By the way...

...the "salamander" referred to in the mac 'n' cheese recipe from the 18th century I transcribed yesterday is one of these. Do not click on that link if you prefer to think that all kitchens had a magical creature they used to brown the tops of their dishes.

Retro

We went down to Round Rock weekend before last to attend the wedding reception of friends. We crashed in the spare bedroom of another friend's house, and I found his subdivision rather interesting. It's fairly new, and the houses are designed to evoke styles of the postwar housing boom in the States and Small Town America^TM. Here's a couple of pics so you can see what I mean.

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Time to do SCIENCE!

Zooniverse has a new crowd-sourced project going! (see tag for previous one I posted) This time it's ASTRONOMY. You look through photos of stars and galaxies to see if you can spot gravitational lensing--areas where galaxies or other astronomical objects are behind others, whose gravity is bending the light that's coming from behind them.
http://spacewarps.org

If astronomy doesn't float your boat, try any of their other live projects.