Milk -
"Smoke" - rawhide and soot
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Sharpest jello kitchen knife in the world
Milk -
"Smoke" - rawhide and soot
Saturday, January 25, 2020
bikeshedding - Wiktionary
"a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself."
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Model S 100D Blasting Across the Country (Very Cold!)
Taking a long Tesla trip requires gaming the system a bit - since deeply depleted batteries are charged at a faster rate, and then charging tapers off after about 30% charged. At 23:54 he does one of these comparisons - spend longer charging at the current location as charging rate tapers, or get back on the road until the battery is very depleted again to access those fast charging rates at the next supercharger.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Old-fashioned rice cookers are extremely clever
This can all be summed up in a sentence, @ 7:02, "a magnet holds the latch down to keep the cooker cooking, until the temperature rises just above boiling temperature, at which point this magnet reaches its "Curie temperature," at which it loses its magnetic strength and releases the latch."
I suppose at high altitude, the rice wouldn't cook as well at a lower boiling temperature, but the rice cooker would still turn off once it reaches the higher temperature after the water has boiled away.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Did Opium Make Coleridge Forget the Rest of ‘Kubla Khan’?
Famous story of drug-induced poetic inspiration thwarted, and forever lost, by an untimely knock at the door.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Podcast about common psychology misconceptions
It's not "bystander apathy," it's "pluralistic ignorance" (you don't want to overreact and look silly) and "diffusion of responsibility," (having less guilt for doing nothing because others could have acted.) Social inhibition is a better term for describing what's going on. Most people are deeply empathic.
@30' "Hard-wired" suggests it can't be altered. It's more like an Etch-a-Sketch.
"Personality type" is continuously distributed, rather than distinct types. Traits rather than types.
"Steep learning curve" is often misused, because this means it's easy, not hard, to learn.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
The World's First Smart Potato! #smartpotato | Indiegogo
This is really funny. From CES 2020.
If they receive sufficient funding, the potatoes will communicate with each other over a "meshed potato" network. "Potato not included."
Tesla Autopilot vs Openpilot
I had no idea that Openpilot was available for over 50 different vehicles, and could complete this well with Tesla and even better it in some of these tests. This is one of the best side by side comparisons of autopilot systems I have seen, with two drivers and two vehicles following the same route and a very good step-by-step replay and commentary about how each system handled various challenges. I am really surprised how a single-camera, smartphone-based system can compete so well with a much more layered technology in the Tesla.
Friday, January 17, 2020
Does pertussis come back?
"In addition, even after you recover from whooping cough, you may have
brief relapses for several months whenever you catch a cold."
The Length of Illness for Whooping Cough
"This phase wanes after several weeks, but coughing may relapse and remit for weeks to months because of relapses from other upper respiratory infections"
Diagnosis and Treatment of Pertussis in Adults
"we report a case of pertussis reinfection 30 years after natural infection, which was complicated by pneumonia"
Pertussis Reinfection in an Adult: A Cause of Persistent Cough Not to Be Ignored
The Length of Illness for Whooping Cough
"This phase wanes after several weeks, but coughing may relapse and remit for weeks to months because of relapses from other upper respiratory infections"
Diagnosis and Treatment of Pertussis in Adults
"we report a case of pertussis reinfection 30 years after natural infection, which was complicated by pneumonia"
Pertussis Reinfection in an Adult: A Cause of Persistent Cough Not to Be Ignored
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Doug Glant's History of Rock and Roll Bohemian Club
The birth of rock'n'roll: 1954 - 1965. A cultural earthquake.
By Doug Glant.
Bohemian Club Library Notes, Number 138,
Fall 2005.
Preface
Two years ago, a front page Wall Street Journal article addressed the music revolution going on in the hallowed Bohemian Club and at the Grove, the so-called battle between the traditionalist devotees to the swing-era and classical music and the (mostly) younger rock adherents. No matter which side you take (though some enjoy it all), and not forgetting Dr. Johnson, who remarked about two women shouting at each other from adjoining houses on a London Street, "They will never agree because they are arguing from different premises," it's clear that rock'n'roll, like it or loathe it, has had a profound impact on our culture.
