I just found a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in my mother’s cleaning closet and became interested in it. The product is pretty cool: it’s a hard foam that is composed of interconnected stands of the hardest commercially-available plastic: melamine. Melamine is interesting in this application because it is traditionally known as the main ingredient in formica as well as the stuff that make up a whiteboard.

The Magic Eraser, marketed by Proctor and Gamble, is actually a product from BASF called Basotect. Apparently, it also has good sound insulation properties.

One report mentioned that the substance is execelent at removing the polish from glossy paint. I performed a quick experiment by very lightly dragging a dry Magic Eraser on the surface of a glossy photograph. The photograph had very obviously lost its finish in the area with really tiny scratches. I then wet a tip of the Magic Eraser and gave a quick back and forth on a different area of the photograph: the eraser removed the gloss and the pigment of the photograph. It is pretty incredible how sharp the microfiber must be.

I start a slurry of holiday weekend posts by quoting an article published yesterday in the science section of the New York Times, “A Free-for-All on Science and Religion” by George Johnson. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and is the go-to guy when it comes to science quotes.

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”