The Charles Schulz Museum is scheduled to open this summer in Santa Rosa, CA. The website includes monthly photos of the construction which began in June 2000. One notable museum item will be an 8 x 12 foot wall from the Colorado Springs house Schulz lived in in 1951. He had decorated it with early Peanuts characters and the current homeowners carefully uncovered the painted over drawings and donated it to the museum. It was removed, packed up and transported by truck. A new wall was placed in the house, but it won’t have the same cachet.

Ever nipped a spoon or a napkin from a restaurant? You are not alone. According to the New York Times, almost anything worth taking in a restaurant has been pilfered by clever diners. From large lamps to bathroom sconces, tiny caviar spoons to oversized Italian silver, large paintings and a Murano glass decanter, all are apparently no problem for some patrons’ sticky hands. One place had an antique French faucet replaced with a cheap knockoff by a well-prepared thief. Another loses its $25 bathroom candles almost daily. Items with a restaurant’s name or logo are particularly enticing for collectors. Solutions to this petty thievery include nailing things down, making the waitstaff responsible for keeping an eye on items, and sometimes just not using the top of the line accoutrements anymore.

It’s Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee this year and The Royal Family website has published 50 royal facts. The Queen has sat for over 120 portraits. She did not perform her yearly role of opening Parliament on two occasions, when she was pregnant with Prince Andrew and then Prince Edward. Her first corgi was named Susan and she has owned more than 30 corgis since. There are also 50 facts about her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.

SkyScraperPage.com has an amazing feature: a searchable database of world’s tallest building diagrams. There are pre-sorted direct links to groupings of buildings by city, continent, and architect. The search parameters let you create your own unique groupings and sort them in various ways. The illustrations are exceptionally detailed. My own subtitles for a few: Vienna, “old versus new”. San Jose, “no upstaging”. Wuhan, “1997, year of the instant skyline”. and Miscellaneous, “The Titanic?”

IKEA organized a trip to their Emeryville store for East Palo Alto residents as they prepare for the March election which will decide if cutely named Swedish items and the accompanying traffic snarls will be coming to their city. Opponents and supporters alike traveled up by bus to see what the fuss is all about. I can imagine that the sight of the imposing yellow and blue behemoth may have not been convincing, but perhaps the prices and nifty products inside were appealing. This article notes that some residents would prefer to have a grocery store, which East Palo Alto does not have, in IKEA’s proposed location. Swedish meatballs and lingonberries just won’t cut it.

Palm and 3Com will have to post a $50 million bond as they appeal the ruling that Graffiti infringes on a Xerox handwriting patent. But a motion by Xerox to have Palm Powered handheld sales halted was denied. So perhaps they got off easy.

You’re probably familiar with Rosie the Riviter, but women were also recruited for other roles in the war effort. This collection of World War II posters illustrates the various jobs women were encouraged to take on, and also the psychology used to encourage participation: your parents will be proud, your little sister will be envious, and your brother will come home sooner. And if that wasn’t enough motivation, there was also the pay scale. (via coudal partners)

“Is the mind of a Mandarin speaker different from the mind of an English speaker?” Lera Boroditsky’s research (abstract here) has shown that the different representations of time in the two languages result in a difference in how the speakers think about time. The study of language’s effect on cognition has been controversial in the past as Benjamin Lee Whorf’s findings from the Hopi Indians were used for racist theories which supposed that speakers of primitive languages were incapable of abstract thought. But, despite the potential for improper use of the results, experiments into how language shapes our brains open fascinating windows into understanding how the brain works, how we represent concepts as we are cogitating. (via xblog)

Footnote: as I was delving into Boroditsky’s background, I came across the honors thesis of someone I know who has worked with her. Lauren Schmidt’s thesis shows that gender assignments for objects in languages affect the speaker’s mental representation of the objects. Studying French changed my view of various objects as I projected various characterizations on them in order to better remember their gender assignments. And I always wanted to know more about how they were assigned in the first place.

Blindsight is a phenomenon where visually impaired people actually know where objects are without having been conscious of seeing them. It demonstrates that there is both unconscious and conscious processing of sensory input. There is much we do that seems to happen unconsciously, but blindsight seems almost magical while also being scientifically verifiable. Actions which become habitual or intuitive, such as reacting to driving conditions, are at a different level of unconscious behavior compared to the basic skill of knowing where something is when you have no idea that you saw it. (spotted in a Wired News article)

The History of Eating Utensils contains objects from the Rietz Food Technology Collection which is housed at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The entire collection consists of 17,000 objects, most of which are eating utensils from many cultures and time periods. Such a variety of materials has been used to create utensils! The section on portable utensils has folding knives, forks, spoons, and travel chopsticks.