I like my BMW more than I like most people. This Dowco Guardian motorcycle cover keeps my classic bike looking nearly restored.
Loving both the ocean and shiny things can be hard. A lot of work goes into keeping corrosion at bay on my old airhead. Fog and wind bring minute amounts of salt that go after the metal. Harsh temperature changes and direct sun bake the plastic bits. Keeping the bike covered when not in use is the only way to keep it alive.
Cheap eBay covers were not doing it for me. I can find a number of $25-45 covers that fit and will last one or maybe two years. The salt and sun also destroy covers. They give at the seams, or holes wear thru around my mirrors. I decided to spend twice as much on a Dowco cover.
I got 6 years of service out of the Dowco. It is not dead, but holes have started to appear. I will replace it with the same cover.
When I was directly next to the ocean I also used a flip-over cover for a few years. The double layer of insulation helped until high winds would start whipping the shelter about and made me fear for the motorcycle's safety. I may try one again if I can find one small enough to co-exist in a parking space in front of a car.
Dowco Guardian 50003-02 WeatherAll Plus Indoor/Outdoor Waterproof Motorcycle Cover via Amazon Read the rest
Cold welding is the phenomenon of two pieces of metal fusing on contact. It's a big problem in space, but it can even happen on earth at room temperatures with the right metal, as Cody demonstrates. Read the rest
The periodic table of elements will soon be updated with four new names, including three that honor Moscow, Japan, and Tennessee. A total of four new names were recommended Wednesday by an international scientific group, and the fourth is named for a Russian scientist. Read the rest
The BBC's Making of Me and You asks a few questions about your age, volume and sex, and derives from that a chart describing your composition. We are all much alike, one presumes, but the details are fascinating. Read the rest
A cool addition to my growing cabinet of curiosities.
Two days ago, a truck carrying a container of radioactive cobalt-60 (enough to make a dirty bomb) was stolen by carjackers off a highway near Tijuana. Today, authorities found the truck. The thieves probably aren't terrorists, just some guys who wanted a truck with a crane attached to it. But, at some point, they opened the container of cobalt-60 and will now almost certainly die from radiation exposure. Read the rest
Rare earth elements aren't actually rare, but right now the vast majority of them (97%) come from a single place — China. Given how important these elements are to the making of everything from computers to cars, that gives China quite the monopoly. With that context, here's the news: Japan just found a big supply of rare earth elements in mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, what may be good news for manufacturing is not necessarily good news for the health of oceans. Read the rest
A fascinating visit to the Bank of England bullion vault, which stores $315 billion in gold. The narrator is kind of sad because he says gold is useful for many things and it's just sitting here. Read the rest
University of Kentucky chemistry professors John P. Selegue and F. James Holler are collecting comic book references to chemical elements. On their Periodic Table of Comic Books site, you can click through the standard periodic table to see pages from comic books that mention specific elements. The samples seem to be weighted pretty heavily to classic, Golden and Silver Age stuff — there's a lot of 1940s Wonder Woman and miscellaneous anthology series from the 1960s.
They don't have all the elements accounted for yet. In particular, the lanthanides and actinides — aka, those two rows at the bottom where everything ends in "ium" — are lacking comic book shout-outs. Maybe you can help!
Visit the Periodic Table of Comic Books
Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette!
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