When we visited Vermont last summer, I made a note to remember the excellent "Constant Bliss" cow milk cheese, made by Jasper Hill Farms. Also check their Bayley Hazen blue cheese.
They're sold at Zingerman's, in Ann Arbor and at two places in Portland, Oregon, but apparently not in Washington state.
My other favorite Christmas present is this French Press from Bonjour Products:
It makes 3 cups of incredibly tasty, rich coffee or tea. Just grind the beans (to the large French press size), plop them in, pour boiling water, and wait 4 minutes.
Cleaning up is the hardest part, but still very easy -- certainly easier than an espresso machine. Pouring water over the filter mechanism seems to get it clean enough for daily use. I should probably soak it in soapy water and rinse it thoroughly every so often just to keep it spotless.
Coffeegeek.com has thorough instructions for how to use press pots.
For Christmas this year I received this extremely useful headlamp which I'm now using all the time. The bright LED beam lasts a long time on tiny replaceable lithium batteries, making it great for doing little jobs around the house or the garage.
You can get it at Brookstone for $25.
Kevin Kelly (of Cool Tools) recommends the Zipka, from Petzl. It's about the same price but I think more clunky-looking than the Brookstone.
We finally watched An Inconvenient Truth, which is required viewing for anybody who wants an easy-to-understand introduction to the facts behind climate change. Thankfully, this is not a political, Bush-bashing movie like Fahrenheit 911, nor is it fact-stretching in the name of humor, like Supersize Me. There were one or two brief political jabs, but they were quite appropriate considering who made the movie.
There are plenty of sites out there that attempt to give a counter-argument, but none are convincing. Just one example is a publication by The Heartland Institute that tries to refute the claim (mentioned in the movie) by the journal Science that not a single peer-reviewed scientific publication has published evidence in the past ten years that contradicts global warming. This claim should be easy to disprove: produce just one contradictory peer-reviewed article. Instead, the bashers point to a vaguely-defined survey of "climatologists" who say there is controversy. No refuting facts, just instilling an ill-defined mood of skepticism where there is none.
Still, I was disappointed to hear that Al Gore, in a desparate attempt to increase profits for the movie, has himself been actively trying to warm the earth through shameful activities such as this:
Aparently he's even making a pathetic attempt to jump up and down on the Greenland ice shelf to hasten its slide into the ocean.
For the full story, click here:
It was 47 degrees inside my bedroom when I woke up this morning. And still no sign of a repair crew at the transmission pole that feeds our neighborhood.
From the official Puget Sound Energy site (updated 6pm Dec 18):
Two of three substations serving Mercer Island have been restored, with the third expected to be energized Monday evening. Many customers have regained service on the north half of Mercer Island. Full restoration of the island's heavily damaged distribution lines likely will continue late into the week, perhaps Friday or Saturday. Our electric system sustained tremendous damage on the island from falling trees and limbs.
Our neighbors were complaining among themselves about unfair it is that Mercer Island always seems to be last in line for help on disasters like this. "They just assume everyone here is rich and can afford to stay overnight in hotels," says one. "In fact, it's so bad that we probably won't have power before we leave for Hawaii on Wednesday".
And I'll have you know that the Westin was completely booked all weekend, so don't go assuming that all of us have it easy here!
Mercer Island has been without power since Thursday night. This tree fell on West Mercer Way near 46th at about 2am, narrowly missing the big house on the left.
Somehow my tire ran over a nail yesterday and, poof, it was flat. I want to sell the car soon, so I'm not interested in a new set of tires or anything -- I just want to quickly get myself back on the road as soon as possible.
Imagine my surprise when I dropped into Les Schwab this morning and asked them to get me a new tire. The salesman talked me out of it and instead gave me a free repair on the old one. Took about half an hour and now my tire is as good as new!
Milton Friedman was married to his wife, Rose, for 68 years (!) and when he died last week was eulogised by the Economist as the "most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century (Keynes died in 1946), possibly of all of it". Of course, when two people have been married so long, you really can't credit just one of them for anything -- they were clearly a team, and should be assigned co-authorship to everything they did.
Which is why it's interesting to see this interview they gave to the WSJ last year, talking about Iraq:
Mr. Friedman here shifted focus. "What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression." Mrs. Friedman--listening to her husband with an ear cocked--was now muttering darkly.
Milton: "Huh? What?" Rose: "This was not aggression!" Milton (exasperatedly): "It was aggression. Of course it was!" Rose: "You count it as aggression if it's against the people, not against the monster who's ruling them. We don't agree. This is the first thing to come along in our lives, of the deep things, that we don't agree on. We have disagreed on little things, obviously--such as, I don't want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out--but big issues, this is the first one!" Milton: "But, having said that, once we went in to Iraq, it seems to me very important that we make a success of it." Rose: "And we will!"
