MacGyver Me

My electrician brother is going to love this one.

My laptop gets quite hot after I've been using it for a while. So I have a laptop cooling pad.   Looks just like this:

 

The laptop sits on the pad and you plug it into a USB port on the laptop.  The USB connection powers the small fan inside the pad that cools the laptop.  It works well and without it my laptop gets extremely overheated

Today I was trying to carry the laptop pad, a sweater, my aluminum water bottle, my computer bag, my purse and a banana - all at the same time while I opened a heavy door.  Water bottle and laptop pad didn't make it.  Both dropped to the ground.  Water bottle was fine.  But the cord to the laptop pad must have been caught in between all the other things I was carrying and when it fell the USB cord snapped right in half.

But I am not one to let a minor product mishap defeat me.   I need that laptop cooling pad.  I took some wire strippers and stripped the plastic covering off both broken ends of the wire.  Found red and black mini wires inside.  Stripped those down to stalks of thin copper wire.  Twisted the red from one side to the red from the other side and then did the same with the black.   (Pretended I was defusing a bomb.  OMG!   Whatever you do, don't cut the black wire!  No wait!  It's the red!  Don't cut the red.....NOOOOOOO!)

It works!  Some electrical tape around it and I'm good, right?  What could possibly go wrong?

I'm convinced it is perfectly safe.  There can't be much electricity flowing through those tiny wires to power that mini fan.  In fact, I touched the exposed wires while it was plugged into the computer and felt nothing.  My other completely reasonable justification for thinking this is safe is that it will only be plugged in and "on" when the laptop is sitting on my lap.  It can't start a fire in my lap, right?

Brother Bob?  Thoughts?

And isn't it just a good idea to try to fix things rather than adding one more piece of plastic junk to a landfill? 

I'm sure MacGyver would agree.  He's been patching up that denim jacket since 1987.

Science Saturday

 www.bugguide.net

This website is the best!

I don't know why it makes me so happy to find out

the names of the bugs in my yard, but it does.

Valley Carpenter Bee

Xylocopa varipuncta

And she's a female!

I love that there is someone in the world who knows that.

 I bet you thought this was a Flame Skimmer.

You're wrong.

It is a Neon Skimmer - Libellula croceipennis. 

Duh!

(Do the kids still say that these days?)

Green Lynx Spider

Peucetia viridans

or

Peucetia longipalpis

It is still being hotly debated.

I'm hoping for longipalpis because that is much more fun to say.

Silver Garden Spider

Argiope argentata

(I still see a monkey giving us the finger.)

Scudder's Bush Katydid

Scudderia furcata

(sounds like an Italian curse word)

or

Scudderia mexicana

He's a male.

Okay kids.  Class dismissed.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. 

Henry David Thoreau

Science Saturday

Do you know what makes the steam come out of an iron?

No?

Neither do I.

My iron stopped working a couple of weeks ago. The steam stopped coming out. Instead it oozed water all over my clean clothes with an occasional pathetic gasp of sizzling.

My first response was to give it some time. Maybe it's just going through something. If I let it sit there for a bit and give it some space, it will work out whatever issues it is struggling with. This tactic almost worked. I was nearly able to finish the pair of pants I had been working on. One bottom part of the pants leg to go and it started spitting out water again.

So then I did what every good American consumer does - I went out and bought another iron. This one has Smart Grip AND a self cleaning feature. Ooooooh - fancy.

But I kept wondering what could make an iron break? How many moving parts could there possibly be to wear out or malfunction?

I decided to try and find out. I used the time-tested scientific method called - Rip It Apart and Look At Stuff.

A couple of screwdrivers and a wrench and here's what you get. So what did I discover?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.



There were no obviously broken or corroded parts or disconnected wires and that is the limit of my mechanical detective skills. If it doesn't LOOK broken, my scientific exploration ends. I considered plugging it in while it was in its disassembled state to see what would happen. But my common sense and rapidly fading interest in this project stopped me from going that far.

But the good news is now that I've ripped it into slightly smaller chunks, it will only take 6 million years to fully decompose in the landfill instead of the normal 10 million.

Here is a man who tried to go for one year without throwing anything out.

365 Days of Trash