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.: 2003 --> july
july
:: Unbelievable: Presidential candidate Howard Dean raised over $800,000 on Monday in online donations as his staff tracked it on his weblog. The Washington Post notes that he's using the Web in lots of smart ways [annoying free registration required]: for example, organizing campaign mini-rallies using Meetup.com. Whether or not he wins the race, he may already have assured his position as the first Internet candidate.
'We have the largest grass-roots organization in America right now, and we are going to try to utilize it,' said Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. 'If television took the grass roots out of politics, the Internet will put it back in.'
Is that possible? We'll have to wait and see.
Despite Nicholas Confessore and Paul Krugman's [NY Times: pockeet, password: pockeet] sobering warnings that the United States is effectively becoming a one-party state, I would remind you that this can only happen with our compliance. Each of us has a vote--if we choose to exercise it. If you are not registered to vote, take the time to do it this week. We can take this country back, we just need to decide we want it.
[ 07/02/03 ]
:: Please allow me to recommend Chuck's recipe for authentic New Orleans Red Beans and Rice. I made the vegetarian version (omitting a few ingredients I didn't have on hand and adding a generous portion of tamari) and the result was world-class. Based on this outstanding result, I'm eager to try his other recipes. Don't miss his tremendous page of recommended cookbooks. Hey, what do you expect from a guy whose domain is called 'gumbopages'?
[ 07/02/03 ]
:: The vegetarian version of Chuck's Red Beans calls for a teaspoon of liquid smoke. Normally, I would have skipped such an artificial-sounding ingredient, but I had just read the Cook's Illustrated liquid smoke taste test, where I learned that liquid smoke is just what it says it is: smoke that is collected, liquified, and then mixed with water (sometimes with other flavoring additions). (Wright's Hickory Liquid Smoke won the taste test, by the way. It is made of water and natural hickory smoke concentrate--nothing else.)
Liquid smoke is a natural food! And boy, is a dab of it going to be good in my split pea soup!
[ 07/02/03 ]
:: A terrific list of the 50 Best Magazines [slithy popup!]. I know surprisingly more of these publications than I would have guessed (thanks, Web!), and based on those, this list is top-notch. The number one magazine? Oh my, yes:
1) Cook's Illustrated. The measure of a magazine is how well it covers its chosen field, and in that regard, Cook's is a gem, notable both for the quality of its recipes, for its testing of kitchen gadgets and for the obsessiveness of its recipe testing [...]. Even if you're not a foodie, this magazine's tart, skeptical prose is well worth reading, and its product reviews are as trustworthy as can be, given its exhaustive testing and the fact that it doesn't take any ads.
(via anil's daily links)
[ 07/02/03 ]
So this is the world we're living in. It's one in which Roquefort- producing anti-globalisation campaigner Jose Bove is arrested with ludicrous force by 80 French police officers at his home for damaging a field of GM crops, even though he has a record of coming along peacefully when taken into custody. It's also one in which what Bove has called la malbouffe americaine (foul American junk food) is hymned in song by idiots and bought in tens of thousands by British children - the fattest and most ill- nourished children in western Europe. It's one in which the government, lamentably, hasn't authorised dawn raids on all households owning this single, even though that might be thoroughly justifiable in terms of improving the nation's health. Certainly more justifiable than descending in a heavy-handed manner on a lovable cheese-making surrender monkey.
[ 07/02/03 ]
:: Fancy food. It's a world of Japanese hotdog fun. And you thought the Octodog was absurd. (from the lizard, natch!)
[ 07/02/03 ]
:: I'm on vacation for a week. If I have time, I'll toss up a few links. Otherwise, enjoy the fine purveyors listed on my portal page and I'll see you in a week.
[ 07/05/03 ]
:: Well, this is pretty much an oxymoron, isn't it? Microsoft wins Homeland Security contract. As long as they're not working on securing our computer systems, maybe it will be all right.
[ 07/17/03 ]
:: A old In Context article by Amy Dacyczyn They Call Me the Frugal Zealot. She is, too. I am currently reading her second book (now available with books one and three as The Complete Tightwad Gazette). It's great fun, but Ms. Dacyczyn really is quite mad--believe me, reusing foil is just the tip of the iceberg. She translates all of her money-saving tips into an hourly wage ('if it takes you 5 minutes and you save $3.20, that's like making $38.40 an hour.') and gains much more pleasure from these savings than I think I ever would. On the other hand, she and her husband managed to save 43% of their gross income, and buy a house on one modest income, so you make the call.
