mender, road mender, tinker, tinkering with, Frankenstein, biohacker, flit, Plane Tree

Here Comes the Best Part of Thanksgiving: Leftovers

The remains of the day provide ingredients for three more days of meals that invite you to tinker and try new dishes.

Vincent van Gogh
The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy), 1889
Oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art

Biohackers' Discover Inner Frankenstein

Hobbyists are tinkering with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. But are these biohackers a threat to national security?

Spotlight

Thomas Edison in His Lab
View Poster

Where would our spotlight be without Thomas Edison? Edison was a man who didn't believe in giving up; he said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Born on this date in 1847, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" received over 1,000 patents for things we consider indispensable today, such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and the stock ticker. He created the first motion picture camera and the first copyrighted film, Fred Ott's Sneeze. Edison was hearing impaired from when he was young, and had only three months of formal schooling. But, luckily for us, he loved to tinker.

Old Enemies Unite on Health-Care Reform

Lobbyists for seniors, drugmakers, and dcotors want to end cost inflation. Obama's plan would tinker with taxes and regulations but preserve employer-based insurance

On Tuesday, UBS, the European bank hit hardest by the tight credit market, said that it had sold $15 billion of subprime mortgage debt and would cut 5,500 jobs as part of its cleanup, news that some investors saw as an indication that the bank was dealing with its problems.
But as the bank is slowly getting a grip on its subprime exposure, it already faces new challenges elsewhere. Customers are withdrawing money from its asset- and wealth-management business and it is still looking for a long-term strategy for its investment banking unit.
“The absence of horrors and no further write-downs are good news,” said Peter Thorne, an analyst at Helvea in London. “But the private banking business will get worse before it gets better and the job cuts are more tinkering with the investment banking business than anything else.”


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約翰‧勒卡雷《鍋匠、裁縫、士兵、間諜》

華爾街日報
Tinkerers Make Cool Devices Cooler
Page One: Driven by the need for improvised solutions -- or a desire to innovate in the theater of the technologically absurd -- a growing breed of hardware hackers are ripping apart consumer-electronic gadgets to change both form and function

ESSAY

Healthy Right Up to the Day You’re Not

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D
Health is the opposite of a commodity: it flits around like Tinkerbell, defying all the best intentions and predictions.

flit 
verb [I usually + adverb or preposition] -tt-
1 to fly or move quickly and lightly:
In the fading light we saw bats flitting around/about in the garden.
FIGURATIVE Sara finds it very difficult to settle - she's always flitting from one thing to another (= changing her activities).

2 to appear or exist suddenly and briefly in someone's mind or on their face:
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face.

flit 
noun [C] UK
See do a moonlight flit at moonlight.

tinker
n.

1. A traveling mender of metal household utensils.
2. Chiefly British. A member of any of various traditionally itinerant groups of people living especially in Scotland and Ireland; a traveler.
3. One who enjoys experimenting with and repairing machine parts.
4. A clumsy repairer or worker; a meddler.

v., -kered, -ker·ing, -kers. v.intr.

1. To work as a tinker.
2. To make unskilled or experimental efforts at repair; fiddle: tinkered with the engine, hoping to discover the trouble; tinkering with the economy by trying various fiscal policies.

v.tr.

1. To mend as a tinker.
2. To manipulate unskillfully or experimentally.

[Middle English tinkere.]

tinkerer tin'ker·er n.

tinker (MAKE CHANGES)
verb [I usually + adverb or preposition]
to make small unimportant changes to something, especially in an attempt to repair or improve it:
He spends every weekend tinkering (about) with his car.
I wish the government would stop tinkering with the health service.
Compare fiddle (MOVE ABOUT).

tinker 
noun
1 [S] UK when you make small changes to something:
I'll just have a tinker with the television and see if I can get it to work.

2 [C] especially in the past, a person who travels from place to place, repairing pans or other metal containers

Plane Tree

懸鈴木屬（學名：Platanus）是懸鈴木科中現存的唯一屬，主要分布於歐洲東南部、印度和美洲，最常見的為二球懸鈴木。

Definition of road mender

: one that repairs roads