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another application for rare-earth magnets
Sunday, November 29 2015
I'd stayed up late last night watching still-disappointing (but still watchable) episodes of The Man in the High Castle and reveling in all the open space in my newly-clean laboratory. For this reason, I got up unusually late, as did Gretchen. When she headed to her shift at the bookstore without walking the dogs, I took them on a short walk up and down the Farm Road and soon returned to bed, sleeping into the mid-afternoon.
I'd returned to my protocol of caffeine abstinence, and this kept me from getting much done today. The price for euphoric caffeine experiences is dysphoria during caffeine withdrawal. That said, I did come up with a solution to a problem Gretchen had for displaying collections of my tiny paintings of animals. She'd wanted me to simply glue them on top of a frame painting given to her by a former friend. As someone who paints paintings in the hope that nobody will then glue other paintings ontop of them, I didn't especially like this proposal. Also, I was concerned that Gretchen wouldn't like the arrangement I would choose if I were to do the gluing. So instead I drilled shallow holes into the backs of the frames of the tiny paintings and glued little rare-earth magnets into the holes. Then I cut out a piece of steel sheet metal (from an old device that used to connect to one of our televisions) and managed to fit it on top of the former-friend's painting without using any adhesive or fasteners. This provided a surface to which the tiny paintings could now be stuck refrigerator-magnet style. This would allow Gretchen to rearrange the paintings at will or even substitute in other ones (should magnets be installed in their backs). Magnets solve a lot more problems than people are willing to imagine, and this is especially true of rare-earth magnets, which are at least equal to velcro in their holding power. It's surprising more clothing doesn't feature magnets as fasteners.
Meanwhile the outdoors had returned to more seasonable (colder) temperatures after yesterday's rains.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?151129 feedback
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