what the shell?

I’ve been making pancakes for Maggie on a regular basis for months. The packaged gluten-free mix in the store makes ‘cakes that are good. Almost as good as the ones made from buckwheat that you personally grind into flour in the back yard, mix with freshly squeezed milk from an organic virgin goat, and eggs from free-range, naturally-cloned chickens; chickens who were raised on fire-roasted corn, high altitude glacier water from the Alps, and earthworms fresh from the compost bin. Yes, the packaged mix is that good.

But tonight Maggie said the pancakes were a little crunchy. They are usually a little crunchy, she said, but tonight they were too crunchy. I took them back and tried ‘em. Dang if there wasn’t a tiny piece of eggshell in almost every bite. For months I’ve been busting those chicken ovoids over the mixing bowl and dumping shell pieces in there. She never told me. How embarrassing.

I never claimed to be much of a cook, but now I must get down to basics and learn how to break an egg. I went to Wikihow and looked this up:

“NEVER crack eggs directly into the bowl that you are building your recipe in. Always crack eggs into a separate bowl first just in case you need to remove any bits of shell before transferring the eggs to the bowl you are working in.” Whoops.

Wikihow also says that when you start, “Grasp the egg in your dominant hand.” That’s a problem already. Neither of my hands dominate. Both are pacifists. My left one likes to write, my right one likes to do sports. It’s a good trade off. They both take turns with computer mousing, though my left likes it better. If one hand gets a little uppity, I slap it with the other one. We call that peace through ambidexterity.

i can read, can’t i?

Actually, I don’t have time for much reading. I bought a few books anyway and hope to squeeze them in. Yeah, I buy books instead of going to the library. That’s especially important when it might take me months to read one. It’s good for the book industry, bad for the trees. Someday I’ll get an e-reader. Right now the Kindle seems kind of pricey. I’m waiting for a cheap, high-quality e-book reader. A $100 Kindle. I think prices will come down in a few years. Then I won’t look back. For now, in paper:

59 Seconds, by Richard Wiseman. I already wrote about this one.
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The memoir of a fearless woman who grew up in strict Muslim family in Somalia. She came to Europe to escape an arranged marriage, earned a college degree, and became a member of the Dutch parliament. Incredibly, she openly denounces Islam and its treatment of women, ignoring the danger of doing so for the sake of speaking out and hopefully alleviating some of the horror perpetrated on women in the name of god.
Into the Cool, by Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan. It’s about the second law of thermodynamics. How does the flow of energy from a concentrated state to an equilibrium underlie evolution, ecology, economics, and just about everything else? If I can understand this book, I’ll get their hypothesis on this subject. I’m dubious about theories that try to explain everything, but I think if nothing else, I’ll see the world from a different perspective after reading this.
House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds. A science fiction book that attempts to take the reader 6 1/2 million years into the future. It’s a world in which humans and post-humans have slowly spread throughout the galaxy (at sub-light speeds–I like an SF novel with no warp drives and wormholes). It’s a strange time in which, among other things, the Andromeda galaxy seems to have “disappeared” and no one knows why.

It may be 6 1/2 million years before I get all these read, at my 20 minutes per day allotment.

this summer: metropolis

Seattle Bus Finder – a promising Android app

Open Seattle Bus Finder, enter the bus route that you want to track, and the GPS function actually pinpoints where the buses are at that very moment. I stand at the bus stop for the #18, for example, look at the app and see a map with my current location at the center. On the map I see that the 18 is just four blocks from where I’m standing and heading my way. Cute little bus icon. All is revealed. The bus arrives shortly thereafter. I love this.

The next time I use it, however, the map shows no buses in my vicinity. I look forward to a long wait. But to my surprise the bus arrives at that very moment and there’s no sign of it on my app map. I hate this.

