Galton boards, lilacs, and cabinets...

Galton boards, lilacs, and cabinets...  I recently bought a Galton board (from Amazon).  You can read all about it, and see video of it in action, at the preceding link.  This is definitely a most geeky gadget: a mechanical device that demonstrates (beautifully!) a normal distribution.  As one whose nickname (“six sigmas”) is related to the normal distribution and standard deviation, this was irresistible to me. :)  I've yet to work through the math to understand why it works, but watching it work is positively mesmerizing...

Just north of our house, in a field on the east side of State Highway 165, there is a gorgeous group of lilacs.  We stopped yesterday to take these photos of it (below).  The scent was very intense just downwind, where I stood when taking all of these photos.  After standing there for a minute or so, then re-entering our car, the car smelled downright bad!  :)

I made more progress on the cabinets as well.  I've now unbolted the units so I can work on them separately, and I'm fabricating the bottoms.  These are made of 3/4" birch plywood (really pretty stuff) with a 3.5" high “pedestal” constructed of redwood 2x4s underneath it.  This pedestal provides a “toe kick” at the bottom of the cabinet, to make it more comfortable to work right at the cabinet edge.