Emperor of Ice Cream Blog

Standardized Tests

X. J. Scott — 2011-12-05T17:12:48-05:00

I was looking at the example questions from our standardized state tests this year for 3rd graders.

For English competency testing I found the following passage followed by questions to test understanding.

In 1889, Queen Margherita and King Umberto I of Italy took a vacation in the seaside town of Naples, Italy. The queen saw people strolling outside eating pizza. She wanted to try some pizza for herself.Raffaele Esposito was a popular pizza maker in town. He was chosen to make a pizza for the queen.Esposito wanted his pizza to be extra special. So he made a pizza using the colors of the Italian flag: red, green, and white. Red tomatoes, green basil (an herb), and white mozzarella cheese went on his patriotic pizza.Esposito baked his creation, and it was delivered to the queen. She loved it. She sent a note of praise and thanks. Raffaele named it Pizza Margherita in honor of the queen. Soon everyone wanted to try it.

The questions are then as follows:

How did Raffaele Esposito feel about Queen Margherita?Identify two clues the author includes in the passage to show that Raffaele Esposito feels this way.

I found these questions annoying because the text says nothing about Esposito’s feelings about the queen, and what he did, which is a well known story from the history of pizza, is simply being a rational person, not an emotional one.

In the scoring guide it gives example correct answers as essay text saying things such as “He loved the queen.” The text does not support that though.

Here is my answer, which would receive a 0 according to the established scoring criteria.

How did Raffaele Esposito feel about Queen Margherita?

Raffaele Esposito was a talented businessman who owned a restaurant in Napoli in the 19th century. When the queen came to eat pizza there having heard of this regional specialty of Napoli, he felt the traditional topping of garlic and oregano (known now as Pizza Marinara) would not sit well and made a new pizza style with cheese, basil leaves, and tomatoes, mimicking the colors of the Italian flag. The queen enjoyed this and sent him a note thanking him. The original note is in the restaurant which still stands to this day, and is now called Pizzeria Brandi. A wise businessman, Esposito prominently displayed the letter and started marketing the garlic-less pizza as Pizza Margherita, after the queen's name. This called potential customer's attention to the fact that the queen, a celebrity, had eaten there and given it a good review. That is being a smart businessman.

The above text leaves out much of the full story. Also, it does not say how Esposito felt about the queen. His actions were consistent with what an intelligent business owner would do in similar circumstance and do not reflect any particular "feelings" about the queen. I suspect that he appreciated her having stopped to eat on that day and was thankful she sent a note since it enabled him to establish his restaurant as the sort of place where famous royalty eats. Marketing the event by naming the new pizza style Margherita was an excellent move to accomplish this.

Identify two clues the author includes in the passage to show that Raffaele Esposito feels this way.

The text does not give clues to Esposito's feelings. It only discusses historical events, somewhat inaccurately, and outlines rational business decisions.

Your Pal - Oil Symbiote Bacteria

X. J. Scott — 2011-09-15T10:25:41-04:00

Depending on who you listen to, one or more of the following may be true:

Bacteria are the largest consumers of petroleum and are eating half of the gulf's oil.
Bacteria are nature's safety cleansers who removed all the oil spill from the BP incident, naturally, effectively, and for free.
GMO Bacteria can be patented and used for oil spills. They are designed to have much more aggressive growth rates and have the advantage of toxic byproducts that will turn earth into a desert while consuming all oils and fats on the planet, including that in your body. GMO products are “green”, environmentally friendly, and completely harmless when they escapes to the environment where apparently it spontaneously chooses to stop eating oil because it is so well behaved.
GMO Bacteria eat garbage and produce petroleum as a byproduct. Soon there will be unlimited oil and no garbage. The bacteria eat only true garbage and never mutate. It is safe. Perfectly safe. Green and environmentally friendly.
Natural Bacteria live deep within the earth and are producing oil as we speak. The oil will never run out.
Engineered Bacteria improve the quality of oil in existing wells.

Which if any are right? Who knows.

Whistle while you work

X. J. Scott — 2011-09-08T19:31:23-04:00

Dolphins have signature whistles that only one dolphin regularly makes, but other dolphins will use that whistle when around the dolphin it belongs to. This means that dolphins have names for each other and respond to them.

I wonder where they get the names, if dolphins make them up themselves at a certain age, or if their parents or group bestow them. Also, do they change names at certain points in their lives?

The world is standardizing on the modern western authoritarian FILL IN THIS FORM WITH FIRST MIDDLE LAST IN ORDER TO RECEIVE 'RIGHTS'.

Too bad.

Many tribes don't assign names at all for some time or assign a fake name to fool bad spirits.

It's extremely common to change your name at each life change.

The whole western surname thing is so ethnocentric as well.

In South India they do this naming scheme:

Grandpa: Q R S
Father: R S V
You: S V M

You have your father's name and your grandfather's given name, and then yours. There is no persistent surname.

Self Sabotage

X. J. Scott — 2011-07-12T02:56:42-04:00

I was reading an article in Slate about how movie studios are making mistakes in handling sales of their product.

This reminded me of some experiences I have had with certain big studio DVDs:

Forced coming attractions you can't bypass.
Forced ads you can't bypass.
DVD cases with no inserts or information of any kind.
Poor quality transfers.
DRM that installs rootkit malware.
DRM that prevents play on the computer's DVD software, forcing the user to rip it before watching it.

Absolutely none of these things are necessary. None of them are intrinsic to DVD technology. All of these things are choices Studio MBAs make to intentionally make the product worse, to destroy the usability and user friendliness of this product, and to alienate the customers, driving them away from the product.

To be sure this does not apply to all DVDs. But it does for quite a few of them, and in an unpredictable way, which then creates a Market for Lemons and undermines the entire industry.

The solution, which I don’t think will be adopted by the big players, is to make a good product, and don’t intentionally sabotage the product so as not to alienate customers and destroy the market. Forty years ago, the American auto industry in Detroit started in with the idea of intentionally making bad products that would break down in order to increase sales. This is related to the doctrine of planned obsolescence. How did that work out? Detroit has depopulated since then and now is a post apocalyptic wasteland nearly devoid of human life.

In the Slate article, the author spends considerable money each month on cable, DVDs, premium cable, Netflix and Hulu Plus and ends up unhappy. It really sounds like he is watching too much TV, but that is his issue. Here on the farm, we have a giant antenna that picks up HD digital broadcast TV stations from the big city 85 miles away, for those pretty rare cases every few months when we might want to watch broadcast TV. That is supplemented with used and remnant DVD purchases, Hulu, and YouTube. Really the quality of broadcast TV is not so good compared to the thousands of amateur productions on YouTube. As far as movies, cable would not be as high quality as DVDs. When the DVDs we purchase try to block being played, we simply rip them and watch the ripped version. Kind of inconvenient, but it’s certainly fair use given we have paid for them and they won’t play otherwise.

Is the US spending enough on health care?

X. J. Scott — 2011-07-11T23:20:23-04:00

See the following graph for more information about why we need to spend much more money to protect the precious health of all Americans.

http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876a6070f970c-800wi

(From: National Geographic, The Cost of Care)

Similar graphs make the identical case for spending more on state schooling.

Health Care vs Sick Care

X. J. Scott — 2011-07-03T20:45:10-04:00

There is no such thing as a health care industry. The term itself is offensive propaganda.

Health care means eating real food without a bunch of toxic chemicals and pesticides in it, being cautious or moderate in your exposure to dangerous substances and activities, getting exercise, and staying sane by which I mean trying to avoid being born in an oppressive and mentally stressful police state that makes lies of the truth and the truth into lies. Health care is not something you buy or that is provided or controlled by some external party. Health care is things that you yourself do for your own benefit.

Health care does not mean eating low quality giant corporate food sold by giant corporate stores which leaves you hungry because it has almost no nutritional value, so you eat too much and become obese then you buy corporate diet pills, then buying low quality corporate controlled for profit surgery for a hack to excise the fat, then when the pesticide residue gives you cancer you buy corporate controlled for profit radiation and chemical poisons to kill the cancer, then more corporate controlled for profit surgery to remove the cancer caused by the corporate produced toxic GMO pesticide drenched frankenfood.

When I was young there was no such term as “health care industry”. There were doctors, and there was the drug industry, there were hospitals and clinics, there were insurance corporations. None of these deal with health care though. They deal with sick care. People don’t use this system to take care of their health. They live in dysfunctional ways in an unhealthy environment and when that environment poisons them and makes them unwell, they go to the sick care industry, which often then denies them treatment, misdiagnoses them, gives them drugs that make things worse, and/or submits them to endless stress inducing bullshit until they get cancer and die.

No one in the past, other than perhaps the most cynical and manipulative corporate sociopaths, were calling for everyone to be forced to buy (what Matt Taibbi called) “dogshit insurance” plans from a corrupt but massively profitable insurance industry that conspired to cut off their care if they ever actually became sick after years of useless payments. But now all the morons in the world (99% of the population) is screaming for this system as a “human right” and attacking those of us with sense as if we are conspiring to block people from this “health care” because we are elitists who want everyone to die. That is all bullshit and the advocates who aren’t brainwashed know it. If you support the current solutions that are being forced down our throats by this corrupt industry’s lobbyists, you are a rube.

Ticks Love Gasoline

X. J. Scott — 2011-06-14T10:50:25-04:00

Every time I go to fill the lawn mower from the plastic gas can, there are from dozens to hundreds of ticks under and around the cap that rush out and leap on my arm and start crawling up it. This has happened with more than one gas can. Clearly ticks are attracted to gasoline fumes.

Digital Watch Rant

X. J. Scott — 2011-04-13T16:11:46-04:00

I have various watches whose batteries have run down over the years. Some months ago I bought batteries for them and then unsuccessfully attempted to open them to change the batteries. Failing this, today I took them to a watch shop to have the batteries replaced. One of the cases did get scuffed due to the clamps needed to remove the back, so it wasn’t just me that had problems opening these things. The watch expert set the time on the analog watches, but told me that the digitals it would be up to me to set. I thought little of this until I got home and tried to set the time.

There are four buttons on each of the two digital watches I needed to set. Three buttons are labelled, but the labels are useless for this task because they do not label them according to the time setting mode. Clicking on buttons revealed a number of screens, warnings to “hold to start timer”, notifications that the timer had accidentally been started and so forth.

The unlabeled button is considerably harder to press. I vaguely recall years ago having to press it hard while pressing other buttons simultaneously in strange patterns. I also started to recollect decades of older people asking me to help set their digital watches and then being frustrated as I spent 20 or 30 minutes each time trying to figure out how to do so, each watch being slightly different, none being obvious and often having to give up. Hadn’t thought about that in years. Then I remembered the whole deal with setting VCR timers, which was similarly inconsistent and often completely impossible without reading a long error filled manual first which was written in badly translated language and then having to guess. Without the manual one was doomed. I also recalled telling these sorts of stories in the past and then being told by people how easy it was to set their VCR clock, with the implication being that they were brilliant geniuses having figured it out and I was obviously a moron.

