| A thought, on iPod-related things. |
[01 Feb 2010|10:18pm] |
There's a certain advantage to hardware that's all solid-state and sealed together and no user-servicable parts...
...I say, having pulled ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) suzimoses's iPod shuffle off of a sweater that I just took out of the clothes dryer, and discovered that it seems to be working fine despite going through the wash-and-dry-cycle.
On the other hand, there's also something to be said for hardware that's big enough that you can see it before you accidentally put it in the wash, too.
(Addendum: I mentioned this on our work IRC channel, and my sysadmin said that he's done this to his several times. It would not at all surprise me if laundry survivability was one of the goals when Apple designed it.)
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| Time travelling email. |
[27 Jan 2010|04:44pm] |
So, I'm still using Eudora for my personal email. Partly because switching is a pain and it still works fine, and partly because it does some things that Thunderbird (the likely replacement candidate) doesn't seem to do. One of these in particular is to send time-travelling email. As an example of what I mean by this:tiger_spot: Could you remind me to do [thus-and-so] in a few months?
brooksmoses: Sure.
** brooksmoses writes an email in Eudora saying, "Dear tiger_spot-in-a-few-months: Remember to do [thus-and-so]", clicks shift-Send and selects the "On or after this date" option, and enters a date a few months in the future.
brooksmoses: Okay, done. It's very convenient for that sort of thing, but also it's just so niftily exactly cross-time communication, even if the choices of available time have to follow laws of causality.
Apparently the solution with Thunderbird is just to put reminders on one's calendar that send out email when they come up. I find this far less satisfying.
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| A muffin recipe, and a query about black walnuts. |
[23 Jan 2010|02:25pm] |
So, papersky recently posted this link to a lemon-walnut muffin recipe. Aside from the entertaining debate about what properly counts as an "ingredient" and whether this muffin recipe has any or not -- it has no flour, eggs, butter, or sugar -- it sounds quite tasty and I'd like to try it.
The recipe does bring up a question, though: Does anyone know of a local-to-the-Bay-Area source of black walnuts? I am really quite fond of them, and this recipe sounds like it would indeed (as it suggests) be improved by using black walnuts instead of the usual kind, but I don't know of any way to get some other than the trees on my mom's farm in Virginia. Suggestions?
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| It is not even misquoted? |
[29 Dec 2009|09:48pm] |
As one can readily find on Google, Wolfgang Pauli is said to have said, of an unclear paper, "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" (This is not only not right, it is not even wrong!) But when did he say it, and where did that quote come from? I'm not having any luck finding it; the closest I can come to an original source is this biographical article in Biographical Memiors of Fellows of The Royal Society, which quotes him as saying "It is not even wrong" (in English), without detailed attribution, although the author generally says that it and several other things he quotes come either from "trusted sources" or from situations where he was personally present. Less pithily but along similar lines, the author also quotes him saying (to L. Landau, who after a long argument had asked Pauli to at least admit that what he was saying wasn't all nonsense), "Oh, no. Far from it. What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not."
In any case, does anyone know of an original source for the full version of the quote, and/or the German version?
Similarly, I can find dozens upon hundreds of places attributing, "There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true," to Neils Bohr, but none of them give any source for that either. Any leads?
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| Merry Christmas! |
[24 Dec 2009|09:53pm] |
We've had our Christmas Eve dinner, and decorated the tree, and I'm turning out the lights to go to bed, and wanted to share the tree with you all. I probably should have moved the table centerpiece out of the way of the camera, but it was dark and I didn't see it. Merry Christmas to all (well, to all of you who want to be wished a merry Christmas, and a happy Newtonmass or 25th or whatever you'd like to the rest of you), and to all a good night!
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| Some random things. |
[10 Dec 2009|11:18pm] |
Usually it's five random things make a post, but I've only got two, so. (Well, okay, I found a third. So it's three.)