I don’t know if the inconsistent performance has to do with unreliable performance of the GPS on the bus, in my phone, in the sky, or what. The app is free so I have nothing more to say except that I hope the next upgrade can deal with this. If it worked consistently, I’d definitely pay for this app. I could reliably stand on my front porch and know whether I can stroll to the bus stop or whether I should run.

here goes nothing: the 10:23 campaign

About seven hours from now a bunch of folks in England, and more in Australia and other parts of the world are going to overdose. Each one is going to swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic medicine to demonstrate that there is literally nothing in homeopathic remedies. That’s something James “The Amazing” Randi has done in the past to great effect. He consumes a bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills on stage, but…surprise…an hour later he’s still standing. Not even drowsy.

What’s the point? In particular, these activists want to call attention to the Boots pharmacy chain in England. It sells homeopathic meds right along with actual medications. Boots has a strong presence and good reputation in the UK. The group of skeptics hope to shame them into stop profiting by selling nothing-pills and nothing-liquids to a gullible public. They also want to help raise awareness that spending money on this stuff is a complete waste.

In case anyone reading this isn’t aware–homeopathic remedies take a small amount of material and dilute it in water until there are no molecules of the original substance left. Oh yeah, and they vigorously shake the container of water, which causes the water to magically “remember” what was in there. Then they put a drop of the plain water on a sugar pill and sell it as if it were medicine.

It’s magic! And every decent study that’s ever been done shows no effect beyond placebo. I suggest either joining this skeptics campaign or go into the homeopathic medicine business, because the profit margin for selling nothing has got to be huge!

useless and insane

Category: Emergency aid sent to Haiti

1. Scientologists sent (along with some actual aid) ministers who would perform “assists” for stricken Haitians. An “assist” seems to consist of touching the person being treated, as which point vaguely defined magical healing is supposed to occur. I will gladly retract this condemnation if and when major medical journals publish peer-reviewed, double-blinded research showing definitive healing benefits from this technique. My current belief is that treating someone who has shattered bones and/or missing family members with an “assist” is obscenely cruel and nonsensical.

2. A religious organization in New Mexico sent 600 solar-powered “talking Bibles.” The machines emit audio Bible verses spoken in Haitian Creole. Imagine if they had used an equivalent amount of money, time, and effort to send food, or to give money to Doctors Without Borders. Imagine, in other words, that they had even one functioning brain cell among them.

out with the gravitons

Can someone explain this new attempt to explain gravity to me? Here are some edited excerpts from the article:

Gravitational attraction could be the result of the way information about material objects is organized in space.

Consider the concept of fluidity in water. Individual molecules have no fluidity, but collectively they do. Similarly, the force of gravity is not something ingrained in matter itself. It is an extra physical effect, emerging from the interplay of mass, time, and space.

This explanation uses the holographic principle to consider what is happening to a small mass at a certain distance from a bigger mass, say a star or a planet. Moving the small mass a little means changing the information content, or entropy, of a hypothetical holographic surface between both masses. This change of information is linked to a change in the energy of the system.

Then, using statistics to consider all possible movements of the small mass and the energy changes involved, we find movements toward the bigger mass are thermodynamically more likely than others. This effect can be seen as a net force pulling both masses together. Physicists call this an entropic force, as it originates in the most likely changes in information content.

This is one of those items that my poor brain tries to make sense of, but can’t really pull it off. Maybe it’s not possible to do justice to this without a deep mathematical background, but I would love to comprehend this, if only in a very general way. This could be an incredible step forward in our understanding of the universe (if it really pans out), but I may be on the sidelines, wondering what the heck physicists are talking about.

high school big shot

Spoiler alert–Important plot details revealed
“High School Big Shot” (1959). Betty, high school vixen, wants money and lots of it. She romances both a small time hoodlum and a lonely smart kid when it suits her purposes. She gets both boys mixed up in a high-stakes robbery and everyone ends up either dead or in prison.  The end. By the way, the smart kid’s dad is a depressed alcoholic who hangs himself while the kid is out trying to pull off the heist. Nice, eh? The promo picture gives you a hint about what happens to Betty. I say avoid this one when it comes to your local drive-in theater.