The mystery of Dr. Seuss’s green eggs and ham has now been debunked. The eggs weren’t rotten or coloured with food colouring; they just contained red cabbage juice. The pigment in red cabbage, an anthocyanin, has long been used as a simple pH detector much like litmus paper. Egg whites have a pH of around 9-10 and therefore change the color of the cabbage juice to green. Check out the video below of this being done.

Green Egg Trick – Funny bloopers are a click away

I was reminded today about some instructions I saw for building a simple camping stove. It is a very simple design that only requires a pop can and some fiberglass insulation. If you are traveling somewhere by plane, this would be an ideal stove to assemble at your destination, as the airlines won’t let you take your regular stove on board.

Cool Little Miniature Stove! – The top video clips of the week are here

Way back in the day, when Google Maps was first introduced, I was totally amazed with how good it was. I immediately wasted several hours typing in my friends addresses and going on virtual road trips. At its debut, Google Maps was far better than anything the competition had to offer. It wasn’t too long before the satellite view came along and I had to go through the whole process again.

Today, Google added a new ‘Terrain’ View to Google Maps. When I first heard about this, I was quite excited and had to check it out. After checking out a few of my favorite locations, I have to say that I am a bit disappointed with it. The satellite view still gives a better impression of the terrain than the new ‘Terrain’ View.

Here is the satellite view and terrain view of one of my favorite hiking locations, the Cathedral Lakes Rim.

Google Maps’ new Terrain View is nothing to get excited about.

I was playing around on the apple store today and started configuring a Mac Pro. The price started to escalate quickly, so I decided to see how high I could get the price. Here are the specs of the most ridiculously gorgeous and expensive mac money can buy.

Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

16 GB RAM

Mac Pro RAID card

4 x 750GM 7200-rpm Hard Drives = 3TB of storage

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB Video Card

2 x 30″ Apple Cinema Displays

2 x Superdrives

Bluetooth and WiFi

Wireless Keyboard and Mouse

+ several software packages and AppleCare

Total Price: $20,817.00

But seriously, if anybody would like to donate, please to not hesitate to get in touch with me.

I have always assumed that the cricket thermometer was just an urban legend or wive’s tale. The story goes that the temperature can be measured by counting the rate at which crickets make their clicks. The basic principle behind it is that the rate of a cricket’s clicks will increase when the temperature rises.

I was browsing through snopes and found an article about this. The people over at snopes have found evidence of a correlation between temperature and the rate of cricket click.

The formula for this correlation is endorsed by The Farmer’s Almanac and was recently confirmed by Dr. Peggy LeMone, on her blog.

Temp in degrees F = (# clicks over 13 seconds) + 40

Pretty simple eh?

Here is the snopes article, where I started reading up on this. I am pretty anxious to try this myself, but I guess I am going to have to wait until next summer to see this for myself.

I just wanted to congratulate Jan Hudec for becoming the first Canadian to win our own World Cup Downhill at Lake Louise. It is good to see this new group of skiers, recently dubbed the ‘Canadian Cowboys’, posting some good results on the world stage.

Here is the CBC article.

A video produced, by Household Hacker, that depicts an iPod being charged by a Gatorade powered onion has been circulating the internet recently, making Gizmodo, Digg, The Gadgets Weblog and TUAW. The video looked pretty neat and I had to test it out for myself.

I was pretty skeptical, as electrolytes in solution just conduct electricity, they won’t produce it and the anode and cathode would have to be two different metals. I hoped that the onion would add something to the mix so that it would work. I followed their instructions exactly, but sadly could not get either my nano or 4G iPod to charge.

I am pretty sure that there are two different cords in the Household Hacker video. One is coming from the onion and the other from a power source, through that suspicious notebook that the iPod is sitting on.

Ever since I first learned to type in elementary school, in the mid ’90s, I have been using 2 spaces after periods. Recently, I have noticed that many people do not do this and am curios why.

I have a feeling that I was simply caught between generations; I was taught by a teacher that learned to type on a typewriter. Typewriters used a fixed width font, much like programmers today, and an extra space after every period was necessary for the eye to easily pick up the new sentence.

Modern word processors only require one stroke of the space bar to provide adequate space after a period. On the internet, most browsers will only render 1 space, even if there is 2 spaces in the code, unless “%nbsp” is used.

I have developed the habit of ‘double spacing’, and I do not plan on trying to break it. I will simply remain the victim of a generation overlap and keep working my space bar twice as hard.