Happy Thanksgiving!

And in honor of the holiday, I give you Breda's wonderful idea of brining a turkey in an empty refrigerator vegetable bin. Like most things of the internet it is a wonderful idea that is several days too late to be of use to you. But file it away for Christmas.

Not So Peak Oil

As I mentioned several years ago, the theory that underpins peak oil analysis is not especially sound. The output from a given deposit is bell-shaped. This is a sound empirical rule. You can aggregate all known deposits into a large bell shape. True enough. But this theory is only valid for known existing deposits. It doesn't take into account technology growth that allows for the exploitation of new fields or new sources of petroleum. You know, as is happening now.

It's a Casserole

This revelation about deep-dish pizza and others at Snowflakes in Hell and Clayton Cramer.

Math for Everyone

Joanne Jacobs has a discussion about how much math is enough for students. She suggests that frankly, most people don't need everything they're taught even through high school. I think she mostly correct.

When it comes to practical skills for the general populace, the skills list is something like addition/subtraction, division/multiplication, ratios/percentages, and exponents. Any sort of budgeting will require these skills. Any sort of financial planning will require percentages, ratios, and exponents to calculate interest. Anything geometrical will likely require trigonometry sooner or later. Understanding simple concepts like basic computer modeling requires basic algebra, probability, and statistics is very useful for figuring out what people are talking about on the evening news.

I have a Bachelors and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. I know a fair amount of higher math. About the only thing I use on a regular basis are prob/stat, trig, and linear algebra. I haven't done calculus or differential equations in years. Why? Because in most fields the problem has either been solved and turned into a formula or it is unsolvable in closed form and will require some form of discrete simulation. For that matter a lot of "analysis" is simply reading tables for the proper part sizes.

Ages of English

When I was in middle school, we did a unit on Chaucer. We were given the original Middle English text and had to translate it into some semblance of the modern tongue. At one point my teacher read the Prologue to Canterbury Tales. It sounded cool but is barely intelligible.

What surprises me about this clip of Shakespeare in the appropriate Elizabethan dialect was how intelligible it is. It's definitely not Olivier's English though.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

An economist wrote my wife's cookie from tonight's dinner:

The value lies not within any particular thing, but in the desire placed on that thing.

Or in other words, something is only worth what someone will pay for it. This is one of the foundational principles of free market economics.

Expensive Deer Hunting

And a deductable later...

Twilight

I just finished reading the Twilight books. Pretty good in spots, but not without their faults. The most annoying thing is how emo Bella Swan is in books two and three. She's the first person narrator for 90% of the novels so you can't really get away from her either.

Roman Polanski

He's a pedophile. Stop defending him. While he was taking naked pictures of a thirteen year-old model, he got her drunk with champagne and quaaludes, and then he raped her in every orifice. Around that time he also had a romantic relationship with fifteen year-old Nastassja Kinski. Polanski was in his forties during this time.

Stop justifying it. The excellence of Chinatown or the Pianist or Rosemary's Baby doesn't change anything. His pregnant wife being murdered by the Manson family doesn't excuse it either.

On a related note: Mumia did it. He's a murderer not a damn martyr. Kindly stop trying to free him.

Recipes

Amy is paging through a Betty Crocker Microwave Cookbook. One recipe suggests microwaving a pork shoulder in several stages that total over 40 minutes. Look, if you're cooking something in microwave for the better part of an hour, you picked the wrong appliance.

Disney Buys Marvel

For $30 and 0.745 shares of Disney per Marvel share. Speculation abounds about what effects this will have on the Marvel Universe. I'm guessing it really won't have much of an effect on the comics, but will probably change how Marvel Studios and Marvel's merchanising system will work.

The real question is: now that Howard the Duck and Donald Duck are under the same corporate banner, are they still going to make Howard wear pants?

As You Get Older

I had an interesting conversation with some coworkers while coming back from lunch a few days ago. We all noticed that while our parents are not technically illiterate, they don't necessarily grasp the latest technologies. Most of our parents had a lot of trouble with e-mail for instance. We wondered what technology we wouldn't be able to grasp when our as yet unborn children get to be our ages.

• Jeez dad, why do you keep using these old mp3 players? Don't you know everything's on audio crystals now?


• I know. My dad is still listening to music with his ears. I keep telling him he can get it piped straight into his audio center in higher fidelity now. Especially with his hearing.


• Well he probably refuses to mindjack onto the connected global consciousness anyway.


