Adam Fields (weblog)

Can we perhaps try a new maze or something?

http://www.zenarchery.com/archives/001695.html

Yeah, this sounds like a great idea.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/30/us_eyes_collection_of_college_student_data/

"Frequent travelers who don’t want to do laundry in the sink or pay
for expensive hotel laundry services can just take along several packs
of OneDerWear disposable underwear. OneDearWear is 100% cotton, 100%
biodegradable, and comes in several styles for men and women, from
boxers to thongs."

http://www.popgadget.net/2004/11/onederwear-disposable-undies_30.html

Ummm… duh.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/30/lava.lamp.death.ap/index.html
http://www.ci.kent.wa.us/police/pressreleases/index.asp

http://growabrain.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/kitten_cute.jpg

"This quality mousepad features a uh, CLEVER ergonomic wrist rest on a pair of gel boobs."

That’s just too funny.

http://www.bustymousepads.com/

Via chrisd, who says "Please, please, make them stop this":

http://www.customizedclassics.com/romeo-juliet.asp

Angelina Jolie + Brad Pitt. Funny and a good action movie at the same time. Sure!

http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1310562&sdm=web&qtw=640&qth=400

"South Korean researchers say they’ve used stem cell therapy to enable a paralyzed patient to walk after she was not even able to stand for the last 19 years."

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20041127-121143-6745r

I originally posted this on Ask Mefi, but it’s worth repeating.

Here’s my recipe for braised lamb shanks.

Sprinkle kosher salt over shanks. Pan sear shanks in olive oil until good and brown. Not “just browned”, slightly crispy. Do them in batches if you’ve got a small pan - that’s fine. Lay a bunch of assorted fresh herbs in the bottom of a large pan (any will do, but be sure to include rosemary - it goes particularly well with lamb), and lay the shanks on top. Fill the pan with a mixture of 1/2 wine and 1/2 stock, to halfway cover the shanks. Put in the oven for 1 hour on 350, uncovered (this differs from many braises, which are done in a covered pan). Then add sliced vegetables to the pan (carrots, potatoes, parsnips, mushrooms all work well - use your imagination here). Check every 30 minutes, turn everything when it’s starting to brown and dry out. Add more stock/wine when needed to keep it at the halfway point. Total oven time is probably around 3 hours - it’s done when the vegetables are tender and the meat is falling off the bone. Remove from the oven, and let it cool in some of the liquid. Take the rest out, reserve half. Take the other half, and reduce down a bit, and add some cornstarch or arrowroot which you’ve dissolved in water (this is called a slurry). Stir this in, and let it cook for a few minutes. This will thicken the sauce, which you can add back over the dish and serve . But wait, you’re not done yet! Take the rest of the sauce you reserved, and reduce it over a low flame unil it’s very syrupy (this will be about 1/16th the original volume, but YMWV). This may take an hour. Cool rapidly in an ice bath, and refrigerate. Congratulations! You’ve just made a lamb glace. This is extremely precious (yes, taste it). It will keep in the fridge for a few months. Reconstitute it with boiling water, and use it as part of the stock portion for next time, or for other sauces. Same basic technique works with short ribs.

This is adapted from a response I wrote to someone on a mailing list asking for help in picking components for a home-built machine. I’m a big fan of this - you can tune the parts to your liking, you get an intimate sense of how things fit together, and it’s substantially cheaper than buying the same machine from a vendor.

(more…)

That is an excellent question. Offhand, I cannot think of any good reasons why not. I think this is something that’s very worthwhile to get behind. More public scrutiny can only help.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_11_28.php#004122

http://news.com.com/Slimmer+tube+TVs+to+challenge+flat+panels/2100-1041_3-5458670.html

"Authorities in Sweden arrested a man who shot mobile phones into the yard of a high-security prison with a bow and arrows, police said Saturday."

Clever!

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=816&e=3&u=/ap/20041128/ap_on_re_eu/sweden_prison_archer

I’m not sure I necessarily agree with the conclusions, but it’s an interesting discussion anyway. It seems to me that the Democrats lost this election because they concentrated on the Republican-leaning voters (regardless of which party they’re actually affiliated with) who couldn’t stand to vote for Bush while completely ignoring the Democratic-leaning voters who couldn’t stand to vote for Kerry. While the former are extremely vocal, I think there are a lot more of the latter. The Kerry camp completely failed to give a strong answer to those people about why he’d be better than Bush.

