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Haircut day today. Before we begin, K begs me to read “the train book with the lemon on the front” while he’s getting his hair cut. Huh? I’ve never seen this one. I dig through his library books while J gets the bathroom ready for the upcoming adventure.

After an oblique reminder from J, it hits me. He’s talking about Fourier Series and Orthogonal Functions. Last time he had his hair cut, I used it as a prop while distracting him with invented train stories. Guess it should come out of the donation stack. Guess it’s showtime for Daddy.

Today’s chapters included “Shed Fred and the Case of the Missing Coupler” (introducing Forklift Frank), “Vector, the Runaway Locomotive,” and “How Lizard, Owl, Snake, and Kangaroo Rat Met the Desert Jaguar (a.k.a. Big Boy locomotive).”

Ultimately, his best haircut to date. Thanks, Mom, Shed Fred, and company!

Over a 2-year period Thiago Olson, a 17 year-old high school senior, spent 1000 hours working in his parents garage.

Building a fusion reactor, aka “The Fusor.”

News stories here and here.

Guess that puts into perspective our little college adventure in making a pickle glow after hours in the physics lab. (Not to mention that the pickle won…and the power supply lost in a buff of blue smoke.)

My YouTube find of the month:

Think bottled water is cleaner and better? Think again.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as “pure” to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water…. Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere…

From Feb. 18, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle

My son, age 3, is obsessed with trains. Crazy obsessed. Throwing fuel on the fire, today we took him to a model train expo.

While the G-scale garden railroad layout was the clear winner — the trains ran at his eye level and were enormous — a small display by a local model club off to the side caught my eye (and his attention, briefly). The display was a small fold-out switching layout. No scenery. Only track attached to a nicely finished wooden surface. The entire thing was less than 5 feet long and rested comfortably and inconspicuously on an ordinary conference table. Not surprising that we hadn’t noticed it at first.

A single toggle switch controlled the direction of the single locomotive. No speed adjustments were possible. It could be stopped, moving right, or moving left. Each siding was only large enough to hold 1-3 freight cars. The switches were all manually operated.

The setup was clever in that it was incredibly simple to operate yet challenging as a logical puzzle. The game: to reposition, oops, “spot” all the freight cars as quickly as possible to their arbitrarily assigned positions on the sidings in the least amount of time. According to the guy sitting behind the table and puttering with the wheels, uh, “trucks” of a recalcitrant caboose, the layout is a classic named “John Allen’s Time Saver.”

Flash forward 2 hours. Back at home, wife and son nap as Dad googles “John Allen Time Saver” to learn more. (See the best results here and here.) Apparently, the Timesaver is one of two great switching, er, “shunting” puzzles well-known to model railroaders. (The other is Inglenook Sidings.)

Ingenious! What a great father-son project idea! Build motor skills during construction and operation; exercise logic and planning; and play with model trains all at once.

Actually, now that I think about it, so does the Brio setup that he already has…but that’s not nearly as much fun for Dad.

Addendum: Breaking News! Timesaver has been expressed in the Brio vernacular.