(The WSJ concludes by noting that Mrs. Friedman had the last word)
[via trunkandbarter and freakonomics]
p.s. Bonus factoid: Milton was a well-known Reagan fan, but guess who he supported as Reagan's successor? Donald Rumsfeld (!) [according to the Economist ]
The WSJ has a rundown on companies that will buy your current contract and resell to somebody else, in a legal way to get rid of your cell phone contract. It's good for buyers too, because you can get much cheaper phone service with a shorter contract life.
Two new venture-backed startups go after the stay-at-home market.
Industrious Kid, founded by former execs at Ascend Communications, just got $6M in venture funding to start Imbee, a MySpace-type social networking thing for 8-year-olds (and above). At $40/year I just don't see it taking off, though. Any parent involved enough with their kids' internet use will be involved enough to chaperone them on MySpace for free. Why bother with less?
Club Mom wants to be a social networking site "for moms, by moms".
Again, I'm not sure what the market is. Everybody wants to create a "community", but rather than force people to come to you, I think the future is in aggregation -- let people go wherever they want, and you come to them.
Here's the National Weather Service radar showing what we can expect to hit Seattle later today:
The Wall Street Journal has this summary, based on Kelley Blue Book's survey for the 2007 model year:
For the first time, Acura beat out BMW for the top spot in the sedan category. Honda Odyssey was #1 for minivans. All of these vehicles are expected to retain 48% to 56% of their new value after five years.
You have until December 5th to fill out the Community Technology Survey for the Mercer Island School District. It's open till December 5th.
Looks like there's a regular get-together for Mercer Island liberals:
http://www.drinkingliberally.org
Maybe they could organize it to be held jointly with the Conservative Enthusiasts (they often meet at the Mercer Island Library). I bet you could get a lot more people to come.
They started in Portland about a year ago, but now Google Transit has a site for Seattle.
For example, it says that for me to get from home to my office right now (at 6:30 on a Saturday morning) would take 58 minutes. That is, 58 minutes after my bus arrives near home, which won't be till 8:52am.
It seems to be hooked into the same GPS systems used by other sites, but the UI is the best I've seen yet.
While spending time here for Thanksgiving, I stumbled upon Stumphouse Coffee Roasters, an excellent cafe with stores in several locations including here in downtown Portland (3rd and Pine). Top-of-the-line fresh hand-roasted taste, free Internet, and cheaper than Starbucks ($2.60 for an 8oz latte). What more could you need?
Unfortunately they're not open till 7am, so the familiy is awake before I can venture out.
Kevin Kelly recommends two source of food advice:
Cook's Thesaurus is an online database of substitute foods. All out of oats for some special recipe? Try wheatberries or rye flakes or triticale. Still don't have it? At least know the alternatives that might be stocked at your grocery: rolled, steel-cut, groats, etc. each explained with its advantages and disadvantages.
If you really need to be prepared, have this book on hand:
Cooking Ingredients . The Ultimate Photographic Reference Guide for Cooks and Food Lovers (Paperback) by Christine Ingram, contains 1500 different food types and a brief explanation of each.
Next time I'm out of something, I'll try one of the sources above. And if they're not handy, of course I can always go straight to Wikipedia, which is becoming the ultimate reference for everything.
Here's a video from my trip to China last week. I went with my boss and another engineer to the Great Wall, at Mutianyu. Most people go to a slightly closer location of the Wall, so this one is less crowded with tourists. One fun part is that you can ride a toboggan on the way down. I snuck a video camera for the ride, though I had to shut it off early when one of the guards started to yell "no photo".
A local advocacy group trying to improve math standards in Washington State has made the New York Times front page.
“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.’ ”
Where's the Math was founded by Shalimar Backman from Seattle and thinks kids need to learn the basics of addition/multiplication/division rather than fuzzy "concepts".
Here's a quote from Mercer Island's school board member:
On Mercer Island, an affluent suburb of Seattle that had the state’s best scores on the 10th-grade test, the pendulum has begun to swing toward emphasizing computational skills, especially in high school.
“We’re looking at texts that have more numbers and less language,” said Lisa Eggers, president of the Mercer Island School Board, who at one point sent two of her three children to Kumon. “And we’re one of the few districts where the math scores are going up.”
[via sound politics]
I try to keep up with popular movies about Japan, so that explains why this is on my Netflix queue, but oh what a waste. Definitely do not pay to see this movie, and if absolutely forced to watch, be sure to put it on fast-forward the whole time.
It's basically a juvenile car-loving white trash movie about car-racing, where the hero finds himself plopped in Japan in the middle of a bunch of similarly car-loving derelicts. So many things about this comically unreal: as though unemployed Japanese punks have the money to blow on these cars, and yes they use their camera phones everywhere. But our hero has no need for their stupid computer gadgets. Just give him the raw power of a V8 engine and a hot chick and he's a man. Yeah, baby.