This article is just one from the Summer 1990 issue, What Is Enough?, which also includes this lovely article by Eknath Easwaran, The Lesson Of The Hummingbird.
Just as what Gandhi calls 'science with humanity' is not solely the concern of those who wear white coats and work in laboratories, the ultimate responsibility for commerce with morality does not fall only on multinational corporations or governments. Recently, Time magazine, in an editorial that declared Earth the Planet of the Year, said, 'No attempt to protect the environment will be successful in the long run unless ordinary people - the California housewife, the Mexican peasant, the Soviet factory worker, the Chinese farmer - are willing to adjust their life- styles. Our wasteful, careless ways must become a thing of the past.'
As far as I am concerned, this has the potential to become a very promising situation. If it were up to bureaucracies and boards of directors to determine our fate, it would be far more difficult to change things. But it is not up to them. It is up to us. In matters of commerce and the environment, we are the President, the Supreme Court, and the Congress. We decide what to buy and what to ban, what to support and what to discourage.
[ 07/17/03 ]
:: In Las Vegas, men can now arrange to hunt naked women with paintball guns. They call it Hunting for Bambi.
Evanthes shot one of the women and says, 'I got the one with the biggest rack.'
Or can they? Snopes is skeptical. If it is an urban legend, it's gaining momentum.
This article from a humor zine tattoo artist inking insulting Japanese slogans on unsuspecting customers turns out to be a variation on a known urban legend, too. Dead bodies in smelly hotel rooms, unfortunately, turns out to be true. (thanks, lizard, sebastian, and jim!)
[ 07/17/03 ]
:: According to this 1996 article from Science News Online, spraying surfaces with hydrogen peroxide then white vinegar is more effective at killing germs than chlorine bleach and commercial kitchen cleaners! This site warns to be sure to use food grade hydrogen peroxide, as commercially available hydrogen peroxide may contain other chemicals.
It seems these two substances (used separately) are the first choice for removing many stains, too.
[ 07/17/03 ]
:: Perhaps my favorite short review yet: 'Not so much a 'how to' book as it is a 'how to do it well' book, the Weblog Handbook is a style guide for the web.'
[ 07/17/03 ]
:: I've been joking for years that, thanks to my computer, I have Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder. It seems I've been right.
In response to this article, Cory Doctorow says:
When do we stop lamenting a change like this and start looking for the value of the new trend? When do we start examining the upsides of fluid and multifarious attention, rather than popping off reactionary warnings about the dangers of being 'addicted' to communications? When do we get to consider the benefits of living with one foot in the Net and the other in meatspace?
Cory is right about one thing: rejecting new technologies and modes of thinking simply because they are different from the old is ridiculous--and a losing battle, to boot. I remember a member of a media literacy mailing list whose objection to Channel One was that children in school should be reading, not watching TV. He had, obviously, missed the entire point of media literacy, which is to teach people to critically evaluate--to read--film and video in the same way we teach them to critically evaluate the written word.
Pre-literate societies primarily rely on oral representations to learn and order the world. I'll wager no one reading this can watch a Shakespeare play and understand it as readily as if they were to carefully read it instead. We have lost the ability to process complex information aurally, but we have gained a great deal with our reliance on the written word, and the modes of thinking it promotes.
We are moving into a post-literate society, where pattern-recognition will replace the linear thinking of the current period. This doesn't require a rejection of reading as a mode of understanding--pre-literate Greece, after all, gave us the basis for our current mode of thought.
At high dosages, 'always on' may become counter-productive but at least it's easy to correct. The Web and email combine to create the biggest distraction machine ever invented. (I've long predicted that in the near future, being unplugged will be the status symbol. As our environments become increasingly frenetic, uncluttered time and space will be a luxury few can arrange.)
I may tell myself that I'm checking my email while an idea 'percolates' but what I'm really doing, 100% of the time, is just putting off the hard work of focusing on a problem. When I really need to work, I unplug myself from the network, but that doesn't address the underlying problem: continuous partial attention.
Though not as severe as some of the people described in this article, I have noticed my attention span diminishing, or rather becoming quite unreliable, and it is a problem. Sometimes I can work on a project for hours, but other times I sit down to read and, after a few paragraphs, find myself getting up to do something else before continuing to another page. I'm continually starting something and then wandering off to do something else without realizing it. I often come back into a room to discover a half-completed task. This isn't productive multi-tasking, it's the equivalent of walking around in a daze, and it's no good.
