Freaky horned melon

I got this at Berkeley Bowl a couple of days ago:

This tropical fruit is like something out of Aliens. It's full of jelly-covered plant embryos suspended in a matrix of some connective tissue. When I squeeze the melon, the embryos pop out of the matrix.

[ephemerisle] Art ideas for next year

I had a couple of ideas I thought might make fun projects for next year.

1. Walk on water. Find a way of putting a platform that's, say, 20 feet long and 5 feet wide just an inch or two below the water's surface. This is actually rather tricky to do, as the added weight of the people likely will affect the height of the platform, and I wouldn't want it to drop more than an inch or two. The brute force way to do this would be to get, say, four Coleman Islands which would collectively hold 8000 pounds, and then use them to suspend the underwater platform in the middle. Then several people could walk along the walk-on-water platform with ease.

2. Real-life video game with sinking platforms. It wouldn't be hard to construct a platform that holds the weight of a person but only supports their weight for some number of seconds before sinking. After the person gets off, the platform would return to its original level of buoyancy. I could put in a whole line of these things, and let people jump from platform to platform to get to a particular stable goal.

Costa Rica advice

I'm thinking of going to Costa Rica in about three weeks. If you've been recently, I'd love some advice.