An upcoming paper in the Journal of Financial Economics studied business plans from the dot-com era and concluded that the "bubble" wasn't much different from what happens at the birth of any new industry. David A. Kirsch from the University of Maryland (see WSJ.com) says:
This reminds me of the advice in entrepreneurship classes, how it's a myth that "the vast majority of new businesses fail". In fact, the majority of dumb businesses fail, but well-thought ideas that focus on good, flexible business plans with good execution do just fine.
Our Y-Guides group made a team visit to Dinner's Ready, a food preparation store in Bellevue. It's a nice idea, perfect for franchising: the store has all the ingredients and cooking equipment, all the
My 7-year-old son and I made two dinners: a flank steak with mashed potatoes, and a prawn stir fry. Both were so easy to prepare that I almost wonder what the point was. And the total price ($36) was far more than I'd have paid in the grocery store.
The flank steak already came in a plastic ziplock bag. We had to open the bag, dump a scoop of pre-measured ingredients inside and shake it up. That's it. The garlic mashed potatoes were already mixed and mashed, so there really wasn't much to do.
The prawn dish was even simpler: take a bag of frozen prawns, add it to a bag of frozen vegetables, drop in a few tablespoons of olive oil, some salt, and a few others. Done.
I came away wondering what the point was. I suppose if you never cook, it would be nice occasionally to eat something besides pizza. But if you have the cooking pots and pans, you almost certainly can do these recipes at home too, and the trouble of dropping by the Dinner's Ready store has got to be more time-consuming than just doing it all yourself.
I think there are two ways to improve the concept. First, make it all social -- and the store is already doing that, by encouraging groups of people to come in for reservations. Again, why you can't do this at somebody's house, I'm not sure, but still, I suppose some people will do anything to avoid cleaning up.
But a better idea would be to go for more complicated dishes, things that require expensive equipment. Like one of those really nice dough mixers, or a chocolate melter, or specialized meat grinders. I suppose the higher end you get, the more complicated the recipes become -- in which case you lose the mass market audience.
Thankfully, not a problem for my kids (yet), but it's a real scourge in elementary schools. Now Biologist Dale Clayton has invented the "Lousebuster" and written about it in the latest issue of Pediatrics. I wonder if you'd get similar results from a regular hair dryer?
Clayton studies birds and lice, but after moving to Salt Lake City from England in 1996 he found the air was too dry to keep lice alive on laboratory birds. He had to humidify rooms to keep the bugs alive.
If dry air could kill lice on birds, Clayton reasoned, it might do the same on humans. And the project became personal: His own kids had them.
Clayton found temperature wasn’t as important as the amount of air. The air in his device is cooler than a standard hair dryer.
Larada Sciences, a University of Utah company set to market the LouseBuster to schools and doctors, believes the device could be available within two years.
“The device itself will be definitely under $2,000, and hopefully under $1,000,” Larada president Randy Block said. “While that sounds like a lot, think about the average parent spending $40 or $50 for a treatment.”
Source: A lice treatment to blow problem away? - Children's Health - MSNBC.com
It's been pouring all day, but that didn't stop my daughter's team from playing soccer this morning:
The University of Washington has a new map of Mercer Island's geology. I don't see anything particularly unsettling (so-to-speak)about our neighborhood:
We're sitting on "Vashon subglacial till" (purple), which is between Vashon recessional deposits (orange) and "Pre-Fraser non-glacial deposits" (green). The jagged lines near us are "scarps", which in our case are those big dirt cliffs behind our neighbors across the street.
No fault lines, no artificial fill: just nice glacial deposits from the Pleistocene Era.
Be still my beating heart! HD video cameras are here at affordable prices. CNet and CamcorderInfo review the new $1400 Sony HDR-SR1, as the "most forward-facing camcorder of the year".
When I looked into this one year ago, I concluded that HD camcorders aren't worth buying, but that's no longer true. Some of the features I like:
What I don't like
I won't replace my Panasonic GS-400 yet, but it's clear that by next year at this time my tape-based SD camera will look pretty ancient.
This weekend I listened to several podcasts while doing yardwork and other "dead time" in the car, etc.
David Shenk interview: he wrote a recent book about Chess.
Adam Bosworth: Former Microsoftie, now Google, thinks content is the only thing that matters.
Richard Dawkins: wants everyone to be an atheist. from Science Friday.
Here's a list of podcasts I've downloaded for future listening.
Lawrence Lessig (Comedy of the Commons)
Malcolm Gladwell: a 30-min presentation he gave in Camden Maine a few years ago.
Six Apart: interview with Ben and Mena Trott.
Neil Gershenfeld, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms talking about personal device fabs. (26min)
Thomas Barnett, Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation Office of Secretarty of Defense: Emerging Worldviews (about Defense transformation) (32min)
I also downloaded a pile of lectures from iTunes by the Stanford Entrepreneur forum.
