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November 10, 2009 CBS David Letterman
Google plans to release a beta version of its Chrome browser in early December. How does the net know this? A mailing list discussion shows off the latest implementation of extensions in Chrome, already working on the latest Windows and Mac builds of Chromium, but not in the rough Mac test builds. Nick Baum urges extension makers to update their wares to meet the new look, so they'll have more time to "polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December." Isn't open-source development neat? [Google Groups via CNET]
Grocery stores are full of deals involving two-for-one, 30 percent more, family sizes, and other bulk deals. None of that helps, though, if the food goes to waste. The Washington Post suggests farmers' markets, and creativity, for single cooks.
Photo by Ed Yourdon.
The article is framed around a farmers' market tour with Judith Jones, the literary agent who rescued both The Diary of Anne Frank and Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking. She's written a new book about cooking for one, and, from experience, suggests community markets, farmer stands, and wherever else you can get up close and personal with purveyors as a way around food waste:
For singles, one of the best things about farmers markets is that so much of the produce and other products is sold loose or individually: no need to buy a whole bag of spinach when you can just scoop up however many leaves you'd like ...
... Carrots? If you find yourself in possession of a bunch when you need just one, roast the remainder — this goes for all sorts of vegetables — and then use them throughout the week: in hashes, in salads, over pasta, in soups or even as a vegetarian roll-up sandwich with a little dressing.
The article's got a few great recipes for using good pork, and a few other inspirational moments. What's the best food-saving move you've pulled off in your kitchen? Swap the stories in the comments.
This week’s collaboration with the What is it? Blog brings us this unusual scale. It has a very specific function – can you guess what it is used to weigh?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guesses as you’d like. Please post no URL or web links – doing so will forfeit your winnings.
Two prizes this week: the first correct guess and the funniest but ultimately incorrect guess will win a cool ice tray from the Neatorama Shop.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Vagabond Scholar: A series of Armistice Day posts, well worth the time.
Earth-Bound Misfit: And the military has yet another problem.
Speaking as a woman writer and film-maker, I laugh and scream simultaneously when I hear national publications imply that women can't write and women can't make films.
Stupak, Stupak, Stupak, Stupak.
Pour Me Coffee: Good news from the WH Visitor Logs! But did they search for Stupak?
Mike's away, guest-posted by Blue Gal (Did somebody say Stupak?)
Tonight, I'm launching my latest novel, Makers in Canada, at the excellent Toronto sf reference library, the Merril Collection, at 239 College St. (3rd floor), east of Spadina. The event starts at 7PM, and I'll be doing a reading, taking questions, and signing books.
Books are being sold by Bakka Phoenix, and if you can't make it tonight, they're happy to take your pre-orders for signed, personalized copies -- I'll sign them tonight and they'll ship them out right away. They're at +1 416 963 9993 or inquiries@ bakkaphoenixbooks. com.
Hope to see you there!
Mike LaVigne, IT director, said the number of people who access the Internet using the connection varies widely, from perhaps a dozen people a day to 100 during busy times such as First Fridays and the Coshocton Canal Festival.Illegal movie download forces shutdown of free Wi-Fi (Thanks, Dan!)It's used by Coshocton County Sheriff's deputies who can park in the 300 block and complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle. Out-of-town business people can park and use their laptops to make connections.
During festival times, vendors find it a convenience to check the status of credit cards being used to make purchases, LaVigne said.
Because it's a single address used by many people, it's difficult to tell who made the illegal download, although the county plans to investigate the matter .
Diesel Sweeties' R. Stevens and Ariana Osborne are offering this wordy Venn diagram shirt showing the bittersweet territory between happiness and sadness for $18-19, and taking pre-orders now.