Looking around in 2011, I don’t see many people with digital wristwatches. I see occasional analog ones, which are very easy to set. Most people use their cell phones as watches now, and those not only automatically set the time, but they track time zone changes automatically as you drive or fly around the country.

I know this is controversial, but I think all these user interfaces were terrible, and were essentially impossible to use. By impossible I don’t mean that it couldn’t eventually be figured out. I mean that it took far more time and trouble to figure it out than any reasonable person would tolerate for what should be a trivial task.

Googling on “how to set a digital watch” there are dozens of articles, each describing a different method specific to one type of watch. Reading through the first several articles, not one of them described a method that worked with either of these watches. This is a failure of design. Setting the time is not a conceptually complicated task. Doing so on an analog worked fine and worked the same on all watches.

Digital watches should have implemented the same interface as analog. Pull the knob out to put in time changing mode and turn it to change the hours. There are plenty of digital knob designs that have endless turning nowadays, they are common on synthesizers, and are found on mouse wheels. That interface worked fine and should not have been abandoned. The replacement of four buttons and mystery button pressing sequences is not an improvement.

This also reminds me of a car radio I once had. It took me several years before I found out that the way to set stations was to hold down station buttons for five seconds. That was not obvious at all. Once I understood it, yes, it was easy. But then the next car radio worked a different way.

Any time a designer is contemplating having buttons that do multiple things that are not labelled, or buttons that do several very different things depending on how long they are pressed they should stop and ask themselves if this is the right design. If it’s just a shortcut, and there also exist alternative methods of doing the same thing, then it’s not a problem. But if the only way to do something is extremely unobvious, unlikely to be accidentally discovered, and not labelled, it’s probably going to be a problem for many users.

Another problem is arbitrarily different interfaces. If you are going to have a new interface, it should be better than existing well known ones. For example, analog watch interfaces work fine and are well understood. There is not a single digital wrist watch I have ever seen that is any improvement whatsoever in the ease of use of the analog watch interface. Therefore, the interface should not have been changed. This is simple logic. Likewise the interface on VCRs. They should have either used analog style knobs or decoded time signals that have been encoded on TV transmission signals for years. Modern cell phones do have an improvement over analog watches though, they set the time automatically.

Designers responsible for digital watch like interfaces should do the world a favor and stop designing things. There is no excuse for such abysmal interfaces, and abysmal interfaces have been a curse upon mankind for decades. It’s not surprising people gave up on them when cell phones came out with a better design. For those of us without cell phones, the answer that is least frustrating is to have an analog watch.

And finally, I remembered that the last time I dealt with this watch in 2000 I found that it was programmed incorrectly regarding whether 2000 was a leap year and gives the wrong day of week for all dates after February 28, 2000. There were a number of developers back then who knew that there was a 100 year exception to the 4 year exception, which they gleefully programmed into their systems, not having studied the issue fully where they would have realized that there is a 400 year exception to the 100 year exception. I talked to one of these developers in 1991 who was gleefully bragging to me about how brilliant and exceptional he was for knowing about the 100 year exception. When I informed him about the 400 year exception, which meant that his exception was breaking year 2000 leap support rather than fixing it, he shrugged and said “Whatever. When 2000 comes around, I’m not going to be working there any more anyway, so it’s someone else’s problem.” That statement left a bitter taste in my mouth that remains today, 20 years later. What unimaginable hubris many incompetent designers have.

Recognized Holidays

X. J. Scott — 2011-03-14T18:11:10-04:00

Each culture has their own festivals, celebrations and observances.

Among others, we observe the following ones.

date	observance
July 20	Moon Day, Interplanetary New Year
August 17	Indonesian Independance
November 16	Moon Pie Day
March 14	Pi Day
First Friday in May	No Pants Day
Third Sunday of May	State of Franklin Decoration (Memorial) Day

Consume to obtain Benefit

X. J. Scott — 2011-01-17T02:32:58-05:00

I have long been disturbed by the use of the term “Human Resources” when talking about people who work for giant corporations.

The definition of resource is “any physical or virtual entity of limited availability that needs to be consumed to obtain a benefit from it."

That is a good description of the evil that corporations do though. Consume the worker until there is nothing left, nothing more to give, and then discard him like a used tissue.

How does one reconcile any moral path with the objectification and dehumanization of people by calling them Resources. Resources are things. People are not things.

The term “Human Resources” is very offensive. Anyone using this term should be regarded with suspicion.

MBAs have destroyed OceanSpray CranGrape

X. J. Scott — 2011-01-03T11:47:25-05:00

I used to like OceanSpray Cranberry drinks, except for their use of corn syrup. Recently they have switched to sugar beet sugar, mainly because beets are now genetically modified and producers can’t resist converting everything to health-threatening frankenfood.

The straight Cranberry is pretty good though.

I also bought some of the CranGrape, which I had not had in years. I was shocked to find that there was absolutely no flavor of either Cranberry or Grape. It tasted like a poor copy of artificial grape KoolAid. There was nothing reminescent of real grape, it tasted totally fake. It left a sickly aftertaste, followed by a burning sensation on my tongue that lasted for over 30 minutes. And then stomach cramps. If you have had real OceanSpray CranGrape in the past and bought a generic copy that tasted like this you would immediately say “Wow this sucks, it is nothing at all like the real thing, it tastes like bad KoolAid.”

I did remember this drink used to have the ingredients “filtered water, high fructose corn syrup, concord grape juice from concentrate, cranberry juice from concentrate, ascorbic acid”. So I looked at the label to find what had gone wrong. The label now reads “Filtered water from concentrate, grape juice from concentrate, cane or beet sugar, cranberry juice from concentrate, carrot juice from concentrate, fumaric acid, natural flavors, sodium citrate, ascorbic acid, citric acid”.

They are no longer using concord grapes. Clearly it is white grapes, which have little flavor and are used as a drink sweetener, and then they are adding fake grape flavor. Don’t be fooled by “natural flavors”, that merely means the flavoring compounds are derived from turpentine instead of synthesized from raw chemicals. The Cranberry juice is far enough down on the list to explain why it can no longer be tasted.

Folks, what this drink is is nothing more than premixed grape-flavored KoolAid, using white grape juice and genetically modified beets for sweetening. It’s not CranGrape at all, and the correct price of grape KoolAid is 15 cents a gallon, not three dollars a half-gallon.

Congratulations OceanSpray accountants with MBAs from Harvard. You’ve destroyed another premium brand and replaced it with crap, all for a buck. No one is fooled by this though. This is not really a natural food product, nor does it taste good.

Mystery of the Million Molars

X. J. Scott — 2010-10-03T01:51:02-04:00

When I was 7 years old, we lived out in the country. My friend Wes knew about an old house that had been abandoned by a dentist. The dentist might have unexpectedly died or been killed, I can’t quite remember. We rode my pony (that I had bought with egg money I had raised) out to the homestead which was several miles from our houses. The abandoned property was in a forest of oak trees and the ground was always littered with oak leaves and acorns. The old board and batten house was locked up but outside there were many wooden tables one after another that were standing in the open outside behind the house in this oak forest, the occasional sunlight piercing through like rays in a cathedral. These long wooden tables were covered with stacks and stacks of little cases. Opening the cases revealed dental molds of people's complete teeth. It looked like they were used for making dentures. We would ride out there and sit in the shade and tell stories and talk and spend hours looking through these teeth and read the names on the labels and wonder about the people from years gone by that had had these molds made by a long gone dentist.

But that's not the strange part of the story.

The strange part is that a dozen years later, around age 19, I lived about 50 miles away from there. My friend Dee and I would go hiking in a valley near the interstate. It was a lovely area with yellow waist high grass that one forded as they ran through. You could duck and hide easily. I remember one time during these walks Dee ran into a coiled rattler snake she almost stepped on. It raised its head and started rattling. She started talking to it, “Hello there, I bet you are as scared of us as we are of you, aren’t you sweetie? It’s OK...” After a few minutes of this the snake calmed down and stopped rattling.

There was a small river there and a handmade wooden car bridge across it that led to a really neat playhouse that the unknown but awesome father had built. The playhouse had many rooms, two stories, electrical hookups and a small kitchen with a sink. It was really the coolest playhouse imaginable, but it was decades old, abandoned and falling apart. I would sometimes go sit there and draw in my sketchbook.

We found the related house that had been confiscated by the state when they put in the Interstate. The house was sealed up and there were notices on the doors that it had been confiscated by the government in an eminent domain action. I always respectfully ignored the house. Dee was not that way though and when I showed her the house she went up and kicked in a door. We then looked through the house. There was no furniture, but in one room was an abandoned meth lab. The other rooms were empty. I remember the ochre carpeting that indicated the house had been contemporary in the 60s or 70s.

We came into the garage as the last room. It was the only room that was not empty. In the garage, packed in cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling against every wall were thousands of little cases containing —— dental molds.

Synchronicity, Pitaya

X. J. Scott — 2009-11-11T19:24:21-05:00

Last night I was reading an article that mentioned that three staple crops of the ancient Hohokam culture (the people of the southwest that lived in communities such as Casa Grande) were corn, mesquite, and pitaya. I hadn't heard of pitaya, so I looked it up, it is the fruit of the cactus Hylocereus undatus, known in English as Dragon Fruit. (Pitaya is used to describe the fruit of certain other cacti, that of the Organ Pipe Cactus is called Pitahaya Dulce.) I've had various cactus fruits but seen or heard of pitaya, even though I fancy myself an expert in exotic fruits and there are few I haven't heard of.

Today, following an unrelated link, I stumbled into a recent comic strip that featured the pitaya.

Inside Out

X. J. Scott — 2009-08-28T22:30:24-04:00

I recently saw Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. It's a challenging and dark, but brilliant film. If you haven't seen it, you should see it before reading this or anything about it.

Very clever films give you a lot to think about and analyze. If you think enough and watch many times you can get at clues to the hidden meanings and broader themes of the film.

Other films in the art genre are made nonsensical to prevent this analysis of finding meaning.

This film is unique from either in that it does has deep meaning, but the film has been intricately designed to prevent you from finding it, and should you eventually realize that, then you have unravelled the puzzle of the film.

Kaufman said to one interviewer, "The film is not about what I think it is about, it is about what you think it is about." An obvious analysis of that statement is that the film is open to interpretation and different people might read different things into it. However, Kaufman's statement is a trap. He wants you to think that is what he is saying, in order to mislead you. But actually he told you the truth, just in a misleading way. The film is about what you think it is about. It is about your process of trying to find out its meaning. The plot reflects this as well, the film itself represents the search for meaning, and the impossibility of finding meaning. You may not know what is real. You may not interpret things correctly. What is the purpose of your life? Even thinking we know, we can not ever really know. Peel away one level of the onion of meaning, and there is another within, just as intricate.

Despite the film's intentionally constructed imperviousness to analysis, its intricate design rewards rewatchings, which are necessary in order to understand things such as how calendar time is managed as a structural element.

Frogs Falling from the Sky

X. J. Scott — 2009-06-14T14:47:59-04:00

Frogs and fish fall from the sky from time to time. Rare but it happens.