Any suggestions?
When the owner of a stolen or found item can't be located, the Mercer Island police department sells it at http://www.propertyroom.com
You can also register your items at http://www.stealitback.com. If they are ever found by the police, you'll get them back for free.
Apparently Mercer Island was the first in Washington State to join this service.
Until I started to understand the importance of local politics, I never took local elections all that seriously. What difference does it make who wins the race for district judge? The "will of the people" will ensure that in the long run the right person will win.
But some people really are crooks and sleazes. Take this guy for example: Bellevue "lawyer" Richard Pope:
He's rated "Not Qualified" by the King County Bar Association, having been cited for "unprofessional conduct" as a lawyer in four cases.
The bad news is that he actually won the primary! I guarantee that anybody who looks at his record or the things said about him would never vote for him. So who did?
Maybe people thought he had a nicer name than the other candidates. Maybe they vaguely remember seeing one of his signs out on Island Crest Way. Maybe his name rings a bell because he's run ten times in the past, so after a while you just start thinking he's already somebody important.
Fortunately, several legitimate organizations have come together on a non-partisan basis to post objective facts about each of the candidates on http://www.votingforjudges.org. I am definitely going to look at that before the next election.
Our home PC(s) are getting old and will need to be replaced in order to take advantage of the coolest Vista features. Having a Media Center PC would also let us do some things on our TV (like Hi-Def, Tivo-like DVR) that are long overdue for a family like ours. But how do you know which PC is future-proof?
An easy way is to follow Intel's Viiv specs. According to this nice summary in Byte, Building A Viiv PC requires the following components:
A chipset that is from one of the Intel 945/955/975 Express chipset families. Viiv also specifies an Intel dual-core processor, including the Pentium D, Core Duo and Pentium Extreme Edition.
Another important Viiv ingredient is an NCQ SATA Hard Drive. NCQ stands for Native Command Queuing, which increases a SATA drive's performance by letting it receive more than one I/O request at a time and letting the drive itself determine the order in which to carry out the requests. A remote control is not required for Viiv compliance, but Windows MCE does require a Phillips Key Code MCE-Type remote for full functionality.
A Viiv-compliant motherboard featuring a 945, 955 or 975 chipset must also include an Intel ICH7-DH chip (the DH stands for Digital Home). The ICH7-DH enables Intel's Matrix Storage Technology which supports NCQ hard drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. The ICH7-DH can take advantage of NCQ without needing an actual RAID array or more than one hard drive. Viiv also specifies a gigabit NIC, which all three chipsets support.
Here are some of the podcasts I've played during the past few days:
Radio OpenSource: I heard Steven Pinker host interviews asking various intellectuals about their most dangerous idea. As always, Pinker is so articulate and describes what I think (e.g. regarding the unlikelihood of intelligent life in outer space).
Incidentally, I also found a page dedicated to Steven Pinker Multimedia: all known audio and video of Steven Pinker.
I listened to Jennifer Burns, a professor from UC-Berkeley. Her lectures on US History are available on iTunes, including the one I listened to called "Rise of the Religious Right".
Harvard professor Niall Ferguson discusses his new book War of the Worlds on Open Source. He's a historian who claims big wars result from the three E's: economic volatility, empire descent, and ethnic tension. All three are in place now in Iraq and portend a big WWII-style conflict. I originally heard about this book in an NPR interview, so it was nice to get a longer version of it. (Incidentally, the Economist thinks it's an okay book by a brilliant, if too populist, historian).
Plus, I listened to several short news podcasts by The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American.
This week's story about IllyCaffe's Head barista reminded me of that excellent espresso I have every time I'm in Europe. I no longer remember exactly, but it's possible that my very first espresso was an Illy, on my trip to Italy in 1993. From the article, it sounds like Mr. Illy should exchange coffee-making tips with David Schomer from Espresso Vivace:
He says that his firm is inching ever closer to delivering “perfection in every cup”. His particular obsession is with technical innovation. He claims (though some espresso-lovers dispute this), that Illycaffe has been responsible for three of the seven big innovations in coffee-making in the past century, as a traditional Italian craft has become an industrial process. The firm standardised espresso-making, and developed the paper pod containing a single dose of pre-ground coffee for an espresso machine. (Others invented decaffeination, instant coffee, multiple packets and liquid coffee.) Mr Illy is a chemistry graduate—at university he wrote a thesis on the “Quality of Espresso from a Chemical Perspective”—and is as enthusiastic about the science of coffee as he is about its taste. Now Illycaffe is implementing what it regards as its third big innovation. This is a two-stage espresso-making process involving “hyper-fusion” (which intensifies the drink's aroma), and “emulsification” (which makes it smoother).
Can you buy Illy whole beans in Seattle? Yes, at Williams-Sonoma at Bellevue Square, plus a few QFCs like the one on NE 8th in Bellevue or on Capitol Hill.
