Email with Marc: Radio waves seek the bottom

On Mon, Sep 19, Thane Plambeck writes ...

Thane> /The New York Times/ recommends ways to get your wireless
Thane> network signal its strongest throughout your home, with
Thane> this tidbit:

Thane> Place the base station centrally on an upper floor, or atop
Thane> furniture, because radio waves spread best laterally and down

* * * *

Yes. It may not be obvious to the layperson, but radio waves actually gain strength as they propagate through RF attenuating materials.

Marc

Strange Tomato

Owen asked that I blog this strange tomato he found.

Larabar, Cherry Pie

"You're going like this thing. It tastes exactly like cherry pie."

Gloria was right.

I can overlook the gratuitous umlaut (the company is based in Denver).

If the label is to be believed these things only have dates, almonds, and unsweetened cherries in them.

From W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper's lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least the semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he likes a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.