A round-up of interesting elevators from deputydog. I’m scared of heights or I would’ve watched all the illustrative Youtube videos.

Tutus, clean bathrooms, juice boxes, and bubbles ruled the day at another Baby Loves Disco event in Seattle. (website)

“ChefDb is an ongoing project aimed at documenting the work history of chefs and restaurateurs from around the world.” It’s not a restaurant review site or yet another food blog, it’s a ongoing documentation project that grew out of its creator’s interest in cataloging all the establishments he had visited.

I love finding news stories about goats being hired out as landscapers. Here’s a bit from the NY Times. The National Park Service sent out a mass email in search of a “New York City Goat Herder” to clear brush at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Larry Cihanek, who laughed when he saw the email, has provided goats from his family farm. They’ve been munching away at the fort’s vegetation for a month, and Cihanek hopes to bring them back next year for more.

From the depths of my ancient browser bookmark folders: “the vital statistics of the perfect chopstick.” After testing a dozen pair of chopsticks with experienced users, Swei-Pi Wu of the Hua Fan College of Humanities and Technology in Taipei, Taiwan, determined that “the most efficient chopsticks for general use would have handles of 6 millimetres diameter, tips of 4 millimetres diameter, and a 2 degree tip angle.” An earlier study on length, led Wu to recommend that 240 millimetre chopsticks were best for adults and 180 millimetre ones for children. (printed in 1996)

After a three year search for a new concertmaster, the Seattle Symphony hired four violinists for the job last month. It’s a perhaps innovative, certainly unusual, arrangement where three of the concertmasters are actually out-of-towners who have full-time jobs elsewhere. Two are concertmasters of other orchestras. One is a professor at Yale. The fourth is Maria Larionoff, the Seattle Symphony violinist who was acting concertmaster during the search. She originally refused to be considered for the position but has obviously reconsidered now that she has the opportunity to share it with others, giving her a break from the added stress. Some insiders, who would not go on record, believe the shared situation was created to eventually place Larionoff into the role full-time.

SizeChina.com is creating a database of Chinese head and face shapes using 3D scans. Bicycle and other sports helmets are made to fit European heads, making them uncomfortable sometimes for others.

Gorgeous shot of the full moon at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

It’s time again for the gigantic, huge, really really big Friends of the Seattle Public Library booksale. Over 200,000 books and other items inside the hangar at Magnuson Park, September 28-30.

LEDs are replacing flourescent lamps in LCD screen backlights and edgelights. LEDs are more efficient and now the brightness and cost have reached a point where they are the preferred solution.