The critics panned it, but I thought Stepford (2004) was a worthy remake of the original, which was terribly out of date and becoming irrelevant. As I said previously, the women of Old Stepford seem lazy when looked at from today's world, where we take it for granted that women work in corporate jobs. The new version accepts that, and turns the women into powerful business icons. But now, the men and women are lazy. They've all taken early retirement so they can spend quality time together in their palatial suburban mansions. Sure, there's still a Men's Association, but it's stocked with guy stuff: high tech video games and robots that fight each other. The women have their own "association": the Stepford Day Spa. Now seriously, given a choice is there an MBA woman on earth who really feels like this is discrimination?
The acting is not as good (am I the only person who thinks Matthew Broderick is an amateur?) and the whole movie feels like the Big Name stars had more fun making it than we have watching, so it disappoints in the sense that I left hoping they'd do more. For example, one of the key characters is a powerful woman who moves to Stepford after finding her husband in bed with her 20-something assistant. Would it be more satisfying for her to just dump the creep and go back to the Boardroom where she can take revenge by making piles of money -- rich, divorced, alone ? Or should she accept early retirement and a robotic implant so she can spend her afternoons at the Day Spa and her evenings dressed glamorously, in the arms of her happy husband?
The remake, like the original, just takes it for granted that men will do anything to keep their women. Somebody should do a movie that asks what women will do to keep their men.
Since she joined my life, I have never been more than 30 minutes away from dinner, so why is there a web site devoted to her called "Rachel Ray Sux"?
Look at this pin-up pose she did for FHM:
[see this nice Slate review]
"It has been drilled into our collective psyche that rigorous schools assign rigorous homework," [a school principal] wrote. "I recognize that this is a ridiculous thought process, particularly since your research suggests otherwise, but it's hard to break the thinking on this one. How could we be a high-achieving school and not assign homework?"
I just listened to an interesting 30-min Econtalk podcast interview with Rick Hanushek from Stanford, talking about education and how to make schools better.
The most interesting part was the discussion about a study that shows that class sizes don't affect educational outcomes much. After accounting for things like socioeconomic background, teacher education level, geography, etc., it turns out that the difference in outcomes is negligible, even between a 25-student classroom and a 15-student classroom.
In fact, he claims that if the goal is to improve student performance, only one thing really matters: teacher quality. The difference between "good" teachers and "bad" teachers is so dramatic that it makes everything else irrelevant.
It just turns out that some teachers have the ability to take a classroom of kids at any performance level and increase their performance, consistently, year-after-year, regardless of starting level and regardless of all the other variables we ordinarily try to control (salary, class size, textbook spending, etc.)
Unfortunately it's very hard to say what makes some teachers better than others. We do know what doesn't matter: graduate degree, years of experience (after a few year start-up period), salary, school district.
Here are some of the references:
About the failure of spending and smaller class size to improve test scores:
About the importance of teacher quality:
About the economics of educationHere's their list
Beans, canned: Goya.
Butter: Land O’Lakes unsalted.
Chicken broth: Swanson 99 percent fat-free, in a resealable carton.
Extra virgin olive oil: Private labels like Master Choice (A&P stores) and Private Selection (Kroger) can be buttery, excellent and inexpensive.
Frozen foods: Peas and spinach (no sauce); peaches, cherries and berries (no sugar).
Mustards: Plain Dijon for cooking (Roland is cheap and hot; better than the American Grey Poupon); Gulden’s Spicy Brown for sandwiches and hot dogs.
Peanut butter: Smucker’s Natural.
Peanut oil: For frying.
Tomatoes, canned: Redpack, Italian San Marzanos, Pomì (in a carton).
Tomato paste: Amore, in a tube.
Vinegars: White vinegar for brightening a dish without adding noticeable flavors; store-brand red wine vinegar for dressings and cooking. (Supermarket balsamics and sherries tend to be of poor quality.) JULIA MOSKIN
Also see their suggestions for real gourmet you can buy at the supermarket. Including:
and more
Best Buy is now selling a $299 DirecTV receiver that was made in part by Jeff Phillips, a friend from my MSTV days.
MaximumPC (Nov 2006) recommends the following utilities that caught my eye:
WinDirStat: to help understan where all your hard disc space went.
File Shedder: to completely, thoroughly, erase and permanently delete a file.
TrueCrypt: really,really encrypt a file. Apparently works with USB keys.
Ccleaner: recover hard drive space wasted on temp files, unused regedit entries, etc.
Belarc Advisor: audit your system's drivers, logins, etc.
ExplorerXP: much better than the Windows Explorer. Also chop up large files into smaller ones for easier FTP.
