brief review: Diaper Genie

The Diaper Genie is a simple manual device that seals dirty diapers into a continuous tube of plastic film with twists in between the diapers. You push a diaper down into the mouth of the Diaper Genie, close the lid and twist a handle, and the diaper is hidden away behind a twist in the plastic, with the Genie ready to receive the next diaper. The bin in the bottom gradually fills up with what I can only describe as a string of plump diaper sausages. When the bin fills up after about 30 or 35 diapers (two or three days' worth at the current rate), you are supposed to manipulate a mechanism that cuts the plastic tube, empty the bin into the trash, then tie off the tube.

It works so well at its basic task of making dirty diapers go away and sealing in odors that I do not even begrudge them their business model (which you can probably guess: don't sell razors, sell razor blades). There are cheaper competitors that take standard trash bags, but I have it on the authority of my brother-in-law that these are not as good at keeping in the stink.

The main weakness is the cutting mechanism: it doesn't work very well, and in practice you'll probably end up reaching in there and cutting the tube with scissors, negating the claim that you can perform the dumping operation without touching the filled tube. This isn't too onerous since the diapers are all twisted away inside.

The whole thing wastes petrochemicals and contributes to the flush-and-forget ethos of our wasteful planet-raping exploitative consumer capitalist society blah blah screw it, I have a little poopy baby.

Pseudo-history and the definition of a planet

This Planetary Society article about the proposed redefinition of "planet" says:

In the past, no term in astronomy had seemed as clear cut as a "planet." There were nine, six of which had been known for several millennia, and while no formal definition was available, none seemed necessary. Planets seemed intuitively obvious, and if more were discovered somewhere in the universe, both professionals and lay people confidently assumed that they will know one when they see one.

factitiouslj points out that, at least in 1828, the definition was different:

The book First Steps to Astronomy and Geography, from 1828, listed the planets as "Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Vesta, Juno, Ceres, Pallas, Jupiter, Saturn, and Herschel." Apparently the name "Uranus" hadn't caught on yet.

So at least one textbook was listing four asteroids (three of which may be planets under the proposed IAU definition) as planets, 27 years after astronomers started finding asteroids and before Neptune was discovered. I suppose the demotion happened once they started to realize how many there were. If the definition of a planet was ever considered intuitively obvious, it was an obviousness that was subject to change.

Dark matter and the Bullet Cluster

John Baez explains the evidence for dark matter provided by a remarkable object called the "Bullet Cluster": two clusters of galaxies collide and the hot gas is slowed down, but an invisible component detectable by gravitational lensing just keeps on going.