NerdlyNews

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My home has a fireplace and before the oppressive smoke of wildfires ruined the joy of lighting it, I used to start a fire once in a while during the colder months. Firewood isn’t readily available here in the Bay Area, so I would often have to resort to the use of firelogs since they were easily obtained in the barbeque section of my local grocery store. This lead to a conversation with a friend of mine who assured me, “There’s no shame in the chemical flame.”

Well, KFC’s latest promotional item, the 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog from Enviro-Log®, puts the shame back into the chemical flame. Yup, it’s a chemically-engineered firelog that emits the scent of their fried chicken.

Imbued with the unmistakable, mouth-watering aroma of Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe, the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog finally puts to rest the age-old dilemma, “How can I make this fire a hundred bajillion times better?” This one-of-a-kind firelog from Enviro-Log, a leading manufacturer of firelogs made of 100 percent recycled materials, is the result of countless hours of research and development, all done over the last couple of months since we had this idea. Pick up a firelog today, and you’ll be wondering how you were ever able to enjoy a fire that didn’t smell like fried chicken.

This fried chicken firelog was available for $18.99 but has since sold out.

Image via The Daily Meal

(Geekologie, The Daily Meal) Read the rest

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Dr Nim is a plastic, gravity powered computer from the 1960s that plays the game, Nim, against a human player. Recently Michael Gardi made a 3D scale model of Dr Nim, which you can download and print on a 3D printer.

The Amazing Dr. Nim is a toy invented by John Thomas Godfrey and manufactured by Education Science Research (E.S.R., Inc.) in the mid-1960s. It consists of a marble-powered plastic computer capable of playing the game of Nim. The machine selects its moves through the action of the marbles falling through the levers of the machine.

The “game board” is a based on the mechanical Digi-Comp II digital computer (also a Godfrey creation). It has memory switches that hold bits of data. The unit is programmed by lobed levers that affect and are affected by marbles that are released from the top of the game. Three of the levers set the start position. The fourth lever is the ‘equalizer’ option; if set, the player can win if they play perfectly. The last lever is used to indicate who’s turn it is, the human or Dr. Nim’s.

Game play is described in the manual that was bundled with the game and can be found here:

The Amazing Dr. Nim Manual

There are many good online references for the game. The following video is especially informative and entertaining:

The Unbeatable Game from the 60s: Dr NIM

And this article speaks to the relevance of a game like Dr. Nim in today’s digital world:

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Dr.

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San Antonio artist Michael Esparza‘s oil paintings put Texas-based fast food restaurants in the center of bucolic landscapes. It’s hard not to compare his work to Thomas Kinkade’s but that’s the point. (The main difference, imo, is that Esparza’s pieces are actually palatable.)

Texas Monthly:

The idea for the series, which Esparza describes as “a little bit Bob Ross and a little bit Thomas Kinkade,” came to him 2012, just after he came back to Texas from a year of studying art in Italy. In Italy, nothing was built taller than a church, so it was a shock when Esparza returned to San Antonio, the size of roadside signs were particularly jarring. “I was just seeing how iconic they are, but also from the Italian perspective, how ridiculous they are. From that point of view, it’s like, ‘What are you doing, Texas? What’s going on with these big signs that you have on the side of the road?’” he says. “But the first thing I did when I got back from Italy was I went to Whataburger, and then right after that, I went to Bill Miller’s. I just needed a burger, and I needed a po’ boy. I was already full after Whataburger, but I didn’t care.” Esparza says he wants the paintings to evoke the sense of homecoming you feel when you see those signs after spending time in a place where they don’t exist—be it Italy or elsewhere. “They become your own little beacons for where you live,” he explains.

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Six ago I posted singer Dominique Pruitt‘s first music video, “To Win Your Love.” Since then, she’s released a number of country-inspired tunes and I like them all. Her latest is “High In The Valley.” Read the rest