This issue has a How To article about streaming video from a webcam. They recommend a $20 utility from http://www.tincam.com
Reading the New York Times editorial, it sounds like the Pope really put his foot in his mouth, apparently calling Muslims "evil and inhuman". An obvious insensitive remark requiring an immediate and heartfelt apology, right?
My first reaction is to think how could a leader with as much public experience as Benedict XVI say something so stupid? So I read the speech transcript and now I wonder the exact opposite: How could journalists or thinking Muslims possibly interpret his remarks as offensive?
The speech, addressed to scientists at the University of Regensburg, is about religion and reason and a response to the question posed by some scientists for why universities would have theology and religion departments with faculty devoted to the study of something (God) that doesn't exist.
The Pope's answer is that in the West, with its Greek-inspired traditions, God and reason (science) are fundamentally bound together. By contrast, he quotes the Islamic philosopher R. Arnaldez who argues that God is absolutely transcendent and unbound by anything at all, even reason itself. The remark about Muslims, quoting from a 14th Century dialog between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian, is given as an example for how under the Greek tradition, you couldn't convert somebody through violence -- only through reason.
Here's the full quote:
[The 14th Century Byzantine emperor] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.
If an apology is justified, the Pope has to first understand what he said that makes people angry. Should he apologize for saying or implying that:
I hope nobody disagrees with the first statement. Presumably we all agree that forcing someone to convert is evil and inhuman.
He should apologize if people misunderstood him as saying that Islam advocates violence. It's not his place to pontificate (so-to-speak) about Islam. Note that his real point, however, was not about Islam but rather about the idea that God transcends reason. I wonder: do Muslims agree or disagree?
The third statement -- that Christians are sometimes hypocritical -- is something I bet the Pope would not deny. But he would say that Christians fail their Greek-inspired heritage of reason when they resort to violence.
Either way, I wish I understood the logic of those people who are firebombing Christian churches over this. "You defame us by calling us violent, so we're going to kill you!"
A recent survey by Baylor University (summarized in today's USAToday) found that:
The study authors also decided that the respondents (a statistically-valid representative sample of all Americans) divided their attitudes toward God into these categories:
[source: Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, funded by the John Templeton Foundation]
Global warming is real, it's caused by humans, and there is much we can do about it. That's the position convincingly argued in a special "Survey of climate change" in the Economist 9/9/2006. Here are some interesting facts I took away:
Today's Pacific Northwest Sunday Magazine in the Seattle Times had us chuckling in the middle of an article on why it's so hard to lose weight:
A TREND IN obesity research is to look beyond individuals and at environments, says Streichert of the exploratory center.
The new obesity conversation includes urban planners, architects, grocers, school boards, economists, politicians, transportation experts.
What if schools banned high-fat and high-sugar foods? (The Seattle School District did just that in 2004; last year, high-school students said they consumed 20 percent less soda and 13 percent less candy and chips during the school day.)
What if sidewalks, bike trails and nearby parks and shops encouraged people to make exercise part of their daily routine?
What if we could all afford to eat as if we lived on Mercer Island?
Obesity rates would plummet, predicts Dr. Adam Drewnowski, who specializes in obesity, economics and taste preference at the UW.
Mercer Island has its fair share of chubby people, so I'm not sure what this is saying. Maybe it's because we have so few restaurants?
ArXiv and PLoS are growing as the way scientists share knowledge.
Digital Cameras: They recommend Casio EX-Z600 ($279), Canon Powershot SD600 ($350) and more. All have 6MP and great specs, including min 800ISO sensitivity.
Hospital-grade air filters can clean your air for about $500.
See John Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity for UI and design hints.
Lessig's column tells about new opensource-inspired business models. See revver.com (for videos, with ads inserted automatically), Openbusiness.cc, Eric von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation.
Netflix has a production company Red Envelope that secures distribution rights for overlooked DVDs, and turns them into money through its recommendation engine finding viewers.
Charles Mann (the 1491 author) writes about the splog industry.
I know the real reason the wives of the Manhattan suburb of Stepford are so happy. While their husbands work 80-hour weeks, they spend mornings leisurely reading the paper, afternoons playing tennis and socializing, evenings walking the dog through quiet, peaceful neighborhoods. As far as I can tell from the movie, the husbands do all the real work around the house too: planning and supervising new construction projects (like putting in a new swimming pool), doing the yardwork, organizing family vacations and dates with the wife. Even when grocery shopping, the husband comes along with the checkbook to pay for it all.
I watched the 1975 version of the movie, so I noticed much of the dialog feels anachronistic and even silly today. At one point the main character confides to her friend that she once "dabbled in Women's lib", like it was some secret outlaw organization. None of the wives have, or apparently ever had, careers of any kind, and they show no detectable interest either. It's hard to tell whether that's part of the script -- to make you feel the pain of their lack of self-fulfillment -- or whether it was simply not something audiences would have understood.
