shhhh. don’t tell odin he’s getting some potassium nitrate for christmas.

shhhh. don't tell odin he's getting some potassium nitrate for christmas.

shaving a yak by flipping through old make magazines and came across the dog-eared article on making smoke bombs and remembered in was going to make odin a kit for his birthday but couldn’t find any potassium nitrate locally. but it’d make a great christmas gift, right? i think lighting professional grade colored smoke bombs off the treehouse deck is something that needs happen. and it looks like i can get potassium nitrate here by christmas!

we’ll just need to try and heed mark frauenfelder’s advice to not make them in the kitchen.

heresy.

heresy.

90% of the wood in our 100 year old house has been painted over the years. for whatever reason the dining room was left untouched. we’ve contemplated stripping and refinishing all the trim in the house to make it brighter but it’s just too daunting of a task.

it feels so wrong to paint over the 100 year old wood, but it must be done.

field notes: the wisconsin edition.

i stumbled upon this classic combo of field notes and flannel and looked down.

field notes: the wisconsin edition.

indeed, i was wearing field notes and flannel and a canadian tuxedo and a union suit.

the union suit is actually from the kittery trading post in kittery, maine, but i’m not sure you can get a more classic wisconsin ensemble.

( and in case you’re wondering odin traded me the amber edition he picked for the dark brown-black stout. )

is this scheduled post, push to social networks thingy turned on?

if you see this, then the answer is yes! which means you’ll probably see a few posts scattered through the day instead of a bunch at night 🙂

you can’t tell but i upgraded to wordpress 3.8 “parker” and am really enjoying the new features ( scheduled post and publicize features aren’t new, i’m just getting around using them ).

the new default twenty fourteen theme is gorgeous, flexible and responsive and for the first time in 13 years i think i might switch to the cms default ( heresy! ).

well done, wordpress and the 188 contributors who made it happen!

scientists discover double meaning in genetic code

just when we had the human genome all figured out ( that’s ironic linking for you youngsters ), scientists discover a second code hiding within dna which means the double helix contains code for two different languages simultaneously. one language describes how proteins are made, and the other how genes are controlled. it really wouldn’t surprise me to discover there are more languages to be found since we’ve long known evolution is an opportunist, “…Thirty-one years ago, Gould and Vrba suggested that repetitive DNA sequences known as transposons, which originated from viruses, might serve no direct function at first, but may be used to great advantage later on. Since then, research has shown that transposons played an important role in the evolution of pregnancy.” it makes one wonder if those making products from genetically modified organisms really have any idea what they’ve altered. update: “Duon” is just a new name for something we already knew about