deathmtn

The parking lot of the auto supply store is where I do most of my car maintenance, which is pretty much just changing light bulbs and wipers and putting in oil. Actually feels more private than the street in front of my house, where I feel more people could be watching me.

I'm always tickled to see this little fuse cover removal tool included with the fuses. But always disappointed when I confirm the problem isn't simply that a fuse melted.

Iced coffee, beans, and rice — the week's staples, all being made partly on their own in trendy specialized food preparation devices. I've gotta say, trendy they may be (except maybe the cold brew toddy, which was trendy 8 years ago), but work well they do. (Felt like I had to match the arrangement of the the Yoda-like-yet-common "___ they may be" clause.)

3'5" 35 lbs.!

The right font makes a lot of difference I think. Also, Observatory's year view now has handy counts for project activity categories. e.g. 4 projects were started in April, 3 were grown (developed but not shipped), 2 were shipped, and 5 were tended (developed after shipping).

Katt made some really good cupcakes for the birthday party. Bonus Cat is also excited about them.

The Impossible Whopper (made from Impossible Meat, an all-vegetable meat substitute that uses a lot of heme to simulate meatness) is actually really good.

Well, really good if you have Whopper nostalgia like me. The more important finding is that it's incredibly beef-like. I don't think blind taste testers would be able to tell it apart from Whopper-quality meat.

So that's one tiny point on the board for a positive future!

Burger King is shockingly busy. Well, to me.

We used to have our Legos sorted by color, which worked for a while. Searches got really long, so I'm trying to sort by shape. Lego ontology is really challenging, though. So, we'll start with these categories, then see if they're too big or too small.

The tunnel!

Haulin'

I have to take a moment to acknowledge how hard simply solving a system of equations is. I was puzzled by how the velocities of two colliding objects are calculated, so I looked it up. Turns out both the conservation of momentum and the conservation of energy hold true in an elastic collision (in which no energy leaves the system of two colliders).

That's two equations involving masses and velocities. The Wikipedia article, which is really good, waves it through and says with these two equations, you get the handy one that tells you the velocities after the collision.

I tried a couple times on my own to derive the handy one on my own from those two. I kept ending up with huge, crazy equations. I realized there are quite a few paths to choose at each step of solving a system of equations.

In the end, I had to look it up and follow along with this answer on Socratic. The trick I had forgotten about was that terms in the form x^2 + y^2 can be factored. Getting rid of squares and avoid square roots is the key here.

I think I'm in for a bumpy ride in my quest to understand acoustics.