May 17, 2024 2 min read

Friday, May 17, 2024

Good morning and welcome back to Wolmania. I'm feeling frustrated about events foreign and domestic at the moment, but I won't let that stop us from spending a few blessed minutes thinking about other things. Here's the usual stuff:

Item 1: a link

If you, like me, enjoy trawling online auction sites for relics you absolutely don't need, a word of caution: there are cynical people out there on the prowl for suckers. Suckers like you, perhaps.

Anyway, this ID badge for Apple Employee #10 was a fraud.

Item 2: a list

Phaseolus beans, ranked:

Navy Beans (Cannellini, Haricot Beans/French Beans/Pole Beans/Bush Beans) (P. vulgaris)
Black beans (P. vulgaris)
Tepary beans (P. acutifolius)
Runner beans (P. coccineus)
Pinto beans (P. vulgaris)
Borlotti beans (P. vulgaris)
Flat beans (P. coccineus)
Kidney beans (P. vulgaris)
Lima beans (P. lunatus)

Item 3: a media recommendation

Talking Heads - Live in Rome 1980 (Full Concert)

Item 4: word of the week

Pellucid

As I scrutinized the eBay listing, looking for a reason - any reason - not to place a thousand-dollar bid, I realized: the lamination, purportedly more than 40 years old, was suspiciously pellucid. A fugazi! Smugly, I closed the tab, and turned back to my Adult Lego Set.

Item 5: a photograph

On the brink of the metal-insulator transition, the electrons in a manganese-doped gallium arsenide semiconductor are distributed across the surface of the material in complex, fractal-like patterns. These shapes are visible in this electron map, where the colors red, orange and yellow indicate areas on the surface of the semiconductor where electrons are most likely to be found at a given point in time. In this image, the fractal-like probability map of electrons is superimposed on the atomic crystal structure of the material, imaged at the same time. *(Image: Roushan/Yazdani Research Group)*

See ya!

Thank you for reading. I salute you. See you next week.