1) I bought a new AMD/ATI video card yesterday, in order to play with their new toolkit for programming video cards for high-performance number crunching. (And also so as to get dual monitors on my desktop again, but that's secondary.) It is by far the largest video card I have ever owned. I tried installing it this evening, and discovered that ATI's drivers are not happy with my version of Windows, and so it is no improvement for graphics and doesn't do dual monitors after all. Also, it seems to be preventing my computer from hibernating, for reasons I can guess at, so it's actually worse than what I had before. I am thus in the position where I am going to be setting up a Linux dual-boot and trying ATI's Linux video card drivers in hopes that they are better than their Windows drivers. This seems like the sort of thing that cannot possibly end well.
2) I have seen recipes for chili con carne that take approximately a year to make, what with building up a meat stock and so forth. They are undoubtably, in the pleasant world of theory, quite good chili. However, this evening I am reminded of a common maxim of photography, to wit and paraphrased: The best chili is that which you actually have on hand. This instance of chili-on-hand involved some leftover ground turkey, a can of black beans, a can of tomato paste, a lot of dried spices, and a result that was essentially the fifteen-dollar-webcam of chili -- but also got cooked by 9:30 despite my not remembering to start cooking until 9:15. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
3) The virus that I had a couple of weeks ago? I am finally, I think, essentially done with it. The last stages have mostly involved being really really tired, and being unhappy about what being tired does to my willpower. Now I just have lots of backed-up work email and to-do items to dig out from under.
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| A nifty little Flash game |
[08 Dec 2009|02:33pm] |
The Eyeballing Game -- the object is to move a point around on screen to estimate the location of the center of circles, the fourth corner of a parallelogram, the midpoint of a line segment, and so forth. Good practice, as well as a fun challenge.
(I got 2.22 on my first try, and 2.42 on the second one when I was going a bit more quickly. Oddly enough, subsequent tries are slowly but monotonically getting worse; I guess patience is important!)
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| Much better now. |
[28 Nov 2009|11:15pm] |
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As part of my general cleaning up of my office, I got around to setting my laptop dock (for my work laptop) back up, so it now shares its desktop with this nice bright deep-colored 1680x1040 monitor.
And I got it hooked up, and noticed that something really didn't look right. The second monitor doesn't, at the moment, have any full-screen windows on it, so what I was looking at the background -- a certain picture from up in Sonoma County that happens to be the iconic Windows XP background. (It's cheerful and bright and happy. So what if it's on a zillion other computers?) But it was blurry and a bit pixelated.
Turns out that Windows only ships with an 800x600 version of it, which it then stretches to size somewhat poorly. On the laptop screen, it wasn't that noticable, but on the "real" monitor, it's horrid! After some Google-searching, I found the link on the above-linked Wikipedia page to Fujitsu's website with a high-resolution 600dpi "media" TIFF file of it, which I downloaded, resized in Microsoft Picture Manager (which will resize images), converted it to a BMP in Paint (since Picture Manager wouldn't do that) -- I really should get around to installing my image editing programs on here, but I didn't want to do that or boot up the desktop -- and presto, I had an appropriately-sized nice sharp clear version of the image.
It looks so much better now!
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| Another round of links.... |
[13 Nov 2009|11:25pm] |
Another in the series of posts of random links to interesting things I've come across....
An article about Penrose patterns showing up in Arabic decorative tilework, with lots of details about the mathematical knowledge implied thereby, and about how the tilings were worked out.
The OKCupid blog, which is a chronicle of interesting things that they've found by mining through their data. Recently there were some articles on things like how race shows up in dating patterns (and how we're rather more racist than we'd like to be there), and lots of other things.
A similar sort of post from FaceBook, tracking happiness indicators in status messages and correlating them to events. The FaceBook blog as a whole is full of a range of things, most of which seem fairly FaceBook-specific, and so it as a whole isn't as interesting as the OKCupid one.
A very cute stop-action-ish movie of what a "notebook computer" ought to mean. Deeply cute, and also shows off a number of the filmmaker's other similar short movies.