I blame the Internet--with a million things just a screen away, I've trained my monkey brain always to be thinking of two things at once. That's useful in certain situations, but it's not ideal most of the time. It's not a matter of preferring one 'mode' to another. I would rather add a tool to my bag of tricks than replace a very useful one for one that is useful in a different way.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: The rice comparison chart.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Southwest Southeast Airlines has announced it will begin recording passengers inflight at all times, and that they will retain these videotapes for 10 years. I really don't have a problem with them videotaping and retaining until the crew have filed a flight report noting whether or not there were any 'dry-run-looking' passengers on board. With these tapes, an expert could evaluate whether or not the crew's suspicions were warranted, and the airline could alert authorities if need be. But then they should be destroyed. Such a program should be a deterrent, not a record of anyone's activities. (thanks, jim!--and mike, your email keeps bouncing--thanks for the correction.)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: A survey of URL-shortening sites. (thanks, lizard!)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: News and Media Resources.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Does this work?
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: McGyver Cubans: Cubans Fashion Raft From Pickup Truck. (thanks, lizard!)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Why editors are invaluable:
We suggest that whenever anyone sits down to write he should imagine a crowd of his prospective readers...looking over his shoulder. They will be asking such questions as 'What does this sentence mean?' 'Why do you trouble to tell me that again?' 'Why have you chosen such a ridiculous metaphor?' 'Must I really read this long, limping sentence?' 'Haven't you got your ideas muddled here?'. By anticipating and listing as many questions of this sort as possible, the writer will discover certain tests of intelligibility to which he may regularly submit his work before he sends it off to the printer. [...]
There is a hasty way of writing which is a counterpart to the hasty way of reading. It is becoming more common every year and raising less and less protest.... The greater the haste in which the draft is written, the closer it will come to ordinary conversational style; and it will therefore have a certain intimate charm of expression.... But it is likely to contain repetition, contradictions, muddled sequences of ideas, dropped threads, hastily chosen phrases, relevancies.... And phrases that seem good enough to him in his haste--useful stand-ins for the star phrases he could not quite command--will often not only fail to convey a particular meaning to the reader but will make a blank of the whole passage. [...]
from The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves & Alan Hodge
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: When I hear unemployment figures, I always want some context: Is that a historical high, or just higher than it was last year? CNN's How bad is the jobless rate? offers that context and suggests that historical jobless standards have been obsoleted by the New Economy--which should support a much higher rate of employment.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Cornell University's Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History is publishing online full texts of hundreds of the most important books in their collection.
Home Economists in early 20th century America had a major role in the Progressive Era, the development of the welfare state, the triumph of modern hygiene and scientific medicine, the application of scientific research in a number of industries, and the popularization of important research on child development, family health, and family economics. What other group of American women did so much, all over the country, and got so little credit? ... We must do everything we can to preserve and organize records and materials from this important female ghetto.
(via boing boing)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Blizg connects weblogs according to their metadata.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: MacGyver Cubans: Cubans Fashion Raft From Pickup Truck. (thanks, sebastian!)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Why editors are invaluable:
We suggest that whenever anyone sits down to write he should imagine a crowd of his prospective readers...looking over his shoulder. They will be asking such questions as 'What does this sentence mean?' 'Why do you trouble to tell me that again?' 'Why have you chosen such a ridiculous metaphor?' 'Must I really read this long, limping sentence?' 'Haven't you got your ideas muddled here?'. By anticipating and listing as many questions of this sort as possible, the writer will discover certain tests of intelligibility to which he may regularly submit his work before he sends it off to the printer. [...]
There is a hasty way of writing which is a counterpart to the hasty way of reading. It is becoming more common every year and raising less and less protest.... The greater the haste in which the draft is written, the closer it will come to ordinary conversational style; and it will therefore have a certain intimate charm of expression.... But it is likely to contain repetition, contradictions, muddled sequences of ideas, dropped threads, hastily chosen phrases, irrelevancies.... And phrases that seem good enough to him in his haste--useful stand-ins for the star phrases he could not quite command--will often not only fail to convey a particular meaning to the reader but will make a blank of the whole passage. [...]
from The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves & Alan Hodge
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: When I hear unemployment figures, I always want some context: Is that a historical high, or just higher than it was last year? CNN's How bad is the jobless rate? offers that context and suggests that historical jobless standards have been obsoleted by the New Economy--which should support a much higher rate of employment.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Cornell University's Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History is publishing online full texts of hundreds of the most important books in their collection.
Home Economists in early 20th century America had a major role in the Progressive Era, the development of the welfare state, the triumph of modern hygiene and scientific medicine, the application of scientific research in a number of industries, and the popularization of important research on child development, family health, and family economics. What other group of American women did so much, all over the country, and got so little credit? ... We must do everything we can to preserve and organize records and materials from this important female ghetto.