Latest event was a few days ago in Japan:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090610/tod-it-s-raining-tadpoles-in-japan-town-c359f57.html

Shut Off Maneuver

X. J. Scott — 2009-05-23T00:47:11-04:00

I was standing next to a car pumping gas today. Suddenly, the gas started spilling out all over the place. In decades of using gas pumps, this was the first time I ran into a pump whose auto-cut off didn't work. A very dangerous and messy situation.

I went into the station to pay and told the proprietor that the auto-shut off was broken on the pump.

He said, "I turned that thing off."

"You disabled the auto-shut off? Why?"

"People need to be more responsible. Pay attention to what they are doing. I give them complete control. I turn on the pump, it is up to them to turn it off. People comment on this, they need to pay more attention, not be thinking some machine is going to coddle them. Every day, people come here and start the pump and go to the bathroom. They come out and there is 100, 200 gallons or more spilled on the ground. I tell them they need to be more careful, pay attention. Of course they have to pay for all the gas, so it's an expensive lesson, but next time they'll pay more attention to what they are doing. See, I am helping them out."

"But the auto-shut off is there for a reason, to prevent accidents. It's only a matter of time before an explosion."

"And whose fault is that then? The fool who could not be bothered to mind his gas, that's who! Not mine!"

Anyway I stunk like gas for the rest of the day and decided we should avoid that station in the future. For context, you should know that almost every patron of this station pumps while smoking, and then comes into the station smoking. The shop is always filled with cigarette smoke and when people are done they just toss their butts wherever they like.

Blocking Yong

X. J. Scott — 2009-04-11T18:09:16-04:00

When the goats are young kids, they are exuberant and energetic. They run to and fro, leap in the air, and frolic. They dive into milk bottle or follow a butterfly passionately, then run away distracted by the next thing that comes along. As they get older, this type of life vitality decreases gradually but continuously, and finally, a very old goat moves more slowly and deliberately and is not interested in running to and fro, except as necessary to escape a predator.

Obviously the same process is seen in other animals and in humans. In Chinese Medicine, the life energy chi can be very strong even when one is an old person. There is also the youthful energy yong, which decreases with age as part of the natural life cycle. It's not just in China though, every culture in the history of the world is aware that children are more wildly energetic, and easily distracted, than old people.

Until now. In our culture, children being themselves is now a diagnosable disease called ADHD. That children are not as serious and focussed as adults is seen as a medical condition which is treated using powerful amphetamines, which are known to cause irreversible brain damage and permanent, negative, behavioral changes in everyone, especially children whose brains are still growing.

In China, no one would try to block the yong that is appropriate for youth because it is seen as in balance for that time in life. If you did block it, Chinese medicine, thousands of years old, predicts the results would be symptoms of premature aging. And what do we see in amphetamine users? Premature aging. We've all seen the booking photo sequences that show the progression that starts with an attractive young woman, and after 3 or 4 years of amphetamine abuse, she is a wrinkled, toothless, worn out old hag.

Apparently, that is what America wants for many of its children. A short, brain damaged life. A futile attempt to contain yong.

But why? Is the profit of the pharmaceutical industry so important that we must sacrifice our very children to it?

Wall Street Propaganda

X. J. Scott — 2009-02-22T17:47:44-05:00

This animation of the economic collapse just came out:

http://vimeo.com/3261363

This is a well produced and slick piece. Also, all they say is true and can't be contested.

However, the piece is propaganda that misrepresents the situation.

How can this be if all they say is true?

Because they carefully selected what not to say.

Not pointed out in the video:

The failed subprime loans are a minute fraction of the bailout and of the loss of investments. The reason is that the mortgage assets were leveraged outrageously and used to invest in nonsensical investment instruments that were based on nothing. There is a quadrillion in loss right now, which is more than the value of all the assets of everything in the entire world. There are $200 billion in subprime defaults, and these represent actual property value of about $100 billion, so it's really only a $100 billion actual loss. None of the bailout has gone to this, but if it had, it could all be paid for with $100-$200 billion and the houses given away for free. It's the fraudulent pyramid scheme wall street had going that collapsed, the mortgage defaults aren't a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

In addition, they do not cover the reason for the defaults. Brokers passed investments on to funds and did not care that the mortgages would go bad. So they got dishonest appraisers and set up a system where you have average home values of $750,000 in a working class neighborhood with average salaries of $35,000. There were lots of adjustable rate mortgages where the first year is $1000 monthly payments on a million dollar shack, then the rate resets, and payments go to $4000. Obviously a family with $35,000 yearly pretax income can not make these payments and will default, that is a foregone conclusion that was known decisively by the mortgage broker. Why give the loan then? Because the brokers are not loaning their own money. The brokers knew for a fact that the people couldn't pay that and the mortgages were intentionally structured to make them fail because they WANTED them to fail, thinking they would then make even more money when they got to resell it in a year and wake a new commission. They also knew that the system can been set up to tweak all these investments that were guaranteed to fail to seem like AAA investments, so they could sell them to investment funds owned by school districts, small towns, and pension funds with no problem.

None of this is covered, instead the slick and expensively produced animation makes Wall Street out to be the victims and the mortgage holders to be the bad guys.

I find that to be pretty interesting in itself.

Washing Dishes

X. J. Scott — 2009-02-07T18:42:24-05:00

There are quite a few "studies" around that claim to show that electric dishwashers are green friendly and use less energy and water than handwashing. Although the studies have been done by various "researchers" worldwide, an interesting commonality is that all the studies were paid for by appliance manufacturers, and all of them compare the most efficient washers in the world under the most restricted circumstances against the most wasteful theoretical hand dishwashing practices that can be imagined. A typical result is to say that a dishwasher will use 4 gallons of water and handwashing uses 25-40 gallons.

Let's use some common sense here. 30 gallons is the capacity of your entire water heater, and is enough to fill a full sized bathtub. Have you ever run out of hot water while handwashing dishes? How many of you have even seen a house that had a sink that was the size of a bathtub? Do you believe that you use anywhere near 30 gallons while handwashing dishes? I didn't think so!

The studies will hide in their footnotes some assumptions and tricks. Let's look at some of them.

One trick is instead of measuring how much water is actually used, estimate the amount of time it takes to wash dishes instead. Then, you can multiply that time by some large flow rate numbers and get outlandish water usage numbers. In other words, assume that the kitchen plumbing is capable to deliver a lot of water quickly and is run at that maximum flow rate during the entire dishwashing session. So they will say, well a really good plumbing system can deliver 5 gallons a minute (GPM) through the kitchen sink, and people run the water for 6 minutes, so that is 30 gallons. This is already wrong for almost everyone and not a reasonable assumption that any honest researcher would make, or would find by actually measuring data. Now, 5GPM isn't an unreasonable rate for an outside hose spigot connected to 1/2 pipe. But kitchen faucets aren't outdoor faucets. If you want to fill a bucket of water to wash your car, you know it will fill faster on an outside spigot, or using the bathtub than using the kitchen faucet. Almost all kitchen faucets in the US nowadays have a flow regulator that limits them to 2.2GPM flow. In addition, few people run them at the full rate while washing dishes. As a calibration, I run my sink at the moderate rate I use while rinsing and filled a gallon jug. It took exactly 2 minutes, so the flow rate was 0.5GPM.

Another assumption is that no pots pans or very dirty items will be washed. This is true for people who just reheat frozen food, but if you actually cook your meals, you'll have to wash pots and pans as well. This will almost always involve soaking the pans a bit, and often these pans can't even be washed in a dishwasher anyway so you have to do the sink batch anyway whether you do the dishes themselves by hand or in the washer. And if you are using the sink for pans, why not share the water and do the dishes there as well? This is never addressed, pots and pans are assumed not to exist in these studies.

Another assumption is that no one stops the sink while washing. They just run that faucet to wash and to rinse and the water flows right down the drain. I suppose there are people that do this. It might even make sense if washing a few items. But a typical washing session here fills the entire sink with dishes at least twice, and the sink is certainly stopped up for this.

Let's compare their theoretical numbers with some real ones. Here's how I do it, and I assert that this is a pretty common method.

I stop up the sink. Then I start to fill it with warm water at a moderate rate. I do scrubbing at this time, while the sink fills. I might do some rinsing as well. Eventually it is half full. Our sink is average sized, each basin is 16 by 14 by 6 inches. It holds 5.8 gallons while full, so half full is about 3 gallons.

Washing the dishes, they come out and go on the counter. Then I stop up the second sink and start a 1/2 GPM trickle to rinse. I start with the large items. By the time there is about 1 inch of water in the sink (1 gallon), I am done with the large items. The plates and utensils then I can rinse in that 1 inch of rinse water.

This way I do two sink loads. I might stretch it to a second load over the day. If I need the use of a sink during the day, I'll drain the filthy water, but retain the rinse. Then, the next wash starts with the clean rinse water from the previous wash. So the total water per wash tends to average out to about 2-3 gallons, and that includes all the pots and pans that can't be done in the dishwasher anyway. This water goes into the septic system and ends up watering the lawn via the leach lines, so the water is entirely reclaimed.

I also have used a two-bucket method that uses about 1.5-2 gallons altogether, but doesn't handle very large pots and pans. The advantage is the water can be poured on the garden in some cases, however if there is much oil in it or any meat residue I don't really recommend that as it will attract varmits to your garden.

The studies claim that the most efficient washing machines will use 4-5 gallons. That's true, but it's not any washing machine that you are likely to own in your home so it's irrelevant for most people. A typical washing machine uses 6-10 gallons for a normal cycle, or 8-15 gallons if it's 10 or more years old. Plus it uses electric heaters to dry the dishes, which uses a lot of energy, plus dishwashing detergents have to be more harsh in order to wash things without scrubbing, and often contain phosphates. Plus, most people find with the efficient machines they have to prerinse their dishes anyway in the sink if they want dishwasher to have a chance to get the dishes clean.

Even if you have generously sized 6 gallon capacity sinks and fill both of your wash and rinse basins to the very brim, that's 12 gallons. A more reasonable "full sink" usage would be 10 gallons, which is the same as the washing machine, but includes the complete washing of the pots and pans and any presoaking or such that is not accounted for with machine usage.

The results of my research? I claim both that it's pretty difficult to use 20 gallons or more to hand wash dishes (unless doing them in the bathtub for some reason), and that typical dishwasher usage is not really 5 gallons per load when you factor in actual machines in homes and the need to clean pots and pans. I also claim less energy usage due to no heat drying, and less soap usage due to leveraging the ability to scrub.

All these other studies, yes all of them, done by guys with PhDs who have university positions, are a bunch of hogwash. For them to call themselves researchers or scientists is a bunch of bull as well. The typical university "scientist" is nothing more than a paid propaganda pundits for for-profit corporate interests. Alas, the brainwashing works well because the false claims are then uncritically regurgitated by naïve idealists who do not do a proper critical analysis. Because this second level of propaganda propagation consists of sincere, trusted regular people, the ideas spread like wildfire, gaining a thought momentum that makes their obviously false claims difficult to get people to challenge.