The Word-O-Matic. Programmatically, it's a trivial Markov-chain generator. The niftiness comes in the source selections -- things like a set of names of Greek heroes, or of States. The result are things in the range between plausible and silly, like Yorkansas and Illiforniana and Texaska, and Pandaristor and Protionestus and Alas. (And I have to mention Valheidilla, from the Norse Gods set.)
The Kashiwa Mystery Cafe in Japan, where you never get what you ordered, but you can leave gifts for future diners. It's one of the looking-at-the-world-sideways sort of experiences, it sounds like.
In other Japanese cultural things, some very cute concepts for fruit-juice-box packaging. It's all concepts, and thus not really concerned with cost or recyclability, but the ideas are still neat and could probably be carried over into something usable in the real world.
A newly-discovered ring around Saturn, about a hundred times farther out than the main visible rings, which (among other things) appears to explain the strange coloration on Iapetus.
Chili Con Carnage, a well-told recipe for chili.
A quite unusual design for a wall clock. This one is priced as a piece of art and thus not something I could afford, but I quite like the design and may have to make something inspired by it someday.
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| Shiny pendants! |
[05 Nov 2009|10:29pm] |
As she does every so often, elisem is having a sale on the bead-and-bent-wire jewelry that she makes. (And gives names to. The names are an important part.) And, as usual, she's encouraging people to spread the word, so I'm writing this post. If you're not familiar with her work, go and look -- it's really quite gorgeous work. And if you are familiar with her work, you've probably already stopped reading and followed the sale link! Here, I'll pick out a few examples I like that show the range of her things:
- Idle Thoughts while Watching a Faun. A selection of beads that do something interesting together, on a small amount of silver wirework.
- Dragon Temple. The same genre of earring, but with a quite remarkable pair of stone beads.
- Back Door to Faeryland. Sometimes the wire gets a bit wiggly on these.
- Paradise in Watercolors. More of the bead-groupings and gorgeous lampwork beads.
- Hydrologists Keep a Book of Splashes. Elise also does more sculptural things with the wire, like these.
- The Fortune-Teller Makes Her Will. Or these, where the wire is wrapping around an encompassing things. I really like the wirework in this pair.
- Promise of Return. She also does pendants, which are often more of the sculptural wirework around a single bead or stone or a pairing. Again, this one is one of my favorites with how the wire tangles around the key, and the colors of the wire and key and stone and its inclusions all work together.
- The Pine has its Sorrows, Too. Another pendant, this time with slightly more typical wirework and a single stone.
- Tinkerbelle Explains Gravity. There are simpler pendants, too, that are more just about the beads. This one's quite pretty, and I like the name.
- Tigers of the Deep. I can't resist including this one as well. It's another pendant with wirework, but with "gold-filled" wire this time.
- My Tidepool Beloved. In a different genre, there are necklaces, which are much larger collections of beads on silver-wire links.
- Unnamed (blue and silver). And then there are the "necklace/crowns", which are all sculptural wire making a ring and designed to be worn as necklaces, but many of them also work well as circlets on top of the head too.
And that's just a selection and leaving out some of the other whole categories of things that aren't up yet. I am, as can probably be guessed from the length of this entry, quite fond of her stuff.
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| Pasta with meat sauce (recipe) |
[30 Oct 2009|08:28pm] |
Tonight's dinner was a very simple pasta with sauce thrown together around some ground beef from the freezer, but it seems to have come out really quite well (suzimoses made comments about "best she'd had in a very long time"), so I decided to record the recipe. (Well, as best I can estimate it from what I remember when cooking it; nothing here was actually measured.)
