Buying a stamp at the post office to mail a sympathy card. They give me one reading “Celebrate!” Uh, no, let’s maybe try a different one.
“I’m in love with Massachusetts…” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDJShMk-r88
This is such an amazing ripoff it’s actually hilarious. http://tinyurl.com/yfnbczd
Added use.typekit.com to my Adblock blacklist. Maybe it’s just my work machine, but the typefaces come out horribly aliased.
Vintage made-in-USA Florsheim Imperial gunboats. You kind of feel like you could jackhammer through the sidewalk just by running in place.
Truffle oil may be a culinary cliché at this point, but it sure does nice things for a bowl of pasta with mushrooms and shallots.
I need some sort of a Price Is Right fail-horns plus Nelson Muntz “ha ha” dance remix right now. http://tinyurl.com/ydfqcjn
Bought a bag of Bob’s Red Mill steel-cut oats at Hannaford. Could be a nice Sunday breakfast thing with Québécois beurre d’érable.
It actually seemed weird this morning that the sun was out, after the last couple months of near-continuous gray dampness.
Netflix this evening: Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch. That one’s going to take some time to digest.
Israeli couscous with various Greek flavors: oil-cured black olives, roasted red peppers, spinach, feta cheese, and an olive oil and red wine vinegar dressing. It’s more of a pastiche than an authentic recipe, but it didn’t taste bad.
From the August 12 game between the Giants and the Dodgers. Shot from the club-level deck in between the lower seating bowl and the big upper tier. For the first seven innings or so of this game, we were in club-level seats closer to the left field foul pole, with the sun beating down in an uncharacteristically torrid manner for August in San Francisco. Later on, as the ushers grew a bit more lax, we moved into the shady area closer to third base.
The apparent slight curvature of the iron beam on the left is due to barrel distortion in my camera lens, but the leaning window on the right is not an optical effect.
An old photo from my last trip to Montreal: Frankensteinian typography on a Hydro Quebec building in the lower Plateau. The t, both r’s, and the i look to have been jury-rigged from random scrap. The minuscule, askew dot on the i may be my favorite feature.
I attended the August 10-12 series between the Giants and the Dodgers at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Results: Dodgers 4-2, Dodgers 9-1, Giants 4-2, the last game of which featured a great pitching performance by Tim Lincecum into the ninth inning that nevertheless resulted in a no-decision for him (and thence a 10th-inning walk-off homer by Juan Uribe) because of some rather dubious umpiring on the basepaths. I can’t say anything bad about AT&T Park except that it just doesn’t feel as “real” as Fenway (and the beer is even more expensive).
I didn’t take very many photos on my most recent trip to San Francisco, and I’ve only just now gotten around to transferring them from my camera onto my computer. This one was taken shortly after lunch (“chicken with explosive chili pepper”: fried chicken pieces buried in chilies and Szechuan pepper) at Z&Y Restaurant in Chinatown. I guess that’s “Barack Obama” in Chinese characters on the posters?
Maybe “platimum” is one of those super high atomic weight elements that the scientific community has only just come up with a name for. Or maybe a copy editor got careless.
Just across the street from the Montreal Botanical Garden is the Stade Olympique and its huge leaning tower visible from all the way downtown.
I’m not a botanist and I wasn’t organized enough in my photo-taking to gather the names of every plant I shot.
“Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.” Then again, few social conservatives pay much thought anymore to core principles other than “screw you, got mine.”
A column on the difficulty of getting through to climate change denialists. I’ve always liked the saying “you can’t reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into.”
U.S. Navy training film from 1953: pure analog computing awesomeness. The integrator is a brilliant piece of equipment: a rotating disc, a bearing, and a rod, and that’s it. Does continuous summation of one-dimensional input.
Ten-minute video on Vimeo of a zoom of 214 orders of magnitude into the Mandelbrot Set. If you gaze at the center point for the whole video, the visual aftereffects when it’s over are eerie: strange fluxing and twisting of stationary objects around the room.
Visualization of the proposed 2011 federal budget. This sort of thing is super-handy for showing to people who complain about budget items on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Peace Corps, scientific research, etc.). See if you can even find them behind the mammoth expenditures on the Pentagon and Social Security and Medicare.
Kafka-esque Dutch bureaucracy meets typographic diacritic design. This gentleman has more patience than I would have.
Everything you know about sautéeing mushrooms is wrong! The traditional orthodoxy has it that mushrooms must not be soaked in water and preferably should not even be rinsed, lest they become soggy. But it turns out that absorbed water keeps mushrooms from drinking up all the oil in your sauté pan as they cook down, and thus mushrooms that are soaked end up less oily than dry ones after sautéeing.
Serious Eats blog entry from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who does stellar Cook’s Illustrated-style recipe writeups online when he’s not actually working for Cook’s Illustrated. I’ve been meaning to make chili at some point this winter, but access to good dried chiles here in upstate NY is hard to come by.
Six-way time trial pitting pen and paper against a standard QWERTY keyboard against four portable devices: the good old Apple Newton, a couple of Palm PDAs, and the iPhone virtual keyboard. Surprised how well the iPhone fared; I’m kind of slow at typing on my iPod Touch but it could just be for lack of practice.
Infographic comparing the percentage of delayed or cancelled flights at ten U.S. airports from last year and this year. It’s good information to know, but Edward Tufte would shiver at the chartjunky decision to make bar graphs out of airplane window shades.
I’ve done some web scraping with Python before to pull weather conditions and forecasts down to my computer at home; if I need to get fancier than that, a proper library for maintaining state across multiple HTTP requests may be the better way to go.
Clips of the new Red Sox third baseman flashing the leather with the Mariners. The new pitching and defensive emphasis of the Sox will be something to watch in 2010.
An introductory text written (almost) exclusively in words of a single syllable, on the topic of Georgism: the idea that government should be funded solely by a tax on land value (exclusive of improvements), rather than income taxes, sales taxes, and so forth.
One hopes this ruling won’t be yet another 9th Circuit decision that gets overturned by SCOTUS. The “tasers keep people from getting shot” message is terribly disingenuous; police seem very comfortable using tasers at the slightest whiff of perceived disrespect or lack of compliance, not just in situations where they would otherwise have drawn their firearms on citizens.
Very interesting blog touching on culinary topics through the lens of linguistics and historical research.