Today we live in an odd time of transition. The Post-Stepford America of the 70s and 80s went through a long period where it became not just an option, but an expectation that women hold down full-time business-oriented careers. Through today's eyes, the Stepford wives look not so much suppressed as, well, lazy. Instead of sitting around all day waiting for their husbands to come home, why aren't they doing something? Meanwhile, today's post-70s men have moved on. There are no men-only associations. Fathers drop the kids at daycare because the mothers need to get to work early. The ironic legacy of Stepford is that most families can't afford to have one person stay home all day, even if he or she wants to.
The reviews for the 2004 remake are disappointing, but now I want to watch it anyway just to see how the filmmakers dealt with the cultural transition. Are the wives at work too now? Are there Stepford husbands who are programmed only to please their wives? Or -- I hope not -- did they leave the basic premise alone and recreate a world that no longer exists?
This looks interesting. A $15 device that claims to make it easy to "unzip" corn on the cob. From FactoryDirect2You.Com
I read about in Wired Sep 2006.
Here's a neat trick to give yourself an arbitrarily large number of email addresses. On Gmail, just use whatever username you normally use, followed by the character '+' followed by anything else. For example:
myname+work@gmail.com gets delivered to myname@gmail.com
I'm going to use plus addressing whenever I fill out an online form so I can track how people get my email address.
Brad Feld has the interesting insight that a content publisher should worry most about the 19% who are left after the 1% of people who will actively participate in any new online venture (give up on the remaining 80% who are contributors only and won't actively participate). He also points to Tom Evslin's site where you can even download an Excel file to model this.
My quick take: you engage the 19% by offering them a way to participate that is brain-dead simple. For example, Amazon's "Did you like this review" feature--just click yes or no and you're done. No registration, no typing, just click on a link and you're done.
I also think the world needs something to expose your passive activities (e.g. surfing from link to link) in a way that helps you build content and maintain privacy without specifically needing to enter something.
The End of Medince by Andy Kessler
This is another of those "lucky-rich Silicon Valley guy writes a book just for fun" books, with a style similar to Randy Komasar's Monk and the Riddle, though not nearly as good. As a former technology analyst, he could have written an excellent and detailed summary of the companies working on medical technology, with keen insights on their various prospects (and for all I know, maybe he did write a private book like that), so to be fair, I think he wanted his book to be interesting.
On the other hand, it's a fun read if you're interested in how many rich friends he has, or the countless important people who love to chat with him in various vacation spots. He's trying to be chatty, and "regular-guy", so there are way, way too many irrelevant side remarks and bad jokes (at least 300 out of the 335 pages), but there are a few interesting items in all that fluff.
I learned two things:
I admire Andy's insight for how Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship and technology will reinvent medicine, but if you want to learn about the future, this is not the book.
Jane Potaschnick is # 1 on the Homethinking.com list of realtors on Mercer Island. The site claims they crawl the web for data about number of homes sold, length of time on market, etc., in order to produce the rankings. Stephanie St. Mary is #177.
Jane Brace is #23 for Dover, Massachusetts.
The New York Times has a lengthy article about pressure on that 6% commision that real estate brokers make, regardless of how much work they do and regardless of the price of the home. The Seattle comany Redfin, featured prominently in the article, is a fully-licensed broker that gives buyers a rebate on the sales commision and is making traditional agents mad.
Quotes from Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at UC-Berkeley is quoted for pointing out that the 6% system benefits nobody, not even the brokers, who spend most of their time searching for new clients--a fixed system like a retainer or salary would benefit them more.
Redfin looks like a cross between an online store (like Amazon) and a traditional hands-on broker. You have to log into their site to get all the info they promise (e.g. neighborhood reports that are more detailed than MLS), so I couldn't check for myself, but the site looks like they understand the online experience.
One thing I thought was neat is how when agents refuse to sell to online buyers, Redfin contacts the seller directly.
Today's Seattle Times has a front-page article predicting that home prices nationwide are going to fall. They quote from PMI Mortgage Insurance calculations that show a 50% or greater likelihood of housing price drops for Boston, San Francisco, and San Jose, in contrast with Seattle where the risk of falling prices is only 11%.
But who cares about averages? What matters to you is how your own neighborhood is doing. The online edition of the paper offers a more detailed breakdown that shows
The bottom line is that long-term I still think Mercer Island is about as protected pricewise as you can get. It's an island, with its own (strong) school system, with a fixed number of homes and residents. People will always want to live here, making home prices about as secure as they can get.
[Kiplinger's Sept 2006 says] check http://www.expedia.com/cars to find the best place to fill up before returning your rental car. Or jump to the source and use http://www.gasbuddy.com (the place Expedia gets its data).
The Windows Live team has just released the best blogging tool ever: Live Writer. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it really has made it so much easier to write blogs. So far I have it working effortlessly with my Work blog (this one), my personal one (with Blogger--which I've been using long before they it became Google) and one I keep at WordPress (which, once I've had more time to work on it might become my main one).