Hot Cocoa

X. J. Scott — 2008-10-20T23:58:47-04:00

Sometimes in the winter I'll drink hot cocoa late at night, it's mainly for the micronutrients in the cocoa beans, which can clear up mood and thinking when stagnated.

2 cups milk
2 teaspoons dutched cocoa powder
4 teaspoons sugar

Put in a pan and heat at a bit below medium for under 10 minutes, stirring and pushing to break up the cocoa clumps. Makes a 16 oz pint or two 8 oz servings.

Nothing complex here and the recipe is probably printed on the side of the cocoa powder box.

I mention this all because it amazes me that few people do it this way. Instead they'll buy these boxes with single serving envelopes mixed with water that only make 6 ounces. There's 6 or 8 envelopes in the box that costs $3, so it's around 50 cents per 6 oz cup, or $1 per 12 oz mug to make the envelope version, which has low cocoa content, chemical anti-caking agents, uses powdered milk. It has no chi to it, no micronutrients and is sickly sweet, you just feel bloated after the envelope ones, not to mention there is residual aluminum from the envelope.

Making it from scratch, which is trivially easy, only costs the price of the milk. The sugar costs 1/20 cent or so, and the cocoa is $2 for a box that lasts about 3 years. And the result is it tastes like it should.

People who use the envelopes are just being foolish. It doesn't really save any time, costs a fortune, and produces a significantly substandard result.

2008 Salsa #1

X. J. Scott — 2008-09-10T13:55:12-04:00

1 (large) Cherokee purple or Black Krim tomatoes (size of a beefsteak)
4 (small) Golden Sunburst yellow tomatoes
1 hungarian wax pepper with all seeds
1/4 onion
1/2 lime
1 teaspoon sea salt

Dice up tomatoes, onion and pepper. Toss together with salt and juice from the lime.
In this case the hungarian pepper was ripened to red and that made it less hot than normal, so kids can eat this one.

Marzipan Recipe

X. J. Scott — 2008-05-05T22:14:28-04:00

Marzipan is a sweetened almond paste. It is very delicious.

Marzipan is now considered something like candy, but historically it was invented as a way to make almonds keep longer since sugar acts as a preservative. Marzipan is a great traveling food in the past since it has high protein and vitamins in the almonds, and energy in the sugar. Marzipan has a good energy to it and just a small amount can refresh you.

Most Americans have never had marzipan, even those who think they have. Occasionally a cake shop will make a cake with a marzipan topping, or a croissant stuffed with marzipan, but this too sugery stuff is not real marzipan any more than the drink that comes out of the machine at the gas station is real cappuccino.

When I was young, one of my mother's German business associates gave her a round pie shaped box with a half kilo piece of marzipan upon which was impressed a three dimensional bas relief of the German town where the client's business was based. This was the first time I had marzipan and it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I ate it slowly, only a pinch a month or even less frequently. It was so delicious that a single pinch could be savored for an hour. I managed to make that pie of solid marzipan last about 5 or 10 years.

Mom mentioned to another German friend that I liked Marzipan and he began a tradition of buying me a bar each year when he was in Germany. These semicylindrical bars were covered in thick semidark chocolate. Some had raisins in them. They also had rum. I felt the chocolate and raisins detracted from the marzipan and would remove the chocolate and eat it separately. The addition of the rum was not objectionable — I think marzipan can be plain or with rum. But covering it with chocolate is a bit too much.

I would make each of these bars last a year. I started looking for domestic marzipan but could not find any of adequate quality. The closest was that See's Candy shops had a marzipan covered with chocolate that was fairly good, but it did come covered with chocolate, which was an impediment to full enjoyment. You could select your own pound of chocolate there, so I would get these and candied ginger in a box every few years, it was an expensive treat.

Where I live now there is no real marzipan available at all, and even the cake shop style marzipan isn't easy to find.

It occurred to me the other day that it had been over a decade since I last had marzipan, which is one of my favorite things of all time.

I read up on marzipan, got some almonds, and did some experiments. And now I am able to make real marzipan that is exactly the same as the best german marzipan. Perhaps you'd like to try as well.

The key is that you'll use an egg white to bind the almonds and sugar together. One egg white will correctly do about 6-8 ounces of almonds and an equal amount of powdered sugar. If you try to use less than 6 ounces of almonds, you'll end up with a sticky paste and not the firm solid malleable substance you really want.

Note that you will be using raw egg whites and there is no cooking involved, so if you don't have a safe source of raw eggs free from salmonella, you should probably just skip this whole project. There are other ways to bind the almonds and sugar together, but I think you should do it right or not at all, otherwise just get the fake stuff at the cake shop or candy store.

I bought a 12 ounce tray of unsalted almonds. I used half of them. I put them in the blender in two batches and blended them down as fine as I could go. The powder got stuck on the sides of the blender, so I kept stopping it, pushing the powder down off the sides with a chopstick, then putting the cover on and doing it again. I think it's best to only do 3 ounces at a time, otherwise you get too much powder in the blender.

You can then add the powdered sugar to the blender if it was clumpy, or mix it in a bowl with the almond paste if not. I did this step to taste, using my memory of the correct sweetness, which is not very sweet. Really fine marzipan should be half sugar and half almonds. Commercial Marzipan can go down to only 1/4 almonds and 3/4 sugar to save on costs since almonds are rather expensive, but that mixture is way too sweet. Don't use granulated sugar, use powdered.

Now with the sugar and almond powder in a bowl, I added about a 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Real vanilla, not fake. It's getting hard to find real vanilla due to civil upheaval problems in Madagascar. Most real vanilla comes from northeastern Madagascar. I read recently that the age of consent in Madagascar is 21, and that is the oldest age of consent in any country. That seems so strange. Madagascar has lots of adorable ring tailed lemurs and those weird Baobob trees. My best friend growing up is now a renowned expert in the Malagasy language that is spoken in Madagascar. He spends time there on occasion. I should ask him next time I talk to him about the vanilla situation. In any case, if you don't want to use real vanilla, stop right now! Just get the cheap marzipan at the cake store. We are making real marzipan here. Let's proceed.

Toss in a bit of lemon juice as well. Not too much, maybe a teaspoon or a half teaspoon. We don't want this too wet. Oh, and that egg white. Put that in now.

Stir and stir and stir. It should seem like you don't have enough liquid, but keep mixing. I do this by hand with a fork, not by any electro-mechanical device. You're going for a consistency kind of like bread dough. Once it gets to be pretty well mixed, you can fold and knead it, and dip back down to pick up that stray powder that didn't mix in yet. Kneading and folding helps the almond oils release into the sugar. Then roll it up into a ball. My marzipan ball was about 5 inches across or so. Now, stick this in a container in the refrigerator for a day or so, and then you can cut of slices pretty thin about 1/8 inch thick. Eat with strawberries and or serve with brandy or something. Not sure about the brandy, it seems a good idea but I don't have any brandy. Let me know if you try and it seems a good pairing. I tried it with beer since beer is also German and I found that beer isn't the right thing to have with marzipan, it clashes.

Very high end pastry shops in big cities might have marzipan sculptures in the display case. These will be little apples or oranges or such things that are sculpted out of marzipan which can be sort of like edible Play Doh to a baker. They paint the outsides with food colors and glaze them to make them shiney. These little treats are probably just like real marzipan, but I wouldn't know since I would never pay $55 for a half size marzipan apple.

In any case, this will introduce you to the delights of genuine marzipan. Don't eat a lot of it at once. Good marzipan is something you just eat a tiny bit of at a time.

Cogs in the Machine

X. J. Scott — 2008-04-02T08:22:19-04:00

There's a study that just came out that took a real detailed look at high school graduation rates across the entire US, and broke it down by Urban, Suburb, Country, Race and Gender. Here's a summary of the results:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080401/ts_alt_afp/useducationsociety_080401184532

The institute that put it together has more details about the study here:

http://www.americaspromise.org/APAPage.aspx?id=10354

And that page has a link to the pdf file of the actual report if you're interested.

So here is the big summary. Rural areas have better graduation rates than Urban. Well that's not surprising, I think? And Suburban does best of all, but is close to Rural.

But the rates are much lower than I would have guessed if you asked. Lacking data, I would have guessed 90% of students graduate high school. But it turns out that nationally, only 69.9 of students graduate, but 74.9 percent in the suburbs and 73.2 percent in rural areas do.

Looking at the numbers where it is broken down by race, you can see that the whole rural/urban/suburban thing has nothing to do with location, but is really just a projection of racial distribution. Minorities are more concentrated in urban areas and not so much in rural and suburban. It turns out that only 50% of American Indians and African Americans who start high school ever graduate, 57% of Hispanics, 76% of whites, and 80% of Asians. So if you just look at the racial distribution of a school, you can account for the urban vs rural rates without even knowing it is rural or urban.

This is interesting since Tennessee has this bill up where they want to ban people from getting a drivers license until age 21 if they don't have a diploma. What that bill is basically saying is that 50% of the African Americans and American Indians, like Cherokees, in our state will be banned from having a driver's license. Clearly this will make it impossible for them to get a job, and will drag them even further down into the cycle of poverty. I have to wonder if that is the real goal of the bill since there's no doubt that the legislators are aware of the racial component to graduation rates.

People reading this might start to get some ideas in their heads about racial intelligence, but I'll tell you that graduation rates have little to do with how smart someone is. People who get expelled are more likely to drop out. In many schools, minorities are more likely to be expelled, and are punished more harshly for the same things that white kids do. Minority students are also more likely to have to drop out of school to support their families who are more likely to be poor. A high achieving minority youth is far less likely to be hired for a job than a similar white one. I know many brilliant and creative people who are black and hispanic and indian, and I know plenty of white folks that can't convert a fraction to a percentage.

Here is my controversial angle on this. Most everyone assumes that high drop out rates are a bad thing, and society must do anything it can to get graduation rates up — by force if necessary. For example, the bill I mentioned. Come down hard, like the Gestapo. Either you graduate, or we will destroy your life. But wait — what if a good portion of the 30.1% who didn't graduate are the lucky ones? What if they are the ones who escaped destruction?

Could this be? I happen to have professional experience tutoring and teaching college students from well regarded school districts, so I know how things really are. Folks, regardless of what the line is the school systems are feeding you, you need to know that most high school graduates are not qualified to do much. Basic, rudimentary literacy can be assumed, yes, but many graduates do not have enough functional literacy in either math or reading to be able to properly participate in a system of representative government, which requires an educated and thoughtful populace. If our freedoms are going to be kept, they have to be understood and defended. For the most part, that is not happening right now. Our educational system is not to blame here, but rather should be accredited: for this is not an accidental plan, but rather one conceived by the power brokers in society who can only thrive with their wicked schemes as long as the population remains ignorant of the foundations of democracy. When people place a higher value to spend their evenings watching sitcoms instead of reading, when people pop a prozac and press the close button rather than show up at a school board meeting and demand accountability when a 12 year old girl is strip searched by school officials looking for a government unauthorized ibuprofen tablet, oh horrors.

