The light in the oven...

(From a comment I made in telynor's LJ, where she noted that the light in her new oven stayed on as long as the oven was lit, and added "My mom always told me that if you left the light on in the oven, food got dried out. Was she just trying to save money on appliance bulbs?")

As you probably know, the devices commonly called "light bulbs" are actually dark-suckers -- they suck the dark out of a place so that light can displace it. (When they get all full of dark they stop sucking and you have to replace them.) Having a dark-sucker in an oven is a good thing because it keeps the food from getting too dark on the outside. The ones they put in ovens these days are self-cleaning, so as long as you don't leave the oven on too long at any one time, you don't have to worry about them filling up too quickly. (If you leave the oven on too long the food starts getting dark faster than the bulb can suck, and then you may have a serious problem.)

Deadlines

There was a great cartoon in this week's New Yorker: the Grim Reaper is standing next to a desk. The man at the desk looks up and says "Thank goodness you're here: I can never get anything accomplished without a deadline."

It is now exactly a week before GaFilk; it's an open question whether I'll get even the demo album finished in time. We'll see. There's very little doubt that I can have something down on plastic by then, since I have more than enough tracks recorded. The real question is how much polishing I'll be able to put into the tracks. Not much, I fear.

Mark your calendars

Just noticed on Slashdot that Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 has been upgraded to a 4 (a close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing regional devastation) on the Torino impact hazard scale, the highest score to date.

The encounter, however it turns out, will occur on April 13, 2029. Yes, it's a Friday. On the bright side, it's before 2038, so 32-bit Unix-based computers will still be working.

Have a nice day.