![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<\/a>— 1 —<\/strong><\/p>\n Pimp my necktie: If you want to dress for success, nothing says power necktie quite like the necktie the folks at EMPA have developed, a necktie woven of silk plasma-coated with 24 carat gold<\/a>. Don’t let the price tag of 7’500.- Swiss francs deter you – you’ll be wearing eight grams of gold that glitters in the sun like liquid metal, bound to get the attention of that special someone. If there’s a gift out there for the father who already has it all, this is it: they are manufacturing only 12 this year.<\/p>\n <\/a>— 2 —<\/strong><\/p>\n I know it’s a little late for Halloween, but if you like dressing up and the gold necktie isn’t your cuppa, our lab information management system software programmer’s wife sews costumes<\/a>. Her selling point right now is price, not necessarily perfect authenticity, but if it’s good enough for LARP<\/a>, it ought to be good enough for Halloween.<\/p>\n <\/a>— 3 —<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about analyzing particles. One important parameter is the Feret Diameter, the longest distance between any two points along the selection boundary, also known as maximum caliper<\/a>. The other day I came across someone who had called it the Ferret Diameter. Because it would take too long to find a photo of a ferret and draw a diameter, here in its place is a micrograph of Bakelite<\/a>. <\/a>— 4 —<\/strong><\/p>\n I recently read C.J. Mahaney’s “Christ our Mediator.” The good part: There’s very little beef to have with the book theologically, and it is concerned with a crucial topic. I do have some concerns with his approach to emotion. He spends an entire chapter explaining that belief must precede emotion, and emotion must thus never be a reason for belief. The danger I see is not in that, but in his emphasis that emotion will necessarily follow belief and meditation. It seems to me that thus emotion becomes the end and proof of belief, and that I think is untenable, for if emotion was too unreliable to serve as a foundation for belief, how can it be reliable enough to serve as its evidence? <\/p>\n <\/a>— 5 —<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the five love languages is acts of service. I’ve been thinking about that lately: who decides which acts of service need to be done, and how? Clearly, the act of service is a gift, so one would think the giver has every right to decide how to serve. The problem occurs if the giver and the recipient have different ideas of what service needs to be done. If I decide to sort our CD collection alphabetically, that is an act of service, but it won’t mean much to Janet. (If I sweep the floor, that’s another story.) As with most gifts, this one needs to be given with the recipient in mind, and that means letting go of my idea of what ought to be done or how something ought to be done. <\/a>— 6 —<\/strong><\/p>\n Have you heard of chemtrails? The first time I heard of it was at the NanoBio conference in Zurich, when a guy reeking of alcohol came in off the street and started telling me how the real nanoparticles were in the chemtrails like those on the conference poster. The idea is that somehow “the government” or “the military” gets regular jetliners to distribute nanoparticles in their wake, thereby changing the weather or raining chemicals on us or otherwise controlling the world. Of course, there’s no plausible way to do that – not that I know of anyway – and condensation does a wonderful job of explaining all the phenomena described. Then why are there more contrails up in the sky than you remember from your youth? Not because chemicals make them more persistent, but simply because flights have increased drastically.
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\nNow, talking about a gift before giving it robs it of a lot of its joy, but when you’re getting to know someone, I think that can’t be avoided. Or can it? How?<\/p>\n
\nInstead of chemtrail images, have a look at a regular cloud and its odd optical effect<\/a>!<\/p>\n