"This diagram was set up to explain how a dominant power maintains its power, but you can relatively easily reverse-engineer the situation to figure out what to do if you’re the one being fucked with. For instance, let’s take a walk through this looking at the two-party system of American self-governance at the national level."

http://outlandishjosh.com/wp/index.php?p=799

"A Wisconsin teenager is the first human ever to survive rabies without vaccination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday, after she received a desperate and novel type of therapy."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/national/25rabies.html

I’m a big fan of Richard Dawkins. Evolutionary theory is very widely misunderstood, and I didn’t really grok it until I read The Selfish Gene. I highly recommend it.

These are the questions he gets asked frequently:

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/FAQs.shtml

http://www.ii.uib.no/~arntzen/kalender/

This was originally posted to someoftheanswers, but I stumbled upon it again, and I feel it’s worth repeating.

———————————————————————-

So.
A few days ago, Farscape was cancelled.
I’m loathe to pick up an episodic series in the middle, because it makes me feel like I’m always missing something, so I’ve been watching the shows, in order, as they’ve been released on DVD. And it’s great. I have more than two years to go, but I still lament its passing. I love sf, I love sci-fi, and I love sf/sci-fi television. And I’ve watched as show after show has been ruined. Sometimes it’s by straying from the original concept in an attempt to pick up a wider audience, which always results in the original audience that made the show popular fleeing as fast as they can. Sometimes it’s just not understanding what the fans want.
Grrrrr..
So, I’ll lay it out for you:

1. Put the show in a timeslot, and keep it there. We, the public, are busy. We like TV, but we don’t have time to check your often-wrong website to find out when the shows we like will actually be on. Moving shows around does not successfully introduce them to new audiences, it alienates the old ones who knew when and where to find it and now no longer do. It’s disingenuous to run a show for three months without running any two episodes in the same slot in a row (or at all), then decide that people didn’t like it and kill it.
2. I have a pet peeve about pre-empting regular shows for long-running sports events, because I don’t watch sports. I understand, however, that some people like sports, and advertisers like to pay money for those slots. If you have to bounce a show, then you should do two things: 1) apologize at least a little bit to the fans of the show and 2) air the show in its entirety in some other timeslot. “We join XXXX already in progress…” is not acceptable, especially for a first-run show that may never again be aired uncut.
3. Keep your website up to date and easy to navigate. If it’s Saturday, don’t make us look for your Sunday shows in “next week’s lineup”. Post prominent notices that shows have been moved. Make it easy for us to find the shows we like. Make the listings correspond to what’s actually on. Make this part of your syndication contracts.
4. If your show is watched by hordes of intelligent fans who are drawn to your multi-season plot arcs, interesting characters, and politcal tension, don’t suddenly turn the show into “Kevin Sorbo’s Action Hour”. Television action cannot compete with the movies for long periods of time. It just ends up being boring and repetetive if you focus on it.
5. Hordes of intelligent fans are drawn to multi-season plot arcs, interesting characters, and political tension. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your fans, and don’t play down to the lowest-common denominator - raise the bar! Your viewers are smart. Treat them that way.
6. Make the plot dependent on earlier episodes, and make it possible for people to see them. Either rerun them in order on a periodic basis or make them available on VHS/DVD (but not VHS-only). Make this part of your syndication contracts.
7. Invest in good writers. Ply them with caffeine and chocolate.
8. Ensemble shows can work very well, if they’re balanced.
9. Don’t cancel a good series in the middle to try out something slick and shiny where the show is just a vehicle for a main character who is a desperate loner trying to find (his wife’s killer | his killer | the people who stole his memories | the people who stole his identity | aliens).

That’s great. They go into a Verizon building to steal telephony circuit boards, but inadvertently disable large chunks of the 911 system, so the cops come over to investigate, and catch them in the act.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/nyregion/27theft.html

http://www.autoweek.com/news.cms?newsId=101309

I’m most of the way through installing my first gentoo build, and
there’s a lot to like about it.

- emerge makes sense, at least on the surface

- the rc system is far more logical than any other I’ve used

- it follows a very important rule: "where things are configurable, offer sane defaults that won’t be wrong, even though they may not be as finely tuned"

The install process is completely unguided, but there is VERY good step-by-step documentation. I’d like to see some of these common tasks packaged up into an installer for less technical users, but for those so inclined, it’s really nice to be doing the install inside a running linux system instead of having to drop out of the installer when you want a shell.

So far, thumbs up.

http://www.gentoo.org

Selective breeding yields carrots high in healthy and colorful compounds:

"Xanthophylls give the yellow carrots their golden hues and have been linked with good eye health. Red carrots contain lycopene, a type of carotene also found in tomatoes that’s believed to guard against heart disease and some cancers.

