Geek Demonstrates Pizza-Powered Engine

The show-and-tell for July 20, courtesy of Ray H. was definitely the most colorful in recent memory. Inspired by a single-cylinder engine model he had seen somewhere, Ray demonstrated a four-cylinder version constructed from K'nex parts. For lots more pictures of the engine model and others, check out Ray's site on instructables.com.

Geek Would Rather Cook Than Eat

On July 13, Phyllis extended her streak of consecutive lame excuses for not eating Tuesday pizza to a record-breaking two. In surpassing the old record of one (held jointly by Bob F. for the now-legendary tree story and by Phyllis herself for shoe shopping), Phyllis cited a 3 PM doctor's appointment as her reason for not eating pizza at 11:30.

According to the geeks' exceedingly liberal "any excuse will do" policy, that would have been good enough. Maybe it's a long way to the doctor's office. Maybe Phyllis drives slow. Maybe there are roses along the way that need to be stopped at and smelled. Who knows? We don't have time to worry about such details, and would have accepted the doctor's appointment without question.

But no. Apparently worried that her story sounded fishy, Phyllis cooked up a secondary tale about needing extended emergency tanning of certain body parts for the benefit of the doctor. It's clear from her excuse that legs were involved. Phyllis also notes that additional parts required sun, but a momentary lapse in her normally impeccable penpersonship leaves some doubt over just which those additional parts might be. Here's an enlarged view of the handwriting in question:

What is that word? Clearly it starts with a lower-case 'b', ends with an 's', and is four or five letters long. Given the context, the only thing that makes any sense is "buns". So I guess we have to go with that.

Buns.

Geek Writes Software, Part I

Bob F. is pleased to announce the online publication of his new program, PianoNanny. Aimed at beginning music students worldwide, PianoNanny teaches music notation and keyboard notes using a fun, easy-to-use, interactive drill.

PianoNanny displays notes one at a time on the grand staff, and you try to click the corresponding notes on an on-screen keyboard. The program scores you for both accuracy and speed. You can tell PianoNanny which clef(s) to use, as well as whether or not you want to practice accidentals.

Implemented as a Java applet, PianoNanny has been tested in several popular browsers, and runs without problems in most of them. Please submit your bug reports, lavish praise, and suggestions for future revisions as comments to this article.