(via boing boing)
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: Blizg connects weblogs according to their metadata.
[ 07/21/03 ]
:: All hail the awesomeness that is Snopes: Hunting Bambi was a scam.
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: The inventor in the garage lives! A self-taught father and son team have designed and built an electric car that goes 130 mph and 80 miles on a 3-hour charge.
For perspective, here's what went into a much ballyhooed pledge by the U.S. government and American motor companies to develop an 80- mile-per-gallon Supercar by 2004: a decade of political squabbling, $1.5 billion in taxpayer money, years of foot dragging by the Big Three automakers, constant engineering. In the end, Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler each built a 72- to 80-miles-per-gallon, diesel-electric hybrid concept car. [...]
Compared to that, creating the Tango was quick, cheap and clean. In 1998, Rick and Bryan took their $20,000 profit from selling the boat and haunted junkyards and used-car lots buying parts. In Seattle, they found a 1968 Fiat 850 Spyder that had been converted to electric, trailered it home to Spokane and tore it apart in their garage. Within two months, they'd built a new frame, mounted wheels, brakes and steering components and rolled the chassis down the street, neighbor kids chasing alongside. By winter they had a drivable car, and by fall, they were racing it on autocross tracks.
Worth reading just for the father's life story. Bonus quote:
Specialized cars such as the Tango could ease jams, make better use of roads and give commuters more options, says William Garrison, UC Berkeley professor emeritus and co-author of Tomorrow's Transportation. 'People want variety.... They don't want people telling them what to do. We wealthy people with bleeding hearts say we need mass transit for the poor. The hell with that. The poor need money. If they had money, they wouldn't take transit.'
For more information about these vehicles, go to Commuter Cars. (via mefi)
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: Feathers fly as Seattle considers supporting pre-kindergarten programs with an espresso tax. Now shouldn't this be an easy sell to a bunch of caffeine-sucking liberals? On the other hand, espresso is one luxury that is affordable even for those with lower incomes. How about an additional tobacco tax, instead? Some people will reduce their usage, while most people will just pony up. (thanks, kevin!)
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: Hormone therapy's rise and fall is the story of incompetent medicine practiced on a nearly universal scale. Take charge of your health. If you're on the Web you have access to everything from medical journals to conspiracy theories. Do some research, make some printouts, and require your doctor to justify every drug and treatment you have questions about. (via fmh)
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: Want to lose weight? Add fiber to feel fuller. [slithy pop-up!]
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: Understanding Eggs: Cage Free, Free Range, Organic. Honestly, this has become the most difficult grocery shopping decision I make. (via dangerousmeta)
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: A nutritional comparison of wheat flour to go with the nutritional comparison of rice. Also, a nutritional comparison of grains. Go forth and be informed.
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: I like this feature! c|net offers a 'get the big picture' link that takes you from a news story to a page of related stories. Very nice. (BTW, good news on the Verisign lawsuit, as well.)
[ 07/28/03 ]
:: Male status seeking: apparently biological.
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: An administration of certifiable sociopaths:
'I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country,' [Wolfowitz] said.
Next up: discarding that pesky rule of law. Oh, wait!
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: US AIDS cases are on the rise:
The number of newly diagnosed cases of HIV rose in the United States in 2002 for the first time in a decade, a disturbing turnaround that health officials say reflects growing complacency about the dangers of AIDS.
Remember, this is still a deadly disease, and an easy one to prevent. Use a condom and don't share needles. Getting AIDS now would be dumb--don't let it happen to you.
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: Nation Master is a site that transforms national statistics into interesting facts, enlightening graphs, and fascinating factoids.
If you don't arrive with any specific questions, NationMaster offers an assortment of pre-selected Top Graphs, linking surfers directly to such tidbits as Christmas Island's tally of 1.3 televisions for each citizen, or the Vatican's tax revenues of $232,888.89 per person. For those with a general field of interest, selected Categories (Crime, Economy, Sports) permit topical browsing. Every page is topped with one in a series of rotating 'Factoids,' and for those primarily on a trivia quest, the best place to start is the full Factoids collection at the Interesting Facts page.
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: Whattaya think? Yoga for toddlers. Well, maybe not, but what about for older children, instead of or in addition to competitive sports?
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: Making Vinegar from the best-named wine site ever, the Gang of Pour. How to make Vinegar from Winemaker magazine, and more vinegar links.
[ 07/30/03 ]
:: Enjoy your last weeks of summer! 2003 author's reading lists and 2002 summer lists. (via electicat)
[ 07/30/03 ]