontaneously generate and there is really no need to encourage them by feeding them, but if I ever did want a squirrel feeder, I would definitely try this hanging "big head" one.  Classic!

via LikeCool

Google Science Fair

 
    Here at Digital Dinner we participate in science fairs every year and and have strong positive opinions about increasing the quality of science education.
      The google science fair has gotten entries from 400 countries in 14 different languages, from all the continents (excluding Antarctica).  Thousands of entries were submitted, and only 4 winners, the grand prize winner (also an age group winner), winners from each age group, and the science in action award winner.
On Monday July 23rd, the 15 finallists displayed their projects with knowledge and passion in their voices.  The finallists were inspired to answer a question, solve a problem.  All that inspiration is contagious.  Here at Digital Dinner, we were inspired too.


Click here for more information:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/events/sciencefair/index.html

 

Mobile Trash Can

This seems to me to be a great way to make cleaning up more fun - a trash can that helps to make sure your garbage goes where it belongs!

Loopadupa

Vi Hart is always fun.  Rather than talking about relationship between mathematics and music or symmetry, she just does it.  Repeating graphical patterns like this are called a frieze group while these repeated patterns in music are called canons.  The combination is lovely.

Loopadupa Loopadupa.

Fruits vs Vegetables

The simple tomato.  Is it a fruit or a vegetable?

We all know we are supposed to eat our fruits and vegetables, and kids prefer fruits to vegetables by a wide margin.  But, have you ever stopped to think about what a fruit and/or vegetable really is?  I'm pretty sure an apple is a fruit and broccoli is a vegetable.  Many of you probably know that scientifically the tomato is a fruit, even though many people consider it a vegetable.  But did you know that the supreme court ruled in the Nix vs Hedden case that the tomato should legally be considered a vegetable.  You may even have heard of the government counting a packet of ketchup as a serving of vegetables in school lunches.   So what is the deal here?  Science says the tomato is a fruit, but the government seems to have no trouble calling it a vegetable.  How can this be??  We are here to set the record straight for all of you.

A squash flower from our garden.
A squash will grow here - a good indication that it is a fruit

First lets talk about what a fruit actually is.  By botanical definition it is the ovaries of a plant.  What this means is that it comes from the flower and carries the seeds of the plant.  In a symbiotic relationship, the plant makes a good tasting tissue around the seed which animals eat and help the plant to spread its seed.  This means that squash, pumpkin, cucumbers, peas, beans, corn, wheat grains and tomatoes, botanically-speaking, are fruits.  In culinary terms though, most of these would be considered vegetables.  
Even nuts are dry, single seeded fruits.  Well, ok, some nuts are two seeded, however, and in botanical terms really only fruit in the order Fagales are true nuts.  In culinary terms, however, the term nut applies to any large, oily kernel found in a shell.  This allows us to call peanuts, nuts, even though they really are botanically fruits and in culinary terms, vegetables.  Anyone confused yet?
As a side note from the "some things are hard to categorize" department, a few years back Monika and I saw the Coco de Mer trees on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles.  It is the largest seed in the plant kingdom with a single seed growing to 40-50 cm in diameter and 15-30 kg.  The largest one on record weighed 42kg.  You don't want to be under these "fruit" when they fall.  So here is a "nut" that is much bigger than most vegetables.  Go figure.  The Coco de Mer looks sort of like a giant, two lobed coconut; which reminds me, a coconut is botanically a drupe, NOT a nut.  I'm starting to get the feeling that this isn't going to be so easy to clear up... 

A haul of tomatoes from the Digital Diner garden

OK, then what is a vegetable?  Well here is where the real problem arises.  A vegetable is an edible plant or part of a plant but not seeds and most fruit.  Do you see the problem here?  A vegetable is any part of a plant you eat as long as we don't consider it a fruit.  This is just the kind of opening that allows the legal system to step in a make a judgement as to what is legally a vegetable.  Of course, it can still get even more complicated.  Think about mushrooms.  No they aren't fruit.  They aren't even plants.  They are fungi.  Still many people consider them vegetables.  Oy!  Wikipedia sums it up with this:

There are at least four definitions relating to fruits and vegetables:

• Fruit (botany): the ovary of a flowering plant (sometimes including accessory structures),
• Fruit (culinary): any edible part of a plant with a sweet flavor,
• Vegetable (culinary): any edible part of a plant with a savory flavor.
• Vegetable (legal): commodities that are taxed as vegetables in a particular jurisdiction

So, the final answer as to whether something is a fruit or vegetable is, "it depends."  The definitions of nuts, fruits and vegetables seems to be quite vague.  It seems there is enough leeway that you can call any fruit or vegetable just about anything you want.  Here is our suggestion to help clear up the problems at least a little bit.  Let's call any edible plant or part of a plant a vegetable.  By this definition any fruit would also be a vegetable, but suppose we don't require fruits and vegetables to be mutually exclusive.  Then fruits are a subset of vegetables.  You would be correct to call a  tomato a fruit or a vegetable as you please.  It is both! I think we could even make room for the fungi in there too.  Vegetable could be a sort of catchall word for edible stuff that is grown.  Sure the tomato is a vegetable... and by the way, Pluto should still be a planet if I feel like it too.  Sorry that just slipped out. Anyway, lets try this on.  All grown (non-animal) food is vegetable.  Does that work for you?  What do you think?  


Now go eat your vegetables!

We grow lots of heirloom tomatoes at Digital Diner.
We expect this year's crop to start appearing in another  month or two.

This year we had a bumper crop of plums,
so we should be able to make it through the winter on our plum jam.

A bucket of lingonberries we picked in Sweden

The Laptop Design

I always find the history of technology is intriguing.  Understanding how some of the technologies that we take for granted today came to be is fascinating.
Time magazine just did a released little story called "Clamshell! The Story of the Greatest Computing Form Factor of All Time."  It is about the laptop design that dominates the world of computing today.  It tells the story of how Bill Moggridge came up with the design of the screen that folded over the keyboard back in the eighties at a company called GRiD Systems.  The part that they miss, is that a patent search shows that 1982 patent number 280511 for the design of the "portable computer"actually has 4 inventors including Dave Paulson, Steve Hobson and, good friend of Digital Diner, Glenn Edens (Bill, Dave and Glenn were three of the four founders of GRiD).   Bill Moggridge was the industrial designer behind this form factor, but I believe the other three deserve some credit as well.  So it is with much joy that we recommend this little celebration of the clamshell design that we all know and love.  Quirky, I know, but with the tablet computers comping on so hot and heavy, it is important to pay homage to the design that has served us so well.

Read the story at Time Magazine