• Yeah, my parents will only get on using a hardline. I keep telling them that the info cloud is subspace accessible now, but the idea of instantaneous high bandwidth connectivity inside their heads freaks them out. They still make me talk to them with words! It takes me forever to tell them anything! Like whole minutes even!

We know it's going to happen, we just don't know when or what with.

Banana Bread

French toast was created as a very tasty way to get rid of stale bread. I've mentioned that banana bread is the fruit equivalent. It is where the overripe bananas wind up at my house. We recently discovered that bananas for bread freeze very well too. They retain their flavor and while the ice crystals make bananas really mushy, that's an advantage when you're going to recycle them into bread.

We've been trying different recipes lately. I started with one Amy's mother gave us. It uses bisquick and sour cream. I was very tasty, but I don't generally keep either of those ingredients around the house. Plus the sour cream gives Amy trouble. Then Amy suggested a healthy recipe from Hungry Girl. It didn't rise well and sat like a sweet banana brick at the bottom of my load pan. It wasn't bad and we still ate it, but we're not trying that one again. We tried this one from Cooks.com this week:

3/4 c. sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. salt
2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
3 ripe bananas
Bread pan

In medium size bowl mix first three ingredients. Add flour and baking soda, mix well. Add bananas crushed with fork. Mix well. Grease bread pan and put mixture in pan. Bake 1 hour in 325 degree oven.

We use pam instead of grease and eggbeaters instead of eggs, but the recipe still worked very well. Its simple and tasty and isn't giving my wife stomach problems. I think I'll stick with it.

This Just In...

Michael Jackson is still dead. Should he turn out to be undead, please act accordingly.

Not Stimulated Enough

I had my meeting to price out a new central air unit. It's going to hurt, but I'm going to do it anyway. The new unit will be 40% more efficient and will be probably be under parts and labor warranty for as long as I'm likely to own this house. It will also have humidity control which the current unit lacks and, in my mind, is practically mandatory for any sort of forced air unit.

Oh and the tax breaks and stimulus money? Yeah he told me not to expect any. In order to qualify for federal dollars I'd need an insane SERE rating. State money is limited by funded and the money is almost always spent by now. About all I can expect is a tax deduction come next April.

Color Me Stimulated

Whether you like it or not...

My AC went out this weekend. The local service people came by to check it out today. It's screwed. The cooling coil in my house's forced air loop has a leak. That means it's shot and will need to be replaced to the tune of $900 just for parts. I'm looking at two grand with install, recharging the now empty system with R22, servicing everything that needs it, etc. Ouch.

It's enough money that the service guys suggested pricing out a completely new unit. Why a new unit? Because the government is phasing out R22 due to environmental concerns. This process starts in January. The refrigerant replacing it in most applications (like household air conditioners) is R410a. Except that R410a is not backwards compatible with R22 equipment. If I'm lucky I'll be able to keep the lines that run between the two halves of my split unit. But the compressor and air handler are not compatible and would have to go. I'll find out what that would cost on Friday. That sounds like it's going to be a great way to spend my Friday off.

Not that any of this can really be laid at Obama's feet. I'm fairly sure the changeover is tied to agreements signed in the 1980s and was decided on at least two years ago. But I still want to gripe.

The Great Books

Physics Geek Jesus Freak mentioned Bill Bennett's list of books every high school student should read before graduation. He mentions that the Great Gatsby, which I haven't read, is overrated. Ditto Catcher in the Rye. Never read Gatsby, but I have to second him on Catcher. Holden Caulfield whines through 100 pages, the end.

The list reminds me that I still need to read 1984. We never covered it in school for some odd reason. When I had the chance to pick it up on my own, I read A Brave New World instead. It was the 90s. I thought that controlling people through their excesses was a far more timely topic than socialist totalitarian rule. But the world has kept turning and I find that I have to rectify the missing bits of my education.

West Pointers Make a Good Impression

Amy and I caught this part of the ACM awards and were impressed:



Thanks to the reminder on Chris Byrne's site, I just picked up the audio and video off of iTunes. Might as well put that gift card to good use and the proceeds go directly to the Wounded Warrior Fund.

Very Fitting

I just heard that the last book of Jordan's Wheel of Time will be so large, they're going to split it up into 3 separate volumes. That's a fitting tribute to both the Wheel of Time's incredible length and Jordan's long-winded and repetitive writing style.

More likely though it's just proof that most of the books in the middle of the series (the entire drought/weather arc) should have been greatly abbreviated. He could have gotten on with it and still had plenty of pages left for the endgame.

Hope These Aren't Horribly Broken in 4th Ed

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