I hardly ever have canned soup — I find it pretty easy to make from scratch, if I have the time. But I just tried some Progresso chicken with rotelli. I enhanced it with leftover chicken breast, and added water, but I still found it too salty, and the carrots and the noodles too mushy. I suppose that overcooking is inevitable with canning, but if this is the best (and they certainly price it that way), what are the rest like?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Internal Combustion Engines
…aren’t done yet. I wonder if transonic combustion could improve the performance of rocket engines as well?
Wow
Stupidity
Are we going to run out of helium due to an economically ignorant law? This could affect the cost of spaceflight operations. It would be ironic if we end up going to the moon not for He3, but He4.
It seems to me that if they really wanted to privatize the federal reserve, they should have sold it off to a private bidder, rather than selling the helium at an arbitrary rate.
Singularity Summit Reportage
Phil Bowermaster attended and has lots of blog posts, starting with this one. Just keep clicking on the next post to see them all.
Personal Life Extension
A conference, in San Francisco in October. Could be interesting and useful.
Rocketry
…meet dentistry. What would we do without Youtube?
Remembering Vinyl
A non-political discussion over at Free Republic.
One of these days I’ll get a new tonearm and cartridge for my Rega Planar turntable and break out a collection that I haven’t listened to in over a decade. Of course, sometimes things that you put off till “one of these days” sometimes never happen.
Whose Choice?
This is a fascinating article. A few years ago, in the context of his concerns about the general ability to redesign ourselves, I had a question for Stanley Kurtz:
Suppose we find that there is something different about the brains of gay men and women (a proposition for which there’s already abundant and growing evidence). If we can come up with an affordable, painless therapy that “fixes” this and converts them from “gay” to “straight,” should we a) allow them to take advantage of it, or b) forbid them from doing so, or c) require them to? And should “straight” (i.e., exclusively heterosexual) people be allowed to become gay, or bi?
I have a lot of thoughts about this but (to paraphrase Pascal) insufficient time to write them down right now (meetings all day). I will say, though, that in this particular case, I think that many of the “bioethicists” in question are less concerned about the ability of parents to design their children to be “normal” than they are about stigmatizing homosexuality.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link’s fixed now.
Singularity Summit
Glenn has links to the liveblogging.