Poissonian Fish

After catching a fishy phrase — "fraction of failing breams", which I corrected to "fraction of failing beams" — in my manuscript draft (though Juan G. Restrepo has suggested the dystopian "fraction of failing dreams" as a possible correction), I noticed in a Google Scholar e-mail that my work was cited recently by a paper called The Contact Structure of Great Britain's Salmon and Trout Aquaculture Industry (which has nothing to do with any baseball players on the Angels). This made me think of "failed salmon" and "failed trout" and gives possible inspiration for writing a paper with a title like Percolation on Fish(y) Networks. My mind continued to descend in a fishy direction, so I decided to plot Poisson distributions of fish (as you can see in my tweet).

Here are some Poisson distributions of fish. pic.twitter.com/wZ367E4GVg

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) May 11, 2019

Old Article: "On the Fracture of Pencil Points"

I got my first taste of solid mechanics (and fracture mechanics) as a kid when attempting to use 'Number 2' pencils, on which I gave up rather quickly. Once they break once, they will soon break again. I switched to "mechanical pencils" (I like the .07 size) when I was very young.

Here is an old article on pencil-tip fracture (by Henry Petroski). The picture below, which comes from an even earlier article, sets up the the geometry of a pencil tip.

(I was thinking about this because a 'Number 2' pencil showed up in The Grimm Legacy, which I am currently reading.)

The Mechanics of Fingernail Cracking

I have managed to further savage a couple of my fingernails and toenails lately, so that made me wonder about their mechanical and growth properties (and, more particularly, if I have done additional permanent damage to them). I hadn't gotten around to googling this yet, but todat's issue of mini-AIR has helped answer one of my questions. (I'm actually pretty amused that an issue of mini-AIR, meant to make us laugh and then to make us think, has managed to do that. It doesn't usually have blurbs about things in which I already knew I was interested. Now I can just cross my fingers and hope that time does a bit of desavaging...)