scientists are using youtube

How cool is this? Scientists are posting videos online to show each other precisely how they do experiments.
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061120/full/061120-12.html

I must admit I do find youtube annoying and tending to the evil side (typical of bloody Adobe and their involvement). You can't save the videos for posterity. When they disappear from youtube, they're gone. Truly ephemeral culture -- the historian's and archaeologists's nightmare come true.

Stuff posted to youtube leaves no footprints in the sand. It is about as close to a complete waste as you can come while still having some kind of immediate use.

April fool... in November

I'm a bit of a sucker for puzzles. When I was in a shop the other day I saw a wooden block puzzle which looked intriguing and it was only a dollar or two so I bought it. Later I was looking at it and figured one piece would be the key, so I was pushing gently at various parts experimentally. One moved a little, so I looked more carefully at the puzzle while trying to push the part back in, which it wouldn't do. It was caught on one of the other pieces. I jiggled it to try and move the piece back in and the whole thing fell apart. Oh boy, I thought. This one is going to be tricky to put together.

That evening I fiddled about trying, without success, to re-assemble it.

Much later I had another shot at it using the "cheat-sheet". This time I was able to assemble it up to the final part which, it seems to me, is logically impossible to insert. Weird. Also, it bothered me that my memory of the original, assembled puzzle doesn't look like the cheat-sheet version. Even worse, there were 2 parts left over. Counting the blocks in the "solution" yields 12 blocks. But the puzzle contains 14 blocks!

I have this image of some guy in a Chinese toy factory hatching this plot to drive westerners nuts by selling them a puzzle for which the cheat-sheet solution is impossible.

I've included a quick sketch I did of one of the blocks. All 14 blocks are identical. Anybody have any ideas?