(Happy()Sad) Diagram Shirt
(via Warren Ellis)
The last day on earth
(via JWZ)
Matrox M9188 PCIe x16 (via Red Ferret)
The Matrox M9188 PCIe x16 multi-display Octal graphics card addresses the need to visualize large amounts of data at once in order to effectively make decisions. The latest offering from the M-Series family is the world's first single-slot PCIe x16 octal card, featuring the ability to support both DisplayPort and DVI Single-Link outputs to ensure wide compatibility with today's monitors. With 2 GB of memory and advanced desktop management features, such as independent or stretched desktop modes, the M9188 drives energy, transportation, process control, financial trading, and other mission-critical environments with extraordinary performance.
As Alice at Wonderlandblog points out, it's rare to see official merch as good as these Bioshock 2 EVE Hypos -- you usually have to find some fetishistic fan art. But this is an actual in-store tchotchke, and it's a corker.
Kim Stanley Robinson: science fiction's realist (Thanks, Robert!)What he came up with was three different temporal dimensions - the first moving very fast, at the speed of light, the second very slow and "vibrating slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble", the third - antichronos - in reverse. We experience them as one, creating a three-way interference pattern, which accounts for sensations such as foresight, déjà vu, nostalgia and precognition. The compound nature of time, Robinson writes, "creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming". He's shown the novel to people who are "much more serious about the time travel stuff" and they're "having a blast". "They immediately map my three strands of time onto their system. They think I've partially discovered the real thing," he says gleefully...
So Galileo makes his telescope. He sees the Seven Sisters constellation, surrounded by "thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places ... No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment". He discovers Jupiter's four moons. He studies acceleration and motion. He observes sunspots. He frequently, frequently rings "like a struck bell" as his genius strikes: "Here it was, the truth of the situation - the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun ... Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang." He stamps on the ground after he is tried by the Inquisition for supporting Copernicanism: "'It still moves!' he said. 'Eppur si muove!'"
Why are men so cheap? Blame testosterone:
"Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy," says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California [...] To make this case, Redwine and her colleague Paul Zak, at the Claremont Graduate University in California, gave a testosterone-containing gel to 25 male university students, and then tested their generosity.
The students then played a simple economic game with another participant via a computer. One volunteer is tasked with splitting $10 with another volunteer in any way he likes. The other volunteer either accepts the offer or rejects it as unfair, in which case no one gets any money. Each volunteer played this game in both roles, on and off the testosterone gel.
Overall, the testosterone cream caused a 27 per cent reduction in the generosity of the offers, from averages of $2.15 to $1.57, Redwine and Zak found.
The article also described how oxytocin, the so-called cuddle chemical, can actually boost generosity: Link
Think that the ending of Humpty Dumpty is too harsh for little children? Change it! That’s what the BBC’s CBeebies programme Something Special did:
Instead of being unable to ‘put Humpty together again’, the new version claimed all the King’s horses and all the King’s men ‘made Humpty happy again’. [...]
The Something Special show, presented by Justin Fletcher, is aimed at children with learning difficulties but is popular with all children under the age of five.
The BBC insisted the nursery rhyme was not modified due to its target audience and said it had only been changed for ‘creative’ purposes.
Was it political correctness or a sensible attempt to make the nursery rhyme more cheerful for kids? Link
"We asked ourselves the question of whether this standard is sufficient to have reliable wiretapping," said Micah Sherr, a post-doctoral researcher at the university and one of the paper's co-authors. Eventually they were able to develop some proof-of-concept attacks that would disrupt devices. According to Sherr, the standard "really didn't consider the case of a wiretap subject who is trying to thwart or confuse the wiretap itself."How to Deny Service to a Federal Wiretap (Thanks, Adam!)It turns out that the standard sets aside very little bandwidth -- 64K bits per second -- for keeping track of information about phone calls being made on the tapped line. When a wire tap is on, the switch is supposed to set up a 64Kbps Call Data Channel to send this information between the telco and the law enforcement agency doing the wiretap. Normally this channel has more than enough bandwidth for the whole system to work, but if someone tries to flood it with information by making dozens of SMS messages or VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone calls simultaneously, the channel could be overwhelmed and simply drop network traffic.
That means that law enforcement could lose records of who was called and when, and possibly miss entire call recordings as well, Sherr said.
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