1 lb ground beef (80% lean)
3 T olive oil
ground pepper
salt
1/4 t crushed red pepper
1 medium onion, diced
1 t whole fennel seed
1/2 t ground cumin seed
1/2 24-oz jar Classico "sun-dried tomato" pasta sauce
12-oz can plain tomato sauce
1/4 cup merlot
2 t cocoa powder
Heat olive oil in bottom of large saucepan. Add ground beef, red pepper, and pepper and salt as appropriate. Stir, break beef apart. Once beef has separated and begins to cook, add onion, fennel seed, and cumin seed. Cook until browned. Add tomato sauces, wine, and cocoa powder, and simmer about 10 minutes. Serve over thin whole-wheat spaghetti, with a salad. Makes about 4 large servings.
I'm guessing that the combination of fennel, cumin, cocoa, and red wine was probably the critical part of the recipe flavor here. I usually put fennel in just about any pasta sauce I make (particularly the meat-based ones), but the cumin is a rarity, as is the wine because I usually don't think of it, and the cocoa powder was a completely new experiment.
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| LJ security bug |
[22 Sep 2009|08:01pm] |
Reposting from epi_lj:Some of you may have noticed that weird flash objects rendering as a big hunk of whitespace are showing up on some of your recent posts. I don't know for sure what's going on, but I *suspect* it's something busted with their new, "Your Journal - Your Money" feature. I'm hoping they fix it soon. (I have not opted in to that feature. It seems to be happening on lots of journals that are eligible for the feature, even though the people have not opted in, so, to be clear, this could happen to your posts even if you do not use that feature.)
I'm just posting about it because eeyorerin noticed that when it adds the objects, it also makes your post public. This could be a pretty big concern if you posted anything that you thought was going to be filtered or that you really didn't want public. I just tried this out myself, and it did indeed change the security from friends-only to public. It also resets the usericon, tags, and mood when it does this.
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| Ow. |
[18 Sep 2009|03:54pm] |
Chopping jalepeno + chapped hands == VERY PERSISTENT OW.
This public service message brought to you by The Voice Of Experience.
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| Signal Boost |
[14 Sep 2009|10:36pm] |
Letting vulnerability be radical
"Have you noticed who suffers when we build a movement premised on never admitting that we can hurt each other, on never admitting that we’re tired and limited and human and just aren’t up for it today? Who stops making blog posts, who stops showing up to meetings and town halls and community projects, stops putting their work out there and speaking openly and honestly? Who stops making friends? Who stops taking risks? Have you noticed what happens in a world where we do this? Where we never talk about what we need, let alone what we want, all while we’re told all day what we should buy instead?"
It's not just social movements either. It's life.
(Comments off here; it's not my post. Go, comment there.)
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| Bookcases! |
[07 Sep 2009|11:01pm] |
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We have new bookcases!
So, quite some months ago, I had an idea of putting bookcases in our hallway. Narrow bookcases, sized for paperbacks, since hallways are not so very wide -- and besides which, it's useful to have paperback-sized bookcases for one's paperbacks, since they don't pack very efficiently on bookcases sized for hardbacks.
The original plan was just to get some cheap lumber and build something that was quick and simple. But it turned out that really cheap pine has knots which leak rosin, and less-cheap pine is still not all that cheap in quantities suitable for a hallway-full of bookcases, and poplar is rather nicer to work with than pine and only slightly more expensive. And, if I was spending that much on them, I wanted to do a good job, with beveling the edges and so forth. Also, I might as well paint them, since we'd been wanting something that we could paint bright and colorful colors. Thus, the project took a bit longer than I'd anticipated -- but it's now, as of about an hour ago, completely finished. And I'm quite pleased with them, too; they're a very pleasant bright glossy purple, and they hold books, and they're something I'll still be pleased with years from now.
( Pictures! )
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| This is just to say |
[06 Aug 2009|01:12pm] |
...that I have taken some of the plum jam from the fridge and put it in my oatmeal?
Something like that. In any case, cooking oatmeal with 1 cup water, 3/4 cup milk, 2T homemade plum jam, cardamom, cinnamon, galangal, and almond extract is very yummy indeed.
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