Purple carrots owe their color to anthocyanins. In a class all by themselves, these pigments are considered to be powerful antioxidants that can guard the body’s fragile cells from the destructive effects of unstable molecules known as free radicals."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041122093132.htm

No, we’re not done with that yet.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/stones_cry_out_.html
http://stones-cry-out.blogspot.com/2004/11/what-went-wrong-with-exit-polling.html

http://www.eatsushi.com/demos.asp

Seems like more of a gimmick, but still pretty cool.

“Weighing 18.5kg, OxyRide can drive for 1.23km with a 50kg passenger, or travel 65m in 74 seconds on fresh cells, claims Panasonic.

Developed to promote the firm’s AA Digital Xtreme Power (DXP) disposable camera batteries, the cells use a modified alkaline chemistry, with nickel hydroxide and other undisclosed ‘active elements’ added to the standard manganese dioxide electrode.”

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=38100&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategoryID=1&liChannelID=6&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1

Someone finally invented the cellphone-driven vibrator.

"When your phone receives a text message or phone call it will switch on the Vibrating stimulator for a set period of time."

http://vibraexciter.com/shop/erol.html

It seems like the next natural step is to combine this with the Audi-Oh.

I was just reminded that Dimitri Mendeleev was simply one clever bastard.

http://www.chemistry.co.nz/mendeleev.htm

I’m open to suggestions on appropriate celebrations.

"How bad is this problem? How much junk can get installed on a user’s PC by merely visiting a single site? I set out to see for myself — by visiting a single web page taking advantage of a security hole (in an ordinary fresh copy of Windows XP), and by recording what programs that site caused to be installed on my PC. In the course of my testing, my test PC was brought to a virtual stand-still — with at least 16 distinct programs installed. I was not shown licenses or other installation prompts for any of these programs, and I certainly didn’t consent to their installation on my PC."

http://www.benedelman.org/news/111804-1.html

RISK. I blame RISK.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1101250211536&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes

Looks good.

http://video.craveonline.com/video/player.php?showVideo=56&statsid=stats_video&pid=1

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/37179

(As a side note, I’ve always been suspicious of Ukraine. I blame RISK.)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

http://www.airform1.com/html/airform.html

A call for a very simple but meaningful protest at the Inauguration.

"We’re calling on people to attend inauguration without protest signs, shirts or stickers. Once through security and at the procession, at a given signal, we’ll all turn our backs on Bush’s motorcade and continue through his speech and swearing in. A simple, clear and coherent message."

http://www.turnyourbackonbush.org/

I’ve started tracking mozilla/firefox extensions I use, if you’re interested:

http://del.icio.us/fields/mozilla+extensions

This is a good article detailing some of the ways in which our government is being dismantled from the inside. It’s pretty clear that both the Democrats and the Republicans are at fault here in creating this situation, although the Republicans are wielding their time in the sun like a bulldozer in a dollhouse.

‘"There was no way that every member of Congress could hold up their right hand and say, `I read every page of that bill before the vote,’ " said Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat, noting that members had just one day to examine the 400-plus-page bill before voting on a law that would change health-care allotments across the country.’

and

‘Democrats are arguably suffering from their own decisions: It was the then-majority Democrats who changed the makeup of the Rules Committee to give the majority more than a 2-to-1 advantage over the other party, acknowledged a Democratic staff member close to the panel.

"Our hands are not clean, no question," the staff member said. "But it’s like a thin layer of dust compared to what the Republicans are doing."

Now, rank-and-file members sometimes have trouble even finding out when the Rules Committee is meeting. The powerful committee frequently decides bills in hastily called, late-night "emergency" sessions, despite House rules requiring that the panel convene during regular
business hours and give panel members 48 hours notice. So far in the current Congress, 54 percent of bills have been drawn up in "emergency" sessions, according to committee staff members.’

I stand with the Libertarians on this one. I believe that power should be both given and taken with a light touch, for the following two reasons:

1) Power, once given, is never returned willingly, and if you want it back, you have to take it.

2) Power to an elected or appointed office should be given with the assumption that it will be misused at some point in the future (even if the current holders would never do that), and appropriate controls should be put into place to prevent it from the outset.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any understanding of this.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/03/back_room_dealing_a_capitol_trend?pg=full

Apparently, many color laser prints are traceable to the printer by a series of microscopic yellow dots encoding the serial number, which are included on every print made by the printer. Ostensibly, this is used to foil counterfeiters.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=6&u=/pcworld/118664