h a l f b a k e r yThis ain't rocket surgery.
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[This is, somewhat embarrassingly, a variation on [voice]'s
Thirsty animated coasters idea, which I had read, voted
for, forgotten about, and then "reinvented" myself. Oops.
Still, it adds some aspects -- the one-sided coating
preventing air absorption, and trading the functional
coaster for
the decorative figurine.]
Take a material like sodium polyacrylate that is to
moisture what an airbag is to impact and what I am to
pizza. Hungry, fast, and rapidly expanding in size.
Press this material into small figurines. Cover the surface
that's exposed to the air with a thin layer to avoid having it
suck moisture from the air. Leave the bottom open. The
figurines have friendly protective shapes, small animals or
maybe that cuddly robot from Big Hero 6, or a buddha, or
my neighbor Totoro. Some sort of non-threatening happy
little bear. Something that you like to keep strewn about
your desk.
The next time that you topple over your coffee cup or that
basin full of water that you keep on top of the speaker to
occasionally dip the air plants into, the moisture hits the
bottom of the little statue and *poof* a large gelatinous
moisture-locking blob appears and locks your spill inside it
before it can reach the keyboard, the laptop, or that
irreplaceable pile of notes from the last three weeks of
steering committee meetings.
I say, that's $5 well spent. Sold in packs of 4, because you
know it'll happen again.
Warning: Like other choking hazards and the small
packages that come in sheets of roasted seaweed, these
things don't mix with small children and pets.
Thirsty animated coaster
Thirsty_20animated_20coaster
[Voice, Sep 06 2020]
Timespan: Grow a lizard
https://www.youtube...watch?v=J2CvkoeOwJg
[pashute, Sep 06 2020]
The Blob!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TdUsyXQ8Wrs
[xenzag, Sep 06 2020]
Photopolymerization
https://www.science...i/S0141813018317938
Hydrogel that activates w/i 15 seconds -- might even assume the shape of the spill [reensure, Sep 06 2020]
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Annotation:
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// small animals or maybe that cuddly robot from Big Hero 6, or a buddha, or my neighbor Totoro. Some sort of non-threatening happy little bear. // |
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So, not a Native American, a construction worker, a cop, a cowboy, a soldier and ... a person of the male persuasion wearing black leather ... ? |
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Though if you just want a bunch of mindless puppets who will soak up any sort of rubbish without questioning what it is, they should be model journalists and come in a box labelled "WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS*". |
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*Pronounced "Core", though the idea of a spree killing resulting in a roomful of blood-spattered newshound corpses has much to commend it. |
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I recently splashed out on one of those full-desktop mouse-
mat things, which I can thoroughly recommend on multiple
counts - but turns out is also great when the inevitable
desktop spillage situation occurs - they're absorbent enough
to localise the spillage fairly effectively - albeit sacrificially
- a good rinse and dry might work out ok. I'm thinking the
olden days were well ahead of us with the whole blotting
paper thing - we all thought it was to soak up stray ink
blots, but it could well have been beverages all along! |
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Maybe just a gerbil feeder bottle at the desk? |
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[+] but how much draw over a large area would be the question [zen tom], and possibly [Ray], was anecdotally posing. |
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Adapting [zen]'s purchase, I suggest a, large surface area, thin base artfully embossed with the theme of the figurine. A Bonsai with escaping root system would be my preference. A c mouse might even work on it too. |
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Although, it does come down to work type and probability of spills and there will always be that person that takes it too far and has a village of desk gnomes. |
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She was only trying to make life better for
everyone but the chemistry was simply beyond her
humble kitchen and once 'it' got out, blind terror
was the only way this story was ever going to go.
The newspapers were first off the mark with the
headline "The Return Of The Blob" as it ate through
everything it its path, absorbing, absorbing
absorbing, its insatiable appetite knowing no
ends...... |
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Sounds like a Call for a Cthulhu idea ... |
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Yeah, it's got to go faster than the absorbent lizard in
pashute's link... Is there anything that, I don't know,
protects data centers from floods? |
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How about a light-activated version? |
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// protects data centers from floods? // |
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Put the servers on a repurposed supertanker. Moor it somewhere with a relatively mild climate; unlimited cooling water available. Intrinsically proof against flooding, though not hurricanes, typhoons or tsunami. |
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In case of a change in local taxation or data protection regulations, it can just move elsewhere. |
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These would be particularly good to gift to co-workers,
WITHOUT telling them what they do. |
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Is that an opportunity for some sort of a coffee-mediated Mugwai/Gremlin transformation ? |
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Considering [wjt]'s deliciously apposite description of // a village of desk gnomes //, it would be possible to gift (over a period of time) a selection of cutesy little figurines to a cow-orker to keep on their desk ... and then one day, a spill of aqueous liquid sweeps around them like a tiny tsunami, and they* suddenly transform into hideous, evil little gargoyles with glowing red eyes, pointy fangs, reptilian skin, and sharp flesh-rending talons ... |
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*The desk gnomes, not the cow-orker. Although you never know ... keep some bright lights handy. |
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Ooh you could make them little witch figures, you know... because they're wick'n. |
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<Sound of scraping chairs and murmurings as audience shuffle out/> |
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I want a buddha to magically soak up all the energy
drinks I spill. And then I can combine that activity
with a quick 10 minutes silent mediation time to
relax my frayed nerves that caused the spill to begin
with. |
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(Bonus points if it can completely soak up the wet
spots all over my shirt as well!) |
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Seriously, this just might sell. I'd buy one for home
and office. It's also very good to see [jutta] post an
idea. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. (Sorry all.) |
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No need to be sorry, [blissmiss]. We could all do with some
warm-fuzzy-ness occasionally. (Although the "fuzzy" could be
from too many energy drinks...) |
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// We could all do with some warm-fuzzy-ness occasionally // |
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Not everyone; the desirability is definitely age related. Some manifestations of "warm-fuzzy-ness" are regrettably associated with increasing years, and are an unfortunate consequence of the sort of loss of muscle tone in critical areas that go along with that ... |
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//Not everyone; the desirability is definitely age related.
