(no subject)

[reldnahkram]

For $5, Chewbacca will not pull your arms out of their sockets.

The Canadian military is testing a stealth snowmobile. No word on whether it's a joint project with MI-6, dept Q.

Did Irish hermits beat the Vikings to the North Atlantic by 500 years?

Baking may be good for mental health.

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

That's interesting that it says that baking might help because the baker feels in control. When I'm baking I tend to feel out of control and frustrated through almost the whole process, even when it's a familiar recipe that I've never gotten wrong. When it turns out well I get the exhausted feeling of relief mixed with not-quite-faded panic that I get whenever I finish some sort of unfamiliar but daunting household task (like replacing a faucet or something)--often by that point I'm more interested in napping than tasting my results. (If there's anything that reliably kills my appetite it's baking. In fact, any cooking does it, but the more complicated, difficult, and time consuming the task, the less interest I have in eating (anything, not just the fruits of my labors) when I'm done.) In contrast, when I'm cooking I feel comfortable doing whatever the hell I want on the fly, with part of the point being no two meals are ever the same, and when it turns out well I get a similar feeling of accomplishment that I would when successfully finishing any sort of creative task.

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about fabricating things in a cleanroom? And how does that contrast to machining things in a machine shop?

[sildra.livejournal.com]

You missed a whole discussion at AW between me and refosolyf about how we hate pretty much everything about being in the clean room. I hate the feeling of restriction of the clothing. I hate the dry air. I hate the feeling that even if I follow the instructions things might come out wrong, and that sometimes the instructions are vague for something that has to be done very precisely because each time it's different (these are the complaints that come closest to being relevant to baking, although I also have other complaints about baking). There are situations where I find precision comforting and/or easy, and there are situations where I find precision daunting and frustrating, and cleanroom work is the latter. (Maybe the difference is the stakes being high. Optics can require a lot of precision, but the stakes are so low. If you're a little misaligned, you just fix it, you don't have rebuild your whole system from scratch. I'll admit that I found the precision of optics frustrating at first, too, but once I got used to it it was ok.)

Machining is fun, though. Machining has always been fun for me, even when I was brand new to it.

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

For me the clean room and the machine shop feel similar to one another. I like being able to make things.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I guess when I'm in the machine shop I feel like I'm making something, and when I'm in the clean room I feel like I'm trying not to break/ruin anything.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I hate the dangerous chemicals. And probably other things that I'm forgetting.