Smallist

Wolffia, a type of duckweed, is the smallest flowering plant. They float on the top of ponds, as the name suggests. Each has a single pistil and stamen, and each produces a the world’s smallest fruit, the size of a grain of salt, called a “utricle.” Here’s an electron micrograph image of a single flowering Wolffia, labelled so you can see where all the naughty parts are.

No great advance in nanotech or UMPC manufacture here, but I thought these were cute. Via BoingBoing.

Truth be told, 3000 square feet isn’t that small. That would be about six smallcaves, in fact. But it is sub-McMansion, and this new book serves as a beautiful reminder that bigger isn’t always necessarily better. The author, James Grayson Trulove, previously compiled a book on book of houses under 1500 square feet. Whether some of those are in here is beyond me, but Houses Between 1500 and 3000 Square Feet is an unwieldy title for a book, and not the most compelling concept, so I’d imagine there’s some sub-1500 items featured as well.

Via MetaEfficient.

If you’re not quite ready to be a Samurai, or one of those eighties guys who reads Sun Tzu, here’s some lighter reading. The Way of the Thumb details the fine art of thumb wrestling, including the pregame psyops. (”keep your thumb ramrod straight, but do make it sizzle a little, like a live wire waiting for a wet foot to step on it.”)

Via Uncrate.

Ah, the dilemma of the klutzy smallist. The smaller your gadget, typically the more frail. I wait in excitement for the Apple iPhone, yet somewhere deep down, I know it will snap like a twig in my jeans pocket.

Not so with the GoBook MR-1, a ruggedized UMPC capable of government levels of klutziness (MIL-STD 810F and IP-54 ratings, the military upper limit of “why we can’t have nice things”). It also has some nifty features like a 16-32GB solid-state drive, fingerprint reader, and something called “stealth-mode keyboard.”

Alas, it costs $4,450. So you might be better off gluing a bicycle helmet to the bottom of your iBook.

As much as I hate to link to the Daily Mail, they’ve got an article on little tomatoes called “tomberries,” which make cherry tomatoes look like beefsteak tomatoes. They go on sale today in the UK. The BBC has another pic here.

There’s been some debate as to whether the iPhone got smaller since its announcement. I guess the lesson is, constrain proportions when you scale images.

A new nanostructured coating, designed at RPI, removes almost all reflections from a surface. The technique works by angling little nanorods to reduce the index of refraction to near that of air. Apparently, this could increase LED efficiency by 40%.

When Meadow mentions how the state can crush the individual, Tony replies, “New Jersey?” Here’s a map of the US with each state name replaced by a country. California est l’etat.

It’s been a good week for folding chairs. First, there’s these swank inward-folding chairs, via Treehugger, plus a 4-way folding table, complete with video on how the folding works.

But that’s nothing. The ISIS chair (via) folds down to three, count-em three centimeters. That’s less than an inch a little more than an inch, folks. And pretty easy on the eyes too.