Last day of the month. 1/12 of the year. My how time flies, etc.
I think the day's allotment of sunshine passed me by while I was on the third link. Then again, maybe not.
Many of us associate dragon fruit with Southeast Asia because of its prevalence in the region and the use of dragon fruit in some Thai recipes, but it actually has its origins in South America. The fruit is mostly made of water and makes for a great low-calorie snack; it's also a great source of fiber and vitamin C.
Boing Boing ran a taste test on dragon fruit and the comments are telling. I'm starting to see more of it in the local stores, so it will no doubt show up on more plates and probably some crossword puzzles, too.
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A traffic control device used in Canada.I wonder how much development money The Department of Transportation could swallow for the same thing? We just don't seem to do clever very well any more.(but we've got the expensive committee trick down cold)
Via: Dianne Ballesty
Cornucopia's cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user's favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food.
MIT's Cornucopia takes 3D Fab to the kitchen. Molecular gastronomy is so been there, done that. Digital food.. no wonder el Buli is closing for two years.
Via: Beyond the Beyond
Theese look good for about a zillion variations, and easy to make in a large batch. One variation a correspondent mentioned, scrambled eggs, might lead to a nice custard-like filling. (albeit with a longer cooking time) Basic recipe with link.
Via: Noble Pig Vinyards
The Quanum RTR Bomb System fixes onto the bottom of your RC plane or helicopter and is released using a spare channel on your receiver. The bomb itself is made of tough fiber reinforced nylon, and will split open on impact and spread its payload. It even comes with a second release plate so you can fashion a bomb that looks even more menacing than this one.
Somebody doesn't seem to be thinking too clearly. Military style gear at hobby prices.
The Victoria is coming to pier 35. Unfortunately the terminal needs a bit of work to prepare it for guests. Fortunately (from my point of view) we get to do it. Working on the older part of the docks is a reminder that S.F. was once a port town and somewhere along the way we decided to let that slip. In return we received a town divided between a lot of counter attendants and the tourists they attend to. It's such a comfort to have half the town's families out of work in a politically correct manner.
Stay dry.
As I've explained to my nieces, I'm alergic to snow. If there is snow on the ground, or ice on the water, the safe assumption is that it's cold. Cold No Good. A man from Sodus Bay (Lake Ontario), N.Y. seems to disagree. No shriveling jokes here, but I do wonder if he's wearing flip-flops.
Via: Dianne Ballesty
Yep.. an electric "Lids Off" jar opener. It's advertised as a gizmo for motion restricted people, but it's designed by Black and Decker. As much as I love gadgets ....
An antique store, on upper Grant, has something similar. It's mechanical, with a sort of ecentric geared arrangement to spin the jar, while the top is trapped in a knurled V. Sixty years later, it still works fine. Draw your own conclusions.
Every time I pick up a guitar, the theme's melody seems to find its way into my warm-up.
Perry the Platypus
The platypus is among the few mammals that produce venom (the male) and eggs (not the male). Who knew?
An old friend (from Wolfgang's - long ago and far away) e-mailed me out of the blue a few days ago. She has taken a degree in visual communication (among other things, of course) and I've taken the liberty of posting an example.
Sunday again. Grandstanding on the tragedy in Haiti, our mayor has assured us that all the S.F. emergency plans are in place (we're doomed). As is often the case, several save the children funds have sprung up, with folding tables, horific pictures, promises with a P.O. box, etc. If you are moved to donate, people like the Red Cross already have boots and equipment on the ground. Donate effectivly. On to Sunday's linkdump of long-form articles.
(AP) -- Hundreds of sea lions that abruptly blew out of San Francisco Bay's Pier 39 last Thanksgiving have apparently found a new home at another tourist attraction - 500 miles north on the Oregon coast.
By now this is pretty old news. Declining fish stocks in the bay forced the sea lions and the brown pelicans north in search of food. People who work on the docks can live with this, people on the shore, not so much. While they were on route, and out of sight, I heard all sorts of theories. A little boy explained to me about sharks and their dining habits. He had it down too. Growls, gnashing of teeth, and he mimed both the shark and the doomed sea lion. Total entertainment. There was the greenie, going the man-made virus / die-off route. Bit too scientifical for me to follow. The best, however, was a story in the SF weekly about a fisherman's dog that scared them off. One 60 pound pooch, according to our ace journalist, managed to dislodge several thousand animals, along several miles of coast, by barking. Sea lions are big animals, totally at home in the water, darn fast in short bursts on land, congenitally cranky, and can bark louder than any fido you might know. This brings me to my conclusion that newspapers are not the best place to obtain news. But you knew that.
I've seen a number of advertisements touting stevia as the sweetener du jour, A gift from the rain forest (listed in Botanica as a semi-arid genus) and a sure-fire answer to our ever expanding waistlines. Not to long ago, this was an herb called sweetleaf. Suddenly, with a little help from Pepsico, a commercial process and FDA approval was found to extract the two sweet glycosides, stevioside and rebaudioside. In fairness, Morita Kagaku Kogyo Co., Ltd. in Japan has been producing a sweetener since '71 so it may actually be a licensing deal. And so another natural product, packaged for your convenience, is born.
How will it affect your kitchen? It's non-fermentable, so no brewed drinks or yeast products will use it. As best as I can tell, it lacks the proper molecular shape to sub for sugar in baked goods, but will do fine as an add on in postproduction. The molecular gastronomy folks will probably find a use. (rebaudioside flecked whipped shea butter formed on a cold grill) The truth is that the product will probably follow the usual arc: Big push, must have, health scare, lots of billable hours reviewing, phew, glad that's over, and finally one more package of stuff you need to keep stocked at the coffee station.
