iron science teacher!

This week, I accomplished one of my (nerdy) life goals - I won the Iron Science Teacher at the Exploratorium's Teacher Institute! I've been obsessed with the Exploratorium for years. When I visited LA years back, I made my travel buddy rent a car and drive to SF so that I could experience the museum firsthand! Years later, in 2006, it was the 100 year anniversary earthquake exhibit that got me out to visit SF for the second time. And now I live here. Coincidence? I think not. :)

Check out the link to watch the video (my "show" is from 21:08 - 35:58).

So... maybe I stacked the deck in my favor a little... who can compete with a rubber chicken in a cape?!

google's rube goldberg-esque, 4th of july-themed doodle

I LOVE Google's doodle today!!

amorphophallus titanum blooms in berkeley!

I already blogged about Amorphophallus titanum in 2007, but I like it so much, I'm going to do it again in honor of Berkeley's very own "corpse flower" bloom this week. At 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 29, one of the 15 Sumatran Titanum plants housed at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens slowly began unfurling its enormous and potentially smelly petals. I decided to document my visit with the fleeting bloom. It felt a little like taking a photo with a celebrity!

Liver-colored, reeking of rancid animal flesh and obscenely phallic, Titan arum - affectionately called the corpse flower - is hardly the stuff of bouquets and love poems. It's more like the Godzilla of the plant kingdom: big, stinky and likely to traumatize small children. (SF Gate)

The names Amorphophallus titanum and Titan arum are used interchangeably. This particular UC bloom was even nicknamed "Maldora" in the Titan Arum Naming Contest.

According to the UC page,

The legendary Sir David Attenborough first used the name titan arum to refer to this magnificent tropical plant in the BBC series The Private Lives of Plants because he felt viewers might be offended by the plant's Latin name, Amorphophallus titanum. [Amorpho meaning shapeless, phallus meaning penis, and titanum meaning huge] Titan arum might have suited Attenborough's viewers, but the plant still seduces people with one of the world's largest and rarest flowering structures and and a reproduction method that beguiles insects with the illusion of decay in appearance, odor and even temperature; hence the name 'Corpse Flower'. Generally fewer that five titans bloom each year in the US.

The plant uses its scent to attract pollinating insects, just like most other flowers. But unlike most flowers, this one hopes to attract flies and carrion beetles - insects that like to feed on rotting meat. Even more strange - it can actually generate its own heat, with the UC-Davis plant heating up from 68 degrees to 90 degrees at its peak hours of smelliness. When the flower finally opens, it releases its powerful stench for a few middle-of-the-night hours each day for 2 - 3 days. Then the blooms fades until its next appearance. The last Titan arum bloom in Berkeley was in 2009.

The fascinating thing is that no one can predict if and when this plant will make a flower. For many years the plant produces only a single, highly divided leaf that can be up to 12 feet high. During these years, the plant it is building up a large underground storage organ, called a corm. Once the corm reaches a certain size, it may send up a single enormous flower. 100 pound corms have been known to produce flower stalks up to 9 feet tall. (source)

Here is a photo of the other Titan arum plants. Looking at the potted plants, he far left pot shows a plant just sending up a shoot. The docent said at this point in its development, horticulturists can't tell whether it is going to be a leaf year or a bloom year. The next plant shows the corpse flower in its leaf-producing, corm-forming state. Third from the left is just a baby, and the far right pot contains the guest of honor - the Amorphophallus titanum flower, Maldora!

Check out this site for much more information, as well as a list of all the known blooms from 1889 through 2008!

Cool Hunting's 46th episode (video) has interviews with visitors to the Brooklyn's botanical gardens in 2006. And I love this guy hanging out with titanum.

UPDATE 7.24.10 - Today, Little Stinker is set to bloom at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens! Meanwhile, halfway across the country, a bride-to-be may be sharing the spotlight with Lois, a rare corpse flower, which just may open on Saturday, sending the stench of rotting meat throughout the wedding festivities in Houston's Cockrell Butterfly Center. This species of flower has only bloomed once before in Texas, and a mere 29 times in the U.S., according to the Houston Chronicle. (Uh oh... UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens has 5 weddings scheduled for this weekend!)

doodle for google - pacman!

As most of you have found out already, today brings the first-ever playable Google doodle! (Read the official Google blog post to learn all about it.)

Senior UX designer Marcin Wichary and Google doodler Ryan Germick "made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the W,A,S, and D keys)."

UPDATE 5.27.10: One blog calculates that Pac-Man ate up approximately 4.8 million hours of productivity on Friday. Read the math. Kind of interesting. Also, if you missed it, Pac-Man has found a permanent home on Google.

Here are 3 things I learned about PAC-MAN today:

1. It was originally called PUCK MAN
2. Pac-Man was released on May 22, 1980 by the Japanese video game company Namco
3. Pac-Man is one of the three video games on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., along with Dragon's Lair and Pong.

A Mental Floss post has even more Pac-Man trivia, or you can visit the official Pac-man site.

Curious about the doodles? The first doodle was in 1998, when Google founders Larry and Sergey decided to leave a comical "out of office" message when they headed to Burning Man.

Read more about the doodle history and visit the logo page to see all the past doodles from 1998 through the present.

Speaking of Doodles.... online voting is now open for this year's Doodle for Google contest. You can vote up until May 25, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time (PT). After May 25th, Google will announce the four national finalists and national winner and that national winner's doodle will appear on the Google.com page on May 27, 2010. So, go vote!

jim's pancakes

How cool is this guy? Apparently, this guy names Jim likes making unusual pancakes for his 3-year-old daughter. You can see his creations on his blog, Jim's Pancakes. He also has recipies, more photos and instructional videos available on the site.

His creations include such 2D masterpieces as a giraffe pancake and a bumblebee pancake... but the images below are some of my absolute favorites! (Click each photo to read the corresponding blog post.)

The ultimate breakfast? ...

... clearly he is having too much fun with this ...

.. and the Golden Gate! :)

celebrating randomness is moving

Hi all -

Well, Blogger is discontinuing its FTP support. I don't like it, but I have to move by May 1.

Hopefully, I will soon be back at www.mytko.org/random. In the meantime, I will be hanging out on Google's servers at random.mytko.org.

Worse case, I will erase everything, and start a new blog. I'll see how this goes.

chicken blog!

So, the other day, I read this great post about a rescued chicken. Who knew 100 chickens a year were abandoned in San Francisco each year? Well this one, named Elvira, was one of the lucky ones to find a home with a woman in the Mission neighborhood.



What's even better? The new owner maintains a CHICKEN BLOG! Awesome. On her first post, in March 2010, she writes, "Not to be hip is embarrassing. Especially in the Mission, which is a nursery for many Silicon Valley success stories, and thus, home for hip people. To be somebody in this neighborhood, I need the chickens."

unfortunate signage

I was in Walgreens the other day, and saw this posted. Ouch....
"H1N1 Available Today"???

If you look closely, you'll see that someone tried to make the point more clear. Perhaps a Sharpie would have come in handy.