You see, perhaps the real issue here is that the smart people are the ones who drop out of high school and move on with their lives and their education. Education is something you earn for yourself, not something someone programs you with, and the sooner you escape the system, the sooner you can get on with a real education. One involving working for yourself, thinking for yourself, and putting together a fine library of those classics that are no longer taught. The foundations and values of civilization have been set aside to make way for sex education, nuclear education, commercialized holiday education, brand name education, and field trips to the movie theatre.

In addition to the free minds issue, High Schools in this country are not exactly known for being a wholesome educational environment.

I've got kids, and at this time, all things considered, I don't think it would be in their best interests to attend any of our local high schools. This has nothing to do with the teachers or administration though! It has to do with the system and the values that schools have taken on nationally for whatever reason.

Like almost all american high schools, the high schools here expose kids to drugs and violence. You learn more about conforming to fit into a clique than you do about learning to think for yourself or be your own person. There are also the issues of zero tolerance punishment, over the top expulsions for being tardy too many times, for using a cell phone or an aspirin. It's not that kids should be allowed to run wild, but these are minor things that in the past either would not have been issues, or would have resulted in suspensions. There is also general culture of trying to instill an ethic of unquestioning obedience to all authority.

I find all these things contrary to the educational ideals that Thomas Jefferson promoted.

I would prefer to have children educated to always question orders to see if they are the right thing, to ask if they are just, to see if they promote freedom. To contemplate themselves what is right and moral, and not to merely conform to systems of rules and facts that have to be memorized. I would prefer for them to learn to be free people, to be able to think for themselves, to be the captain of their own destiny rather than cogs in the machine that are just following orders. To me, the individual free in both actions and words is the highest expression of the ideals held by Jefferson.

Ultra Geek Out: Homemade CPUs

X. J. Scott — 2008-03-30T23:31:58-04:00

We have a family friend, Glen, who was an important NASA scientist on the Apollo project. As a mathematician, he invented the idea of using a Fourier Transform to filter data on a digital computer. This was used to filter out signals coming back from in-flight rocket sensors and reduced the data processing time and increased the volume of usable data substantially. Reducing data processing time meant more flights could be scheduled and more adjustments could be done per flight and more things learned from each flight. Processing turnaround was the main bottleneck in the moon program at the time and solving it was the key element in not only winning the race to the moon, but doing it far more safely than would otherwise have been possible.

Glen built his own computer from TTL logic chips back in the early 70s. You programmed it initially by flipping nice thick metal toggle switches. He toggled in an assembler to bootstrap it, and eventually worked his way up to a keyboard and CRT for it. While visiting him one summer, I played an adventure game on it.

Today I read about a teacher in Portland who built a computer not out of TTL logic chips, but out of physical relay switches. He teaches computer architecture and if you want to understand that topic, watch his 1 hr video.

Then visit the web ring of homemade CPUs, linked from the bottom of that page. What fun!

Among the links is this web page:

http://www.magic-1.org/

Yes, that web page is being served to you by a webserver running in Minix, a small Unix, on a computer designed and built by hand using discrete logic units wirewrapped together.

Details of that computer and a photo:

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

In the Dog House

X. J. Scott — 2005-12-16T18:50:22-05:00

I have a dear friend whose mother is a animal horder. She has to take care of her mother's health problems as well as bring food for the dogs, both an exhausting process. Finally, after 15 years of this set up, the mother called the city and turned herself in! It seems she couldn't even get out of her bedroom at times because of the roving packs of wild animals that occupied the house.

So the city came out, and she tried to explain to them that she wanted to keep some of the dogs, but she would like for them to take the others away. The officials told her no, that would never do, and explained she had two options.

First, she could allow them to “do what was necessary”, in which case she would not be charged with more than 400 criminal counts of animal cruelty, public nuisance and health hazard. In addition, she can thoroughly clean her house and they will then consider not condemning it.

The alternate choice she had was that she could choose to resist their terms, in which case they would take her ass down. In other words, the “tough love” approach.

She agreed to the take the first choice.

My friend then went to take her mother out to town on the day of the city's big clean up operation. But before she did, she had to show the officials the “secret rooms” in the old pre-civil war farmhouse where the mother was “holding back” extra dogs that she wanted to keep.

So anyway, tomorrow is the third day of the dog kill. There are 400-some wild dogs living on the property. The animal control officers, including extras they brought in from up to 150 miles away, are shooting them left and right and stacking the carcasses like piles of corn husks.

What a relief this is for all parties involved.

Two-Em Dash

X. J. Scott — 2008-03-07T04:20:33-05:00

My favorite punctuation mark right now is the two-em dash. There is very little information about this mark on the web, and all of it is incorrect, claiming that the two-em dash is only used to indicate letters that have been left out of a word. I am here to set the record straight.

First, recall how the ellipsis is often misused;— and mis-kerned;— nowadays. A typical misuse is to indicate a pause in voiced or unvoiced conversation:

“I am not sure . . . let me think about it.”

This is unequivocally a complete violation of the proper use of an ellipsis. The ellipsis is correctly used to indicate when part of a quoted text has been left out. Using it for this other purpose leaves us wondering “Is he pausing in speech or is there something he said that the author is not revealing for some reason?” We often can't tell.

Some sort of dash should have been used in the above example instead. One possibility is the two-em dash:

“I am not sure —— let me think about it,” he said reluctantly.

If the person’s pause was not quite so long, the standard em-dash would have been sufficient:

“I am not sure — let me think about it,” he said sincerely.

The two-em dash is for long pauses that exceed the length of a standard em-dash pause. It is also used when you are hiding a person's identity by abbreviating their name, such as,— “During our expedition to Kathmandu, we encountered a Mr. Q——, a former barrister of London, tending mountain goats in a remote valley of the Himalayas.”

Reading List

X. J. Scott — 2008-01-25T22:07:25-05:00

Here are some things I've been reading lately:

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Naturalis Historia by Caius Plinius Secundus
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

Biscuits and Gravy

X. J. Scott — 2007-12-18T19:25:51-05:00

I looked in our cookbooks for a gravy recipe, but they all involved drippings from meat. What if you don't have any of that around? I made up the following recipe and it turned out real nice.

1/3 lb turkey sausage (1/3 of a frozen roll)
3 tbsp oil
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1 1/2 cup milk
6 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tsp salt

1. Defrost turkey and chop into small fragments
2. Fry in pan in oil with cumin and fennel seeds until cooked.
3. Shake milk, flour, salt, pepper in large jar to dissolve flour, get rid of lumps.
4. Add to turkey in the pan.
5. Cook, stirring, until of right consistency.

Chicken and Rice

X. J. Scott — 2007-11-04T16:58:12-05:00

I sometimes forget why I am shunning certain products. This is a new category to keep track of food rants so I remember.

The rule is that if I have a problem with a food source even once, I will never buy it again. Likewise, a single incidence of food poisoning at a restaurant is enough to never return. It doesn't matter if they 'fix' things; if their process allows customers to get poisoned, they can never be trusted again.

Tyson Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts

I do not like store bought chicken at all and that is why I raise my own chickens. But I have problems getting cooperation regarding killing, plucking and dressing the chickens. As a result, most of the chickens I have raised for meat end up living so long they get eaten by dogs, possums, and chicken hawks, discouraging. Somehow store bought factory chicken product appears in the freezer. Organic free range is considered less valuable than the corporate product by society.

This is a 2.5 lb sack of processed white chicken meat. Mostly it is water. The bag indicates that the chickens are 'fifteen percent' injection filled with a 'broth', that consists of salt and 'natural flavorings'. (What is that? Beef and pork juice? Turpentine extract?), and then 'water glazed' before being 'flash frozen'. So the meat is not only injected 15% full of water, but it is covered in ice, which is in addition to the 15%. So defrosting it you lose a substantial amount of the supposed 2.5 lbs. Now that's just a rip off really, and what is with adding flavors to chicken? Is that to mask the flavor of rotten meat, or meat so filled with antibiotics that it is bitter? Probably.

Frying this frozen stuff you find a pan that is actually filled with water with chicken floating around in it. That's how much water was added to it before freezing! The problem is that in addition to this, there is this very foamy stuff foaming all over the place and making foamy noises. Where is this foam coming from? From inside the chicken, the chicken is exuding some chemical that is creating foam. So we finished cooking this batch and gave it to the dog. I hope he doesn't die from eating this Tyson 'chicken', which is obviously unfit for human consumption.

Food Club Extra Long Grain Enriched Rice

Then we made rice. This is a 2 lb bag of Food Club (generic brand of Food City) Extra Long Grain Enriched Rice, distributed by Topco and a "Product of USA". Just plain rice, but with the usual vitamins added: Ferric Phosphate (Iron), Niacin (B-2), Thiamine Mononitrate (B-1), Folic Acid (B-9). The rice had a very noticeable chemical flavor that I would compare to the base of some cheap perfume. It left a weird pasty feeling on the top of my mouth. Shortly after eating a few spoons of it my stomach was hurting and the rest of the family is now complaining of stomach aches.

Now I think the USA sourced rice is fine here, what I worry about is the "vitamins", which are undoubtedly sourced from China. I used to work in the vitamin importing business and by far the cheapest chemicals are for China and for good reason. The drums you get are filthy and the chemicals will be filled with dirt, mouse droppings and not be the right color. Assaying the chemicals almost always would should that the chemical was not the right amount specified. Sometimes you'd have to send the chemical out to be reprocessed. Sometimes it would be the wrong chemical. Lately, chinese chemicals have been in the news, where chinese companies will substitute rat poison or antifreeze for things like additives to baby food or animal feed. This is very common and is the way the chinese do things. Most American import companies do not re-assay the chemicals though, and so the "vitamins" you are taking to improve your health are often actually poison or worse.

Our national food supply is not safe. Not safe at all. This is a systematic problem and as such, is a far greater threat to our lives than so-called terrorists taking pot shots at buildings and dams.

What do we learn in school?

X. J. Scott — 2007-09-27T03:32:39-04:00

Sometimes I think about my old friend Pete. He was a real friendly guy, very tall, was a great person to have fun with. I think I met him in 7th grade or so, and last saw him when he was 22 or around there and he was doing pretty well at that time.

One day when he was around 21, he asked me to read to him a letter he had gotten, and so I did, and then he thanked me and admitted he didn't know how to read. I thought that was pretty interesting since he had graduated from high school without any problems and asked wow, how did you do that. He said it wasn't really an issue, it was never necessary to know how to read. This was an astonishing claim and I wondered if there was some exaggeration about his lack of skill. Some brief questions revealed that he was totally illiterate. He couldn't read at all.

How did he manage to pass tests, I asked. He said that he was just able to do it.

Why didn't any of his teachers have special classes for him or anything? The answer was that in 13 years of schooling, none of his teachers had noticed he was illiterate. He certainly would have been glad to get some help in this, but the topic never came up in school and he didn't even think such extra help was possible in any case. This was a top rated school in a very well regarded district.

I found the situation very interesting for two points.

First, it appeared that reading was not a necessary skill in schools, and perhaps in life.