For the sake of discussion, I'll use theologian Richard John Neuhaus's definition of culture: "Culture is the way we live, and the way we live in argument with the way we think we ought to live. It has to do with what we eat, wear, watch, admire, and abhor. It has to do with dating, and marriage, and raising children, and trying to get a grasp on what it means to live a good life before our lives are over." There's been a multi-millennial debate as to whether politics drives culture or vice versa. I'm with Confucius and Socrates, both of whom summed up the culture side of the argument thus: "You write the laws, let us write the music," "music" meaning the performing and literary arts.
Two phenomena of the early 1950s (television and rock'n'roll)1 changed the global culture (and political) landscape forever. Though rock's ascent was inseparable from and accelerated by the TV boom, I will focus on the music and its first decade (which for me is 1954 - 1965). Some date rock's birth earlier,2 some a year later (when the original white rock'n'roll hit, Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock," went gold. I choose 1954 because that's when a real black R&B tune (not a pale white cover) reached a huge (national) white audience; the song was The Penguin's "Earth Angel." The music and the culture had already changed dramatically by 1965 when the Rolling Stones "shocked the bourgeoisie" with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and quickly, it changed a lot more.
In the beginning.
Rock began in the American South and Southwest, where approximately fifty years ago a confluence of many musical streams and the relatively new phenomenon of the teenager combined with a new rebelliousness (partially fueled by poverty and Bible Belt constraints, especially racial and sexual) to produce a new music rock'n'roll (R&B on the black side, rockabilly on the white). It was a place of high-spirited, even physical religiosity, racial tensions, steamy sensuality, and poverty. When combined with teenage hormones, you had quite a stew from whence to brew a "Devil's" music as many early rockers thought, especially Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The rebelliousness was perhaps best expressed in the movies by Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and especially Marlon Brando in the Wild One (1954), when a young waitress asks him, "What are you rebelling against?" Brando: "Whaddaya got?" Interestingly, the soundtracks of The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause were jazz, not rock. Rock did not spring suddenly, Minerva-like, from the head of Jupiter, but had its roots deeply embedded in the black music of jazz, blues, and gospel, while the white roots were in country, church music, hillbilly, bluegrass, and (country) swing. These flowed together during the Eisenhower years to create rock'n'roll. It was an evolutionary process - we just looked around and it was here; it seemed to come out of nowhere. "The blues had a baby and they called it rock'n'roll."3
Rock wasn't something that was created, overnight or consciously, but rather it sprang up out of social and economic and musical and cultural forces ranging from the migration of millions of black and white Southerners to urban areas, to the vast industrial expansion of World War II, to the business pressures that forced big bands to break up into smaller units, to the trebling of the number of radio station licenses in the post-war period. The dramatic shift of adults to television helped convince executives to re-orient radio toward young people's music. By 1959, there were 156 million radios in the US, still three times the number of TV sets. It's when the music first started sounding a certain way and affecting people the way rock does that we all noticed it was here. Before the confluence of rock'n'roll, there was the blues of Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and BB King, the jump blues of Louis Jordan, Roy Brown, and Wynonie Harris, and the country swing (and boogie) of Bob Wills, Moon Mullican, and Bill Haley, but there wasn't rock'n'roll. Before rock, pop music of the early 1950s was smooth, polished vocal music set to an orchestrated background, much good, some not (e.g., Patty Page's 1953 hit "That Doggie in the Window" - arf arf). Seminal rock'n'roll was raw, rough, sexy, and it scared some folks. But it was also a music which expressed a kind of pure joyousness, a sense of soaring release that in our current sardonic and self-conscious age seems unlikely ever to recur. But I'm getting ahead of my story. Let's go back a few years.
We're Gonna Rock: The Early Years.
What is rock'n'roll? Well, as Justice Potter Stewart said (about pornography): "I know it when I see it." But do we? Is Pat Boone's "April Love" Rock? Elvis's "It's Now or Never"? Anything by Eminem? When does R&B or hillbilly boogie end and rock pick up? When does R&B become doo-wop? I'm not a musicologist, but there seems to be general agreement that rock (which was originally expressly for teens) is repetitive, loud, with simple chords, melody, lyrics, and a titanic backbeat. Among things that aided its growth were a new instrument, the electric guitar, and experiments in amplification by Les Paul (who had a profound impact on Bohemian Steve Miller.)4 The first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar, the Fender Esquire, was sold in 1950...