Antarctica: This frozen wave comes from liquid water being trapped and shielded behind ice. When it breaks out, it freezes instantly and preserves the waveform. (and I thought Cooperstown got cold during the winter)
Via: Carol Dauley
OLYMPIA, Wash. — Court papers allege that an Olympia woman, angry that her husband left her, tampered with his power tools so that he received a powerful electric shock. Carolyn Paulsen-Riat was booked Friday into the Thurston County Jail for investigation of third-degree assault, domestic violence, and second-degree malicious mischief. A judge released the 33-year-old woman on her own recognizance.
The Olympian newspaper reported that court documents said that on Jan. 1, the man was using a 220-volt table saw when he received the shock, knocking him to the ground. Thurston County sheriff's deputies said the man did not need to go to a hospital. In the documents, deputies said the woman told them she had reversed the wires on his power tools because she was angry he was leaving.
Via: Access Atlanta
And I thought my inchoate impulses for minor ground mods on certain stages were over the line
The new Hendrix disc hits the racks soon. The human being dies, but the corporation lives on.
It's not often that a woman will say that her husband gave her a gigantic pile of crap for her birthday - and she loved it. But Carole Kleis isn't just any woman - she's the wife of a farmer, and a little natural fertilizer doesn't bother her a bit, even if this particular usage is rather unusual.
It took Dick Kleis of Zwingle, Iowa, about three hours to spell out 'HAP B DAY LUV U' in 120,000 pounds of manure.
Mirrored: Presurfer
I know, but people who didn't grow up on farms just don't get it.
Here's a chance to compare journalism to the original subject matter. The first is Michael Agger's (follow my tweets / bought to you buy / Molly Ringwald climbs the stairs) review on Slate, the second is a piece of Jaron Lanier's original materal. Both men invent things, but one is more useful than the other.
Now that that's out of the way, the usual Sunday round-up can go forward.
New decade, time to get something done.
Click to enlarge
Looking at this chart, you can see the Great Attractor slightly below the plane of the Milky Way (follow the blue arrow). Now, look above it. Do you see something called the Shapley Concentration (yellow arrow)? It’s behind the Great Attractor, and much further out. It’s also what we’re being drawn toward.
I hear gasps of dismay. In 2005, X-ray surveys in the “Zone of Avoidance” (the area behind the Milky Way which we normally can’t study very well) confirmed that it was the Shapley Concentration we were being pulled toward, not the Great Attractor. In all fairness, it was the Great Attractor and its gravity anomaly which caused scientists to study the area so closely, only to rediscover this huge concentration behind it.
The Shapley Concentration is a massive overdensity in the constellation of Centaurus. It is the largest concentration of matter in the observable universe. Astronomers have long known the Milky Way is moving toward the constellation Centaurus, and at quite a respectable 1.4 million miles per hour. Many thought the pull was the Great Attractor, but with the use of X-rays to peer beyond the Milky Way’s dust, they learned the Great Attractor didn’t have nearly the matter they had originally thought. They also got a good look at the Shapley Concentration, and saw that it did have the matter. As a matter of fact, the Great Attractor is being pulled toward the Shapley Concentration.
Containing many thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way, and about 650 Mly away (that’s million light years), the Shapley Concentration is a rare supermassive cluster of many galaxies. We are being drawn inexorably toward it, and will one day become a part of the cluster ourselves.Oh, not “us” as in you and me… I mean “us” as in this galaxy. Humanity will be long gone by then, extinct on a planet no longer able to support life as we know it. In fact, we’ll probably run into Andromeda long before we become a bug on the windshield of the Shapley Concentration.
Mirrored from: Tom's Astronomy Blog
(Does this mean the Xeelee were in the wrong spot to build their Great Ring?)
When architecture firm Haugen/Zohar Arkitekter was commissioned by the municipality of Trondheim, Norway, to build an outdoor project for a kindergarten, the company came up with this.
Via: Neatorama
I just finished Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright. It's a paen to and continuation of A.E.van Vogt's late 40's World of Null-A. It was o.k. in the sense that Wright had the predilections and techno-babble of the golden age down, and it was fun pretending to be a fifth grader sneaking a peak at something Mom thought might be too mature for me. On the other hand, he committed the cardinal sin of fiction writing, he neglected to tell a story. Concantinating a series of descriptions, interspersed with the ubermensch pausing to to lecture himself about how manly semantic philosophy is really lex naturalis, just doesn't feed the ox. Wright hit the pulp tone perfectly, but his content and rhythm seemed to be from a fix-up.
The Gingko trees around the corner have turned and are dropping fruit. Now I know why they aren't a more popular planting. The fruit is medium size and very soft. The flesh has the same color as the inside of a used diaper and smells like ... what the diaper is designed to hold. Beautiful most of the year, extremely user unfriendly for a few weeks.
February 2010 is when the Chinese Year of the Tiger starts, but alarming news about the world’s tiger population might mean that by 2022, the next time the Year of the Tiger rolls around, there might not be any left. ...more
Via: Dangerous Minds
We will leave aside (because, on this happy occasion, we can) NATO’s Turkey. We will leave aside the EU’s Cyprus. We will leave aside Lebanon. We will leave aside Iran, where, because they can, they voted against the instructions of the BBC, so the ballot must have been rigged. We will leave aside the Palestinian Territories, because they don’t exist. No, we need concern ourselves with none of those. Rather, if Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, then what the hell was the “liberation” of Iraq all about?
By; David Lindsay, Post Right
Happy New Year. Rather than indulging in the media-centric grinching about the last decade, I'll just note that there is some room for improvement. Now's as good time as the next.