Secondly, I found it very enlightening to know that a student could make it through 13 grades, which is 1+6+6*6 = 43 separate teachers, and none of them had noticed in any fashion that he was completely illiterate, and all passed him. He never repeated a grade or a class.

A few years later, I worked as a math and physics tutor at a community college. I was the only one in the program able to teach calculus. This worked out fine because most of the demand in the program was not for calculus, but for very basic skills. How basic? I had access to placement statistics. Around like 70% of students needed remedial math. About 50% of students placed only for the bottom most class for math. This class, which was called Concepts of Numbers or some such, how to count to 100, which number is bigger than the other, and what is an integer. The second class after that got into addition and subtraction, fractions and powers of ten. I would say these classes corresponded to kindergarten and first or second grade respectively. I was not able to teach these classes because I would not know where to start with this when dealing with an adult college student, but I did observe and interact with those that did, as well as hundreds of students in the student body and most students genuinely did not know how to divide numbers or what fractions were. Most could actually count and do addition and subtraction given paper and time, but they made mistakes. This was a pretty good community college in a good area.

A few years later, when I was at the state university, I observed similar levels of math competency, though the numbers that were at this level were smaller, more like 20% of admitted students did not know fractions or how to divide. But that was an exclusive school that only took the 5% of top high school graduates, and required high SAT scores for admission.

Years after that, I tutored in a program for homeless people and saw similar levels of competence, which led me to realize that lack of education was not a problem for homeless people since their skills level was average for the population.

From these and other experiences over the years, I realized that the normal situation in the US for the majority of graduates is that they know how to add and subtract and count, and can do multiplication. But they do not understand fractions at all, and can not do long division at all. Algebra is completely beyond most high school graduates, even though they took two years of it and passed.

I could see that people probably had abilities only that were necessary, and knowing how to divide is simply not something people do. Fractions are only understood to the extent that if you need 1/2 cup of flour, you fill the cup up to the mark that says 1/2. Dividing a recipe in two or doubling it is not possible, except to measure that 1/2 cup out twice.

I was not sure how students could pass algebra though and not have any ability or understanding of it a couple years later. Had they simply forgotten?

The answer came when I worked teaching high school math and computers. My math students had completed "advanced algebra" and were prepared for a challenging textbook in geometry. The results were disasterous. It took me a half semester before I figured that the reason most of the students could not solve the problems or understand things is they knew no algebra at all, but believed that they did since they had passed, often with high grades. In asking them in detail about how things worked, I discovered that algebra was taught by the teacher assigning problems, then giving the answers, then guaranteeing that only the homework questions would be on the test and only as multiple choice questions.

Students were shown:
y + 2 = 6, y = ?
The next day, they were told:
y + 2 = 6, y = 4
was the answer. They memorized it and picked c from a list with their #2 pencils:
a) y=0
b) y=2
c) y=4
d) y=6

If you asked them instead to solve this problem:
y + 2 = 5, y = ?
... they could not solve it. They were completely stumped. They complained the question was unfair to have on a test because that was not one that they were 'taught' in class.

This was the only way for the students to 'learn', other teachers told me. In this case, 'learn' meant to pass the multiple choice test. And how they did that was not by learning concepts of algebra, but by memorizing the correct answers, and then being able to recognize them from a list of multiple choice. Students had developed excellent abilities to memorize useless and arbitrary data in order to succeed, and their teachers were happy with these results.

So at last I understood how my buddy Pete had managed to pass all those tests.

Red Barn's Wickedly Delicious Blackberry Ginger Brew

X. J. Scott — 2006-07-03T22:18:19-04:00

You want to know about something that's freaking awesome? Well I'm gonna tell youns all about something that's freaking awesome. And when I say it's freaking awesome, it's not just so freaking awesome, it's so SO SOOOOO freaking awesome, let me tell you dudes I ain't a messin' with you man, this is some deep, some awesomely deligioomousious sassalilicaly yum yum freakin wow wow. Yeah. Burp. Hey there.

Dangit I HATE Corn Syrup and all it represents. Down with the Man and Down with his lousy Corn Syrup and his stoopid lobbiests that write junk articles about how it is the wonder wonder yum. That junk ain't no wonder wonder yum yum, my friends, that junk is some stuff that is baaaaaaad for you and ho. And it tastes like gunky sticky crud.

You needs some real nutrition, some real food, my friends.

BLAAAAAACK berry. That's right, it is **BlaCkBeRRy*8 season right now!!! You go get some, we need 2 or 3 cups of them right now, go pick them. And stop by the store and get some fresh ginger root while you at it. I wait.

Back yet? Good. A treat awaits.

Lay out this stuff on your counter:

3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp finely grated ginger
1/4 tsp yeast
3 cups fresh blackberries
water to fill 2 liter bottle
Funnel
2 liter soda bottle, empty and clean
Balloon

OK, now dump the sugar in bottle and with the yeast using the funnel.
Grind blackberries with some water in blender to create blackberry slurry.
Fine grate the ginger - really fine.
Pour slurry into bottle on top of ginger.
Fill the rest of the bottle through the funnel with cold water.
Place balloon over bottle neck - this captures the CO2 while maintaining pressure and keeping gnats out.

Leave on counter at room temperature for *72* hours (3 days)
Then refrigerate it for 12 hours.

It's gonna look like a big poop is stuck in the neck, but that is just the blackberry crud, don't worry you can eat it if you want it's not as bad as it looks. But the stuff at the very top, maybe gentle squeeze that out a bit, let's call it 'decanting'. By that time, the rest of the crud will have fallen into the bottle and be mixed around and there's no doing about that, just don't worry, it don't taste bad at all, no sir.

Pour this into a mason jar with some ice.

Put the original screw cap on the 2 liter bottle and back in the fridge.

Now, drink that mason jar, even the sludge at the bottom, go ahead, it's gooooooood. (yum)

You drink! You like! Frickeen-Awesome!!! This is the best hootch you ever drank ! Woo hoo! Dang boy, you need to make more bottles of this right pronto yee haw!!!!!!!!!!! And 100% natural and that's no lie.

Did I mention that it is rather alcoholic? You may have inferred that already.

This is the most delicious thing EVAR. I call it "Red Barn's Wickedly Delicious Blackberry Ginger Brew" and it is my own invention!!!

Try!! It will change your life!

Note: Please be aware that although delicious, this recipe makes very poor quality spirits. They are not aged and thus have byproducts of the fermentation process that will give you headaches and a hangover. Don't drink the half gallon all at once or you will end up sick as a dog.

Monte Dhamali, Ethiopia

X. J. Scott — 2006-01-03T05:04:50-05:00

Monte Dhamali is a striking black volcano in Ethiopia near the border with Djibouti. There seem to be marshes and salt flats in the area, and a strange tan mushroom formation on its southwest slope:

Satellite Image of Dhamali

Here are some recent pictures of Ethiopians:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/africa_ethiopia0s_remote_people/html/9.stm

The following site has photos of Ethiopia and everyplace else on earth, searchable by coordinates:

http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/ethiopia/

The de facto national language of Ethiopia is Amharic. It's related to Aramaic and has a funky alphabet which you've seen if you've even been to an ethiopian restaurant (highly recommended).

There is a good article on Amharic here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic_language

I was unable to view the language since I didn't have an ethiopian font installed. But the above article had a link to one at:

ftp://ftp.ethiopic.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/gfzemenu.ttf

I downloaded it and double clicked on it. Font Book opened up. I pressed 'install font'. And the characters on the web page instantly appeared! I didn't have to reboot or even restart Safari. Go Apple.

Siberian Wastelands

X. J. Scott — 2005-11-10T01:58:18-05:00

The images of these wastelands fill me with an ineffable bliss and awe that becomes ectasy. Exploring these areas speaks to me in many ways. Often, I am very wordy, but faced with this grandeur I am silent and can at best refer to the images.

1. Red Mountain
2. Julia Curves
3. Turquoise
4. Black Rectangle [Chukotka ICBM base - site photos here.]

Siberia holds a lot of interest for me and I've had some things I've wanted to share, but I just haven't. I'll skip those for now and go to surreal contemporary events.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is boycotting WalMart because after a member wrote to WalMart about their concerns about WalMart not saying "Merry Christmas" to all customers, WalMart wrote them back as follows:

“Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than ‘christmas’ which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with ‘christmas’ red and white are actually a representation of of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.”

This response infuriated the person writing and inspired them to call for a boycott of WalMart. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find me defending WalMart, but X-Mas really is a pagan holiday, although this was the first I had heard of either the aminita mascera mushroom, or Siberian Shamanism.

Here is an article on the use of improvised music in Siberian Shamanism:

http://www.hulu.de/en/trance_siberia/music_shamanism.htm

And here is a list of links to sites dealing with Siberian Shamanism:

~~www.buryatmongol.com/sibshamanism.html~~ (Update: Avoid this link, this site got hijacked by a disgusting porn site.)

So, now we know a little bit more about the mystery that is Siberia, all thanks to WalMart and the Catholic League.

Takla Makan Desert

X. J. Scott — 2005-08-17T17:50:04-04:00

I think most of us will be forced to admit that we have never even heard of the world's most desolate and horrifyingly remote desert, the insidious Takla Makan.

1. It has a lake of sorts, or would you call this a swamp?
2. A view from higher up.
3. But most of it looks like these dunes.

Geography is fun.

Vincent Van Gogh in Alaska

X. J. Scott — 2005-08-17T01:45:02-04:00

1. An incredible view of a river in Alaska.
2. A view from a little bit higher up.

Callipygian

X. J. Scott — 2006-07-12T15:08:10-04:00

Callipygian is a Greek word which historically was first used to describe this statue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo

Etymology (Greek):
kallos = beautiful
puge = butt

Otiose

X. J. Scott — 2006-08-10T23:13:15-04:00

Otiose means "serving no practical purpose". I ran into this word in a computer science article where the author casually dropped it into the flow, causing me to go "iuh?!"

Etymology:
Otiosus is Latin for idle.
Otium is Latin for leisure.

Whistle Pig

X. J. Scott — 2006-06-16T21:59:21-04:00

How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?

Or as many of you are probably more familiar with this proverb: "Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?"

Wood chuck is an anglosization of the Algonquian word for this North American native animal, the original word of which is lost.

The animal is legendary: Bill Murray spent a life time on the day dedicated to this animal and its uncanny ability to predict the onset of spring.

In Appalachia, we of course use the correct term for the animal, which is whistle pig.

Enantiodromia

X. J. Scott — 2006-08-15T23:32:01-04:00

Enantiodromia means the tendency of things to turn into their opposite. It is one of my favorite words because it is so useful. For example:

A government established to protect freedom will tend to become a government that rules by slavery.
An anti-drug policy will tend to increase the use of drugs.

Both of these are examples of enantiodromia in action.

Reëxamine

X. J. Scott — 2006-06-22T12:44:07-04:00

I saw this spelling of reexamine in the New Yorker this year. I want to say to the editor, for real, dude? You are spelling reexamine with an umlaut? It's like: Oh. My. Gawd.

