School shootings since Sandy Hook.
What did Congress just do to the IRS?
More crude spilled in 2013 Than Previous Four Decades Combined... or oil spill? What oil spill?
Exploding neighborhood novas
Petition to keep China from processing our chickens. (via Steve Bates)
Free art books from the Getty Museum. In fact, free education!
Here is a cat playing a theremin.
7 comments:
Re: cat playing a theremin... ROTFLMFAO!
I built a theremin (of sorts) when I was a kid, using an old superhet radio and deliberately messing with the heterodyne oscillator so that it yielded something in the audio range. It worked, sort of, and I had almost as much fun as that cat!
The real oddity about the cat is that it seemed to know what it was doing... it wasn't just making random motions that happened to produce sounds; the cat seemed to be producing sounds quite deliberately. If I lived with that cat, I'd take care never to offend it too much...
Re: the IRS... the poor dumba$$e$ that inserted that provision on behalf of some rich "clients" haven't thought it through. What is the one resource the IRS has in effectively unlimited quantity without additional expenditure beyond staff salary, that a taxpayer doesn't have without paying through the nose? Right: attorney time!
One year, the IRS made a MAJOR mistake on my taxes: they apparently didn't turn to the last page of my return, which was a 1099 from my largest client that year. Of course I won that battle, at a cost of a sizable fee paid to my tax accountant for writing my response letter. Yes, it saved me $12k or so, but it cost me a few hundred just to overturn their casual error. Never underestimate the power of the IRS even in cases where they lose!
It makes me wonder just how much the cat could feel or sense the theremin's waves... (electrical pulses?)
And IRS's power is scary and is not to be challenged if at all possible...
It's only a guess, but I'd guess the cat hears, through its ears, pretty much the same things we hear through our ears when it "plays" the theremin. AFAIK, cats don't have the equipment to detect electromagnetic waves directly any more than we do. Their ears probably have a different frequency response than ours, but it's a matter of how much they respond to what audio frequencies, not a fundamental difference in the physical phenomenon they're responding to.
(Birds may be a different matter; there are suggestions that they do their incredible direction-finding using Earth's magnetic field. But AFAIK, that's not a confirmed fact.)
Maybe it's static electricity that I'm thinking of... all that fur and the sparking off of noses.. :D
A bit of context for the cat playing theremin... two examples of humans playing theremin: Saint-Saëns, "The Swan"; Over the Rainbow. Enjoy!
We watch Midsommer Murders which uses the theremin in its wonderful introduction (shows it about 1:30)
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