Some manifestations of "warm-fuzzy-ness" are regrettably
associated with increasing years, and are an unfortunate
consequence of the sort of loss of muscle tone in critical
areas that go along with that ...// |
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What you need 8ey, is underpants gnomes. |
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Or maybe they could be in the form of gremlins. Then it
would
be straightforward to recreate that scene in the film with
the swimming pool. |
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[Loris]; I think you're on to something there. Lots of highly
compressed gremlins, squished in to the shape of a mogwai. |
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Wow, a fractal object, A corn cob springing miniature corn cobs springing ... |
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Desktops should have subtle changes in elevation such that your keyboard and mouse sit atop little millimeter-high micro-mesas, with understated depressions in the hand-rest and other areas. Just a small sump 7 inches fore-and-aft by 2 spans wide by 2 millimeters deep should provide containment for something over 60 drams of spilled fluid. |
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Your hydrophilic daruma can sit in the shallows and wait for all the little crumb humuhumunukunukuapua'a to come swimming by... |
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//humuhumunukunukuapua'a// Wait, what the hell, can we
do that? Just filler words we make up?? |
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That's what the English have been doing this whole
time, that and garbling French and German and then
passing it off as something official endorsed by the
Queen, some wrinkly old codger at an Oxford
backroom library, and the pipe flange threaded
fittings union. |
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It's also a good example of a side-effect of a limited
alphabet: fewer letters mean you need to use them more
often; so longer words. |
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... which is still a lot compared to, for example, welsh, which has only one: "Ugh"*. |
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*That's how it's pronounced; since welsh has no vowels, only consonants, it's actually spelt "Ffllyddrgh" |
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[Blissy], it was an allusion to a once-popular Hawaiian
tune called "Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii". As
I looked it up, though, I found that it topped the charts in
1934 - so maybe I was off in thinking anybody would catch
the reference. |
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Anyway, the last line of the song is "Where the
humuhumunukunukuapua'a goes swimming by" - they're
these little tiny bits of color drifting past in the tidal
pools, and I was thinking of spilling a drink, washing out
little bits of stuff from the keyboard, and as the figurine
sucks up the water, everything will flow toward it... I'm
broadcasting the image as hard as I can, but my co-
workers are declaiming politics and I wanna be on a
beach. |
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(warning - if you decide to search for the song, I have
discovered it's still popular for beginning hula dancers. So
be forewarned - you may be exposed to some really bad
tourist-videos of really bad hula dancing by tourist
wanna-be hula dancers while the music is being played by
somebody that sounds like they would like to give some
dance instruction with the blunt end of a ukulele) |
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I've probably seen this video. I taught the residents at the
memory care center I worked at how to Hula Dance one day. |
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It was cold and rainy out. We pretended we were on the Big
Island instead of where we were. |
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I'm safe but stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Springfield, Ill. Land of Lincoln and cornfields
everywhere you look. Not complaining, could be
hurricanes and fire. May be boring but safe is looking
better and better each day. |
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I did have a dream a couple of weeks ago that it
snowed so much we couldn't leave our houses. Too
much snow was piled up against our houses. And it
was apparent that was how we were meant to die. |
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Tornadoes; hurricanes are typically a coastal phenomenon, losing force rapidly as they move inland. |
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Illinois ? No major interplate or intraplate faults nearby; no volcanism; little risk of landslips; few significant carnivorous predators; not overly supplied with venomous reptiles or insects. Probably locusts from time to time, but they're vegetarian. |
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Risks ? Fire or blizzards as stated; flooding; asteroid impact; having thermonuclear weapons accidentally dropped by the USAF. |
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Those last two can happen pretty much anywhere, though. |
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These 'Spillage People' - would they by any chance be
modelled in the form of a police officer, a Native
American chief, a cowboy, a construction worker and a
soldier? |
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<Points at first annotation/> |
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<Tucks tartan travel rug around [hippo]'s knees/> |
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Come on dear, drink up your nice cup of tea while it's still warm. No, that's not your son. No, it's not dinner time yet, but you can have a biscuit if you want. No, that's just a car alarm, not the air-raid warning, you don't have to go down to the shelter ... |
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<still waiting for my biscuit...> |
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It's the rationing, dear ... |
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My last west coast home was San Francisco. I have a Niece and
Nephew and 2 sibs in Oregon and Washington. My daughter
was born in Olympia, Washington, actually. |
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Olympia ... ah yes, Cascadia. Earthquakes, tsunami, volcanism - check box as required. |
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Back to the idea, that I find quite doable, I'm gonna sit here
quietly and await the arrival of my village spillage buddha. |
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//buddha//
If you build some air channels inside it, you could get it to
go "Ohhmmm" as it expands. |
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<< slams lid on desk, siphoning water away >> |
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