Isn't this just an example of pretentiousness gone waaaay too far?

The New Yorker actually mandates this usage in their style guide, along with such wonders as "The New Yorker mandates that authors must coöperate to reëducate our readership." As well as zoölogy, coördination, and so forth. They also point out that the umlaut is no umlaut in this usage but is rather a diaeresis.

The correct punctuation mark to use when breaking up things in this way is the interpunct, or punt volat. It's used in Catalan to distinguish between the standard doble ela 'll' and the ela geminada l·l. This is exactly the same purpose,— to prevent letters from coalescing into a phoneme;— such as these common cases of double letters that could, possibly, be interpreted as a long vowel sound, if read by a space alien who had never read the New Yorker, and was not yet very familiar with English: “Ree-cha-mee-nay, what is that?”

The interpunct reads and flows better, it is not a distraction, people are used to it, and it does not bring the sentence to a screeching halt as it desperately calls attention to itself. Use it well. On the Mac, opt-shift-9 summons the interpunct.

"We, the punctuative literate, ask that the board re·examine its mandate that authors should have to co·operate in re·educating their readership."

Tiger Team

X. J. Scott — 2006-07-04T13:44:55-04:00

A tiger team is a group of highly trained commando types that try to break the security of a secure installation, in order to stress test the security.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_team

Scott Adams made fun of management's prediliction to inappropriately use terms by doing some Dilbert strips in which the boss started rambling about "Tiger Teams" but in inappropriate context.

Today's STS-121 shuttle launch brought this subject to mind as they were referring to the "External Tank Tiger Team", which is a group of engineers who are charged with designing a safer system in which foam doesn't fall off the space shuttle at bad times during launch. Here's references to the ET tiger team:

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/10/executive_summa.html
http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_space_story.jsp?id=news/JUL06206.xml

Arg! Use the term correctly! A External Tank Tiger Team would be a team that is launching the shuttle in the middle of a freezing rainstorm, to see if a new foam design falls off under these conditions. It's not the right term for the guys actually trying to improve the design, it's for the people who try to break the design.

Hierophantic

X. J. Scott — 2006-06-20T01:52:28-04:00

Hierophantic means pertaining to hierophants, the revealers of sacred mysteries.

Found this word on this page about a famous organic farm in Tennessee and the procreative practices of its members:

"While sexual and marital practices provided only imperfect and sometimes grudging support for The Farm's vision of an ideal alternative lifestyle, the ultimate sustenance of communal life was the queen of the sacral trinity-natural childbirth. Birthing claimed central importance as a physical, emotional, and spiritual ritual at the heart of community life. It was a communal rite of renewal that recreated and redirected the energies of the dyadic unit and reforged its bonds to the whole. The spiritual midwives who guided the couple through the birth had both a hierophantic and an educative role. They stood in place of the entire community at the birthing, because only the parents and the midwives were present during childbirth. While training the couple to achieve higher levels of intimacy and a deeper sharing of their experience, they reasserted the primacy of the community over the dyadic unit. The sanctification of the couple occurred in its reabsorption into the communal energy field. Through the transcendent, telepathic sensitivity of the process of natural childbirth, communal commitment was recreated, and the couple's consciousness was anchored in the community through the support system provided by the midwife network."

– www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/kerntext.html

I think it is true in general that midwives are hierophants and not just at The Farm.

Traffic calming measure

X. J. Scott — 2006-03-05T23:46:00-05:00

Euphemism alert:

Rather than fix potholes, the good fellows of the Tameside council, in consultation with engineers with many years of advanced training, have determined that it will be less bother to redefine them instead.

Henceforth, holes in the road will be appellated a 'traffic calming measure'. This is self-evidently highly beneficial to society, and also reduces the risk of injury to small children running after errant basketballs:

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/men/news/s/206/206521_potholes_are_traffic_calming_measure.html

Learning to Make Espresso

X. J. Scott — 2007-02-10T01:36:09-05:00

The coffee machine broke down some time ago and I couldn't find a replacement that was the type I like that was not expensive.

Brewed coffee is ruined by warming it on a burner as the aromatic oils that give coffee its earthy character quickly evaporate. So I wanted something with a thermal carafe aka thermos, which keeps the coffee warm through vacuum insulation rather than the dreaded externally applied heat. The problem with carafes though I found out from my last machine — Silurian Coffee Slugs! OK, not Silurian, I just made that adjective up to make it seem more exciting. But slugs nonetheless. Weird, weird slugs. I found that the carafe had all these slugs living in the innards of the complicated screw on cover, and when the coffee was done, they would slide out of their hidey-hole in the cap and crawl around in the carafe, consuming coffee, then return to the secret slug dwelling place. These were not normal slugs like any entomologist would recognize, but some freaky space alien slugs that would give anyone the screaming heebie jeebies, or at least it did to me. My goodness, it was creepy.

I tried to sterilize the whole thing by boiling the cap and the cap warped out of shape and wouldn't go back in and I couldn't fit the carafe under the filter anymore and there were no replacements and the machine was ruined. At that point I switched to an old French Press, which is a glass tumbler with a metal filter disk on a stick that you use to press the coffee grounds down to the bottom after letting the hot water steep in the grounds for a bit. Makes a real nutty tasting coffee, but it cools quickly. This press was decades old, and I was sad when it disintegrated after a few months of use, leaving me coffee-less.

Besides the carafe, another criteria in looking for a pot was that it use a funnel shaped filter and not a flat bottomed one. Coffee made with a funnel shaped filter tastes better as the hot water goes more evenly through the grounds.

The problem is that the pots I could find with both these characteristics start at $60, which was outside my budget possibilities.

It's been far too long without coffee though and so today I resolved — even if I had to think outside the carafe and funnel box — to purchase the least expensive device I could find that wasn't out and out unacceptable.

And after an hour in the coffee machine aisle, that happened to be a $24 cappuccino machine.

I've long been curious about these, but I've avoided them because I had heard that they are hard to use, complicated to clean, and it takes a lot of skill to get the foam just right. But hey this was the cheapest thing, and I love good cappuccino, although I was skeptical I had the skills to make it myself. I figured with practice I'll could probably figure it out, but didn't have hopes it would be as good as restaurant stuff.

For those who have not had it, real Cappuccino is not the stuff you get at the gas station or hospital from the automated machine that says "Cappuccino". That stuff is just cheap instant coffee with lots of artificial flavors added. Kinda decent if in the mood for that sort of thing, but it's not the same thing at all and the difference is like the difference between Champagne and 7-Up. Both have their place.

Real Cappuccino is a cup with espresso, steamed milk, and milk foam on top. The milk foam acts as an insulator and keeps the coffee warm longer. The steamed milk goes through a chemical transformation from the brief scalding and has a really different flavor from just adding warm milk to coffee. And espresso is an intense coffee made by driving steam under high pressure through a small canister of dark roasted coffee. The coffee is made from freshly roasted beans which are ground immediately before making the espresso, grinding to a particular sand-like texture. This takes more time and trouble than pouring from a pot: each serving must be made individually and takes many steps. For this reason, cappuccino can be very expensive at a restaurant or coffee shop, running $4 and up at most places.

Cappuccino was invented a long time ago in Italy by someone who tried every possible way he could think of to make the most delicious coffee possible, that captures and transfers all of the subtleties, details and highlights of the beans. In the end, brewing by high pressure steam extracted the most oils and flavor without damaging them, while leaving the headache-inducing toxins behind. The steamed heated milk was the nicest way to complement and tame the flavors of the espresso with milk and the foam was just an extra to keep it hotter a bit longer.

Italy is one of my favorite countries. I've been to lots of places and like to meander about without any plans and take things in. Italy is just one of the most pleasant places to live in the world. There is a wide variety of Italians and each region is like its own country, but on the whole Italians are passionate, fun, friendly and approachable people. Food is very important in Italy and even the worst of the food is fantastic. Things are made from fresh ingredients and the American value of doing everything on the cheapest way possible is simply not done. You don't compromise on the food, for food is life. In Italy, I cried and had visions after eating ice cream in Rome, which was so utterly brilliant that I could not eat ice cream for a year after returning, not even Hagen Dazs or any of the premium brands. There was no comparison. Italian ice cream was genuine and the best of the american ice creams was nothing more than a complete and obvious forgery sharing almost no qualities with the original. Coffee was also the same. Italian cappuccino was perfect in every way. It made you sleepy. It made you see coffee for the first time in your life.

Back in the US, I tried to find coffee like this, even visiting an Italian restaurant founded by recent immigrants who meticulously tried to do everything they could to duplicate the coffee of their homeland. It was quite excellent, but something was still missing. Over the years, I realized some things. You couldn't use tap water because that has chlorine. And you couldn't use bottled water because that is missing certain trace minerals that effect the chemistry of the coffee making process. It had to be unprocessed spring or well water, and the source of the water affected the taste a lot. Water was the most important factor, more so than the beans. Beans should be 100% Arabica, but not the cheapest stuff. You couldn't buy pre-ground, you have to grind the beans yourself. And you should be cautious about who roasted the beans, and make sure they are relatively fresh. Better yet, buy raw coffee beans and roast them yourself, though this is a nasty dirty business that must be done outside due to the smoke.

Anyway, I unpack the machine, grind up some beans that a close friend brought me back from a trip out of state, pour milk in my big coffee mug as a milk pitcher, pour the water in, snap in the coffee handle and turn the pressure cavity cap, and turn the thing on. It starts flowing after a few minutes, I switch the control to steam and swish around the steam nozzle in the milk. It seems to be frothing pretty good. Dip the nozzle down in the milk mug to heat and not just froth, and now the espresso is done. Pour into a 12 oz coffee mug 1/3 full, then 1/3 of milk, then spoon the froth on. This was the first time doing this in my life and didn't bother to read the instructions but it just seems kind of obvious, though I have seen them do this at coffee shops.

So, will this first batch suck, or will it be barely acceptable?

And here goes.... Hm, well now. This tastes 100% exactly like the cappuccino I would get in Italy.

Wow.

And that is something I have never had in the US at any restaurant, no matter how expensive. I think the well water is part of it, plus my intuition for the right size of bean grind. And I guess I'm a natural for the foamy step.

Yay!

Just then the oven beeped and my date-nut-raisin bread made completely from my own scratch recipe was ready, so took it out and made a slice, and put real butter on it. And after years of failing at the most basic baking attempts, somehow last year I got it together and now I have this whole bread thing down and this date-nut-raisin is better than any bread I have had in any bakery anywhere.

So I am standing about, feeling pretty mellow and quietly stunned and appreciative of my good fortune at having somehow done this right, and having discovered some great secret that I was searching for for years.

And I have three cappuccinos from that first batch.

I don't know if you've ever heard this, but great Cappuccino is a hallucinogen. I realized that in Italy. You feel really super mellow. It's not like the harsh caffeine in coffee at all. It's exactly like the difference between $100/bottle wine and Thunderbird wine that is aged in the bottle for 20 minutes on the assembly line before the screw-on cap is attached. One is harsh and nasty and gives you a headache and nausea, and the other is smooth and mellow and makes you relaxed and giddy.

