I was never a big fan of Cosmos, though I think that it did a lot of good in interesting people in space. I’m listening to a rerun on the SCIHD channel, and I recall why.
Sagan’s voice is too pompous, too arrogant, and the ubiquitous sonorous tone, and pauses, which lent themselves to parody (“billions and billions”) are really arrogant. I wish that he had written it, and someone else narrated.
Lileks sets an alarm clock:
First you push the ALARM SET button, and you should get our old friend, Mr. Blinking Twelve. But no. You press SOURCE to select iPod or FM tuner. Repeatedly pressing this button just makes the iPod option flash on the display, though, and you figure you’ve done something wrong. So you turn the device OFF.
And the display face lights up. This is the first indication that the device was designed by the American Union of Nonintuitive Interfaces. These guys get a lot of work nowadays. You start again. SOURCE. You get the flashing iPod option. Ah hah: here’s another on/off button; let’s try that. It turns everything off and powers down the unit. That’s an option you’ve never had on an alarm clock before; if we had world enough and time, we could consider the possible scenarios in which one would want to power down the alarm clock. None come to mind.
Speaking of roosters, having spent some time in tropical climes where they run around wild, I can attest that the notion that they crow at dawn is a myth that has been foisted on city slickers like me. Or rather, that they only crow at dawn. I hear them crowing at dawn, at sunset, at lunchtime, at 2 AM. They may be good at waking you up, but not at any particularly useful time.
Not exactly, despite the claim of this post:
Deep frying is a form of convection heating. Instead of hot air, you are using hot oil to transfer the heat. Depending on the oil used in the fryer, the temperature is usually about 375 degrees to keep the food from absorbing a lot of oil.
The Big Easy uses infrared energy to “bathe” food. It excites the proteins, not the water. Thus, you are literally frying it. It’s just like sitting in the sun all day. The infrared energy will “fry” your meat’s skin. The Big Easy doesn’t need a lid because it’s better to let the hot air escape. That way your food doesn’t dry out and there’s no basting necessary. Unlike conventional turkey fryers there is also no warm-up period. Just drop your thawed turkey (stuffed or unstuffed, injected or not, sugar-less rubbed or not) into the chamber and turn the Big Easy on. Infrared energy starts cooking it immediately and the cooking time for 12-14-pound turkey will be cut almost in half.
Without expressing an opinion on the relative merits of cooking a turkey this way, it’s not equivalent to deep-fat frying. As it says, it only radiates the skin, whereas a deep fryer gets hot oil inside the bird as well, which has to speed up the cooking time considerably. And if the oil is sufficiently hot, there’s no reason that it has to make the bird greasy, or any more so than it would be naturally from its own fat.
The Big Easy
[Update late evening]
Contrary to Glenn’s comment, I don’t call “foul.” The proper spelling is “fowl.”
Half of UK men would give up sex for six months for a fifty-inch television.
You know, if that’s the deal, considering the first twenty years of my life, someone owes me a screen the size of a drive-in theater.
…as only Iowahawk can.
We’re losing our movies:
The report’s authors state the data explosion could turn into digital movie extinction, unless the studios push the development of storage standards and data management practices that will guarantee long-term access of their content.
As the report points out, even if a 100-year black box were invented that “read data reliably without introducing any errors, required no maintenance and offered sufficient bit density at an affordable price,” there would be nobody alive capable of repairing it if that box were to fail at 99 years. In the real world of data management, digital assets are stored on media with longevities much less than 100 years, vulnerable to temperature changes, humidity and static electricity. It can be misidentified, inadequately indexed and difficult to track.
Also, whereas a well-preserved 35mm negative has traditionally contained enough information to fulfill any requirement for ancillary markets, there’s a question in the minds of some industry observers about whether the quality of masters archived in digital formats will be sufficient for quality duplication. In an age when home movie systems can often provide a better experience than some commercial theaters, that’s not an unimportant concern.
This is a problem that cryonicists face as well. How do you preserve the data that defines your life and identity over an indefinite period of time? No static media can be relied on–they all deteriorate eventually. I know that I have lots of floppies from the eighties that are probably unreadable now.
Data is going to have to be stored dynamically, and continually moved to new systems as the technology evolves. It will also have to be stored holographically, and distributed. Fortunately, the costs of digital data storage are plunging, with terabyte drives now available for the cost of multi-megabytes twenty years ago, and that trend is likely to continue as we get into molecular storage.
Jay Garmon dissects a dumb statistical correlation between SAT scores and “favorite” SF&F books. I found it interesting that there were no works by Neil Stephenson on the chart.
Willie Nelson comes out as a Truther.
The producers of the Superbowl half time show have obviously confused me with a Tom Petty fan. Let’s just hope there are no wardrobe malfunctions.
Though I do have to confess that, while this is the first time I’ve actually seen Justin Timberlake, and prior to tonight would not have recognized him, I was most gratified to see him so physically abused in that commercial.
[After-game update]
Well, some publisher made a bad bet
19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Unbeatable Patriots (Paperback)
Guess they weren’t as “unbeatable” as they thought. Given that the putative author was “Boston Globe,” presumably they were going to publish as well.
As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha ha.”
But, you have to say, it was a hell of a game. And being a Wolverine, I did want Brady to pull it out at the end, but it was a tough call. It’s too bad that only one team could win. And of course, there were Michigan players on both sides of the ball. The Giants wouldn’t have won without wide receivers Plaxico Burress (a Spartan), who caught the winning touchdown, and Amani Toomer (a record-holding Wolverine, though slightly before Brady’s time).
The producers of the Superbowl half time show have obviously confused me with a Tom Petty fan. Let’s just hope there are no wardrobe malfunctions.
Though I do have to confess that, while this is the first time I’ve actually seen Justin Timberlake, and prior to tonight would not have recognized him, I was most gratified to see him so physically abused in that commercial.
[After-game update]
Well, some publisher made a bad bet
19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Unbeatable Patriots (Paperback)
Guess they weren’t as “unbeatable” as they thought. Given that the putative author was “Boston Globe,” presumably they were going to publish as well.
As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha ha.”
But, you have to say, it was a hell of a game. And being a Wolverine, I did want Brady to pull it out at the end, but it was a tough call. It’s too bad that only one team could win. And of course, there were Michigan players on both sides of the ball. The Giants wouldn’t have won without wide receivers Plaxico Burress (a Spartan), who caught the winning touchdown, and Amani Toomer (a record-holding Wolverine, though slightly before Brady’s time).