I like blogging for several reasons, but the main one is that it makes it easier for me to keep track of what my friends find interesting. I follow hundreds of RSS feeds, scanning them regularly for updates, which is relatively easy these days because most people only post once a week or so. Hopefully that will change when they see how super-easy it is to post with Live Writer.
We're getting ready to head out for a two week vacation back East, which means lots of reading time. Here's what I'm thinking for my pile:
The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells
The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler
What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
by John Brockman
The Purpose-driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
by Rick Warren
by Martin Seligman
The Intelligent Investor Rev Ed. (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham
NPR had a nice review, saying this Russian-made film based on the science fiction novels of Sergei Lukyanenko is a horror movie with effects like The Matrix and some unusual plots. They’re right. The special effects are not only good – lots of the “bullet time” of stop-action that you see in Matrix for example – but they actually add to the story.
The basic idea is that the world is full of “Others”, otherwise normal-looking people who have been born with special powers. These Others are divided into two warring factions, Good and Evil, with the world basically at peace because of a truce whereby the factions agree never to force a new Other to one side or the other—everyone must choose for him- or herself. The truce is alternately enforced by good Others at night (Nightwatch) and bad Others during the day (Daywatch).
The story would be hard to follow except the special effects help you see the otherwise ordinary world through the eyes of the Others, with battles everywhere until the climatic ending.
This is one of those films that I’m glad I saw just for cultural reasons: it's Russia's highest-grossing film. It’s new and original enough that I’m sure I’ll hear about it in conversation with somebody someday and it would be very difficult to explain without seeing.
I haven't seen Inconvenient Truth, but I bet it's pretty good if it's anything like this podcast by Al Gore that I heard recently courtesy of the Stanford Center for Social Innovation.
Oh, and remember that question I had last month about ice at the north pole? Well Al Gore answered my question. Of course ice melting at the North Pole won't directly raise sea levels, but there's not that much ice there in the first place. Something like 90% of the world's landlocked ice is in Antarctica.
This week's Economist adds
If all these weather forecasts come true, where will be the best place to live? Probably not fast-growing south-western cities such as Phoenix or Las Vegas. With few trees and plants to cool things down through evaporation, and with heat pumping out of buildings and cars (what is called the "urban heat island effect"), these cities may roast. Up in the mountains, skiers too will have a tough time of it, as snowpacks melt.
For those who like rain, Canada may do nicely. Most models show Mexico getting drier and Canada wetter in the future, according to Isaac Held, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By extension, northern parts of the United States will generally get wetter, and southern parts generally drier. The Pacific north-west may not be too bad. Summer temperatures west of the Cascades will rise by up to 1.7° C, as against up to 2.2°C for areas east of the mountains, predicts Clifford Mass of the University of Washington. Seattle may get cloudier in the spring and early summer. That is a bright spot of sorts, on an otherwise unhappy canvas.
Pasted from <http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SNNSTSD>
I've had two hard drives crash over the past few years. The data is (mostly) backed up, so I'm not willing to pay hundreds of dollars to have a professional do something that I consider optional, but it would be nice to get the data back if possible. For example, I have most of my CD collection on one of them. I can always reburn those CDs, but that would be a huge hassle.
Anyway I keep dreaming of a magic way to get the data off the drive for free, and I thought my day had come last week when somebody suggested that I put the drive in the freezer. "A pro I talked to says half the time, that fixes it long enough to recover the data," he said.
So I put the drive in the freezer overnight and the next morning I gave it a whirl. At first it seemed to work -- there was none of the usual unnatural beeping sound. But after the drive warmed up a bit (literally), it started making its funny noises.
So, cross that idea off the list. Any other suggestions?
When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.
“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular — I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”
Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover, and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just for that buyer.
Fader's view of the future includes scenarios such as the following: A consumer is watching a baseball game on TV and has a laptop by the couch. With the laptop, the viewer calls up a replay of recent action via MLB.com. 'Things are clearly moving in that direction,' says Fader. 'I'm never going to watch 'Grey's Anatomy' over a [portable] wireless device, but I may watch a preview before seeing it on TV.'
The Jan 14 Economist mentions the Zheng He map, supposedly dated 1418, showing the world with remarkable precision. If true, it would be astounding evidence that Chinese sailors went around the world long before Europeans, and vindicate many of the controversial claims by Gavin Menzies in his best-seller 1421 The Year the China Discovered the World. Turns out that radiocarbon dating confirmed the dates mentioned by Economist, but controversy remains.
I'm surprised that nobody links this with discovery of steel implements found in the Ozette community, in Western Washington. A mudslide in the early 1400's buried the village long before Europeans arrived. Where did they get the steel?
Anyway, we are very proud of our new Odyssey and now understand why you see so many of them on the road.