Then the mind wanders and the visions come and colors are brighter. You might need to take a nap.

At the end, all you can think about is getting that next Cappuccino. But I know that if I make another one, I won't be able to stop and I will be making them all night long, until I run out of beans. Or until I start to get bad scary trips from excessive Cappuccino induced psychedelia. So it's just one pot for now.

Learning to Make Fire

X. J. Scott — 2007-02-06T17:58:32-05:00

Self-sufficiency is an important goal to me, and I value knowing how to do things for myself. However, sometimes I just don't know how do to basic things that everybody once knew how to do.

When I was looking for a farm, it was important that it have its own water supply, a spring or well. So I have a well and a pond and a lake here.

The house came with a modern wood stove, the WonderCoal 6000. This is an efficient wood stove that also runs on coal. But winters haven't been so bad and the baseboard heaters are easy to deal with and you can just turn them on in the rooms you are using so that the bill is less than if you had efficient central heating. The WonderCoal turned into a surface to stack things on top of, and although I had the chimney swept, I hadn't used the wood stove at all in the eight years I have been here.

During this last season, the tomatoes suffered from blossom rot. This is a brown spot that starts on the far end of the tomato. It is caused by a calcium deficiency in the soil.

I could also tell from the sorts of weeds that were growing, like broombrush, and blackberries, that the soil was becoming acidic, which is what happens after adding fertilizer to it for some years (in this case, organic on-farm goat manure.)

The most common solution is to add calcium carbonate, crushed oyster shells, or the like. These involve transporting sacks of stuff by truck and crushing oysters in factories and things that, while organic, are not sustainable, and also costs a lot.

One of the better solutions to both these problems is the one used in the old days: use wood or coal ash. The coal plant used to give away free piles of coal ash, but because of the high mercury content, they stopped this policy. Many farmers in this area replenish their fields by doing burning directly to the fields, but the slash and burn solution tends to only work for a single season and is mainly reserved for handling large grazing areas.

Three years ago, a huge lightning strike hit our beloved ancient tulip poplar and killed the top of the tree. This year, the top 40 feet of the tree fell off one day, leaving an enormous trunk of very dry and seasoned hardwood, and dozens of large branches blocking the gravel driveway. I dragged the branches off and then used the jeep and a rope to tow the trunk into the field.

This convergence of events made me start thinking about that wood stove again.

It took a while to unpile the wood stove, and move the things stacked behind it away. As I piddled at this, the days grew colder.

I didn't like running the baseboards in this very cold weather because they are not efficient at heating things from a very cold temperature. Also, it seemed wasteful to be burning coal in the coal plant to make steam, which turns the steam turbines, which turn the giant generators to make electricity, which is stepped up in voltage, transmitted to our power pole, stepped down to 220V, and then used in the baseboard to create heat which is like the coal originally gave off.

It makes much more sense and is more efficient to burn the coal in the house and skip all those conversion steps, each of which has an energy loss. Or to burn wood, if you have it conveniently lying around and you actually really need the wood ash that would be created from burning it. Obviously this was the Right Thing to Do. Also, I was freezing in the house and noticed that dishwater was starting to ice over at night.

I knew what to do, but was not sure I knew all the tricks. I put some discarded cardboard and crumpled paper and trash at the bottom, then put a bunch of small twigs that I had been gathering from the yard and simply throwing into a pile to rot, then put some logs on top of that. Light the paper, and the paper lights the cardboard which lights the twigs which burns long enough to get the logs started. It actually worked. It took a few hours to get going though and I was concerned the stove was too efficient at burning things slowly, but it finally started giving off some real heat just as it started getting cold this evening. I then placed a large pan of water on the grating on top of the stove which is for this purpose and that will prevent the air from getting too dry.

Now I have something to do with the dead wood, I have a place to put the twigs that continually fall from the trees when the wind blows, I no longer have to throw away paper packaging, I have a supply of mercury free ash for the garden which is entirely produced on my own land and requires no fossil fuels to bag or to deliver, and I can even boil water for spaghetti without having to use any electricity. It seems the right thing to do.

Trog now knows how to make fire. Grunt!

Sestertius non Denarius Habeo

X. J. Scott — 2002-09-25T17:47:00-04:00

It's hard to find good music nowadays but it is out there if you look for it.

I do believe that the issue with the music industry making less money these days has nothing whatsoever to do with people downloading mp3s. If anything, the availability of mp3s increases sales in the exact same way that playing songs on the radio increases sales. It's advertising the product. If people like the product, they'll buy it. It takes forever to download mp3s and burn them to a CD and the sound quality isn't that great and you have to make a label. Who has time for that? Another issue is that CDs cost too much. The closest Borders to here has the new Eminem CD for $19.99 on sale. With tax that's $21.94. I've paid that much for Jean-Michel Jarre releases that I have to order from Europe, but I don't want to pay that much for o domestic release that's a best-seller. But then again, if they can charge that much for a best-seller, more power to them. I do think they'd sell a lot more CDs if new releases were $9.99 and those that have been out a few months, $11.99. But what do I know, I don't have an MBA from Harvard now do I? I milk goats for a living so I must not have much economic sense. [As a quick aside, I think DVDs should cost less than CDs since you only watch them one or two times and a CD you listen to hundreds or thousands of times and is much more interesting than a movie. I'd buy DVDs for $5 and they'd sell a lot and the studio would make $5 for each person who watches it, or $5/viewing. Instead they sell the DVDs to rental stores for $19.99 and they rent it to 10,000 people so the studio makes $20 for each 10,000 people who watch it, or 1/5 cent per viewing. You tell me which makes more sense economically.]

The Emperor of Bones

X. J. Scott — 2002-10-13T02:35:09-04:00

I was at my mom's and talking with her and a preview came on the telly for some TV docudrama about Jackie Gleason.

Mom said she'd seen some reviews of the show out that the docudrama was going to show how nobody liked Jackie and he was mean and bad to work with. She said that's a total lie and I asked how she knew about it and got a great story!

One of her best friends was Sonny Helmer, who was a famous Jazz Trombonist. He ended up getting a gig at Disneyland in the New Orleans quarter to play Dixieland-style Jazz. He was a really funny and great guy and genius and part of his act was putting on a dress and playing the trombone in a virtuoso style with his feet while walking around the audience on his hands.

He had a swimming pool that was in the shape of a trombone and I remember loving to visit his house when I was small since he had a working pinball machine and a cigar store indian and all kinds of other kitchy stuff everywhere.

In his bathroom, he had a statue of a nude greek god placed in front of the toilet and it has a fig leaf over his crotch. Women would go to the bathroom to go pee and if they lifted the fig leaf, there was a circuit that turned on a red flashing emergency light that was installed above the outside of the bathroom door so everyone at parties at his house would play the game of waiting to see if the light would go off whenever a first-timer went into his bathroom.

Anyway, when Epcot Center first opened in Florida, Disneyland moved all their best people out there, including Sonny. While he was there, he ran into his old friend Jackie Gleason who had a band in Florida and asked Sonny to come and play for it when he wasn't working at Epcot. So Sonny did that.

Jackie showed up one day with this brand new huge custom made white Cadillac convertible — totally unique. Sonny thought it was the coolest car and talked about it for hours that night between sets before retiring to a hotel for the night.

The next morning, around 10 o'clock, the bell hop came to his room and announced that there was a delivery — he went out and there was the white Cadillac, with the keys and a ribbon, all for him!! He was ecstatic! He called Jackie to thank him and say it was too much to give him his special custom car. Jackie said, "I've still got my car — that one I just got you is newer than mine." Sonny asked him how could this be since it was a unique car. Jackie said, "I called the president of General Motors last night at 3AM and told him I wanted another one just like it for a friend and I wanted it by this morning before he got out of bed. He called in the workers and started up the assembly line last night, and they made that car just for you while you were sleeping!"

So Sonny was totally thrilled. Now he still had some things out in California he needed to get so he took this young guy who was playing in the band and conscripted him to drive on a road trip to California to pick up Sonny's old little MGB (those small British convertibles) — they'd drive out together in the Cadillac and each bring back one car.

As they were passing through New Mexico at some point, Sonny was asleep in the back seat and the young guy was driving and stopped to get gas in a small town. While he was inside paying, Sonny woke up and saw that there was a Dairy Queen across the street and he went over there to get a Vanilla Softie Cone. By the time he came out with the cone — the car was gone!! His friend didn't notice that Sonny had left the car and took off.

When the young man arrived at the Arizona border, there was an agricultural checkpoint and he was stopped by the state trooper there. The trooper took a long look at him and said, "Young man, is this your car?" And he said, "No sir, it belongs to him," gesturing towards the back seat. The trooper said, "I'm sorry it belongs to who?" looking back in the back seat confused. He repeated and looked into the back seat and then realized Sonny was not there! He said "Uh oh." The trooper gave him a long look, silent for several seconds, then said "You in a heap a trouble, son. A heap a trouble." The young man didn't know what to do but he was terrified. The trooper had him get out of the car and handcuffed him and talked about how long he was going to spend in jail and just what Arizona jails were like "They ain't all pretty like the jails you mamma's boys got out there in Florida — these are real prisons, boy," while he was "Just checking the trunk to see if the body of the owner is back there," and kicking the tires and by this time the poor guy was about to pee his pants. Then the trooper started laughing suddenly and said "Aw gee, I can't keep this up any longer — your friend Sonny called ahead to the border. You left him at the last gas station."

Reign in the Throne room

X. J. Scott — 2002-08-05T17:30:00-04:00

Just painted the bathroom with Kilz primer today. This after months of preparation involving removing layers of painter and plastered over wallpaper and then smoothing over the irregularities with joint compound, waiting to dry, sand, do another run.

Anyway, there's no ventilation in the bathroom and so afterwards was nearly passing out and went to living room and turned on the air conditioner and sat on the floor and started reading a technical book. After a few minutes, it started raining inside the living room. Fun!

Educare

X. J. Scott — 2002-07-20T18:05:00-04:00

I just read that in the early 1980s, Israel invested more per capita in education than any other nation. Guess who came in second? Puerto Rico! I wonder what that list would look like today. As a wild guess I'd think Singapore would be number one today with all their computers and ID cards.

Overthinking

X. J. Scott — 2002-07-20T02:10:00-04:00

I have an old friend from school who is bummed out because he didn't accomplish what he expected when he set out to accomplish an important goal.

It got me to thinking. This seems to be a common human thinking pattern that we all go through, especially those of us who struggle with the blight of perfectionism. We get disappointed in ourselves because we don't match up to our own absurdly high standards involving impossible goals we set for ourselves. These standards are far and above what we would expect anyone else to do and it's a miracle if we even come close.

Does it make sense to do this? The first part sounds good — setting high goals for ourselves gives us something to do and helps us focus on accomplishing things. But when these best laid plans oft goes awry, then instead of looking at what we didn't accomplish and getting bummed, depressed and paralyzed, why not look at what we did achieve, be happy that the universe walks forward, and move on to our next adventure?