Just a few voices made the difference in determining how rock'n'roll sounds and why it is so powerfully different from other kinds of music. Elvis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard: their work defined what rock'n'roll was all about. And by 1956 they. had all crossed over to the pop charts. The rock era had begun.
At this point, it's useful to get a sense of the times as rock began. Cultural indices (including the seemingly trivial) can reveal and illuminate a sense of time and place like nothing else. So, let's take a look at some events and personalities of the early 1950's, a time later called bland by the 60's counterculture, a time of Cold War, and hot war in Korea, the discovery of DNA and a polio vaccine, TV's take off and it's Golden Age and also: The post-WWII baby boom continues; Mao; Tennessee and Hank Williams; train and Greyhound travel; bebop; Ella; Martin and Lewis; Soviet A-bomb; fallout shelters and air raid drills; ballpoint pens; M&Ms; JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; Nat King Cole; Dash-80 (Boeing 707 prototype); Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I; Uncle Miltie, Jack Benny; Howdy Doody; the Lone Ranger; U.S. households with TV (1950): 9 percent; average pay for teachers (1950):$3,010; women in U.S. workforce (1950): 28.8 percent; Luci and Desi; Groucho; Superman; Dragnet; suburbia; Ozzie and Harriet (with David and Ricky Nelson); Dr. Benjamin Spock; Roy Rogers; Bishop Fulton Sheen and Pope Pius XII; Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers; Grandma Moses; Andrew Wyeth; Jackson Pollock; Billy Graham; Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle; Ben Hogan; Rocky Marciano; Bud Wilkinson; Queen Elizabeth II; Mt. Everest conquered (Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary); Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Truman and Eisenhower (V.P. Richard Nixon); B-52 and Strategic Air Command; Stalin dies; H-bomb; Playboy; TV dinners and Hula Hoops; crewcuts and ponytails.
At this point, it's useful to get a sense of the times as rock began. Cultural indices (including the seemingly trivial) can reveal and illuminate a sense of time and place like nothing else. So, let's take a look at some events and personalities of the early 1950's, a time later called bland by the 60's counterculture, a time of Cold War, and hot war in Korea, the discovery of DNA and a polio vaccine, TV's take off and it's Golden Age and also: The post-WWII baby boom continues; Mao; Tennessee and Hank Williams; train and Greyhound travel; bebop; Ella; Martin and Lewis; Soviet A-bomb; fallout shelters and air raid drills; ballpoint pens; M&Ms; JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; Nat King Cole; Dash-80 (Boeing 707 prototype); Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I; Uncle Miltie, Jack Benny; Howdy Doody; the Lone Ranger; U.S. households with TV (1950): 9 percent; average pay for teachers (1950):$3,010; women in U.S. workforce (1950): 28.8 percent; Luci and Desi; Groucho; Superman; Dragnet; suburbia; Ozzie and Harriet (with David and Ricky Nelson); Dr. Benjamin Spock; Roy Rogers; Bishop Fulton Sheen and Pope Pius XII; Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers; Grandma Moses; Andrew Wyeth; Jackson Pollock; Billy Graham; Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle; Ben Hogan; Rocky Marciano; Bud Wilkinson; Queen Elizabeth II; Mt. Everest conquered (Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary); Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Truman and Eisenhower (V.P. Richard Nixon); B-52 and Strategic Air Command; Stalin dies; H-bomb; Playboy; TV dinners and Hula Hoops; crewcuts and ponytails.
(To be continued.)
Monday, January 13, 2020
Finding the Sweet Spots With Avios & Money Rewards - The Points Guy
Using an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the best way to redeem British Airways points.
A beautiful poem.
sprung rhythm A poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of speech, in which each foot has one stressed syllable, either standing alone or followed by a varying number of unstressed syllables. [Coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins]
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-1889), English poet, known for a number of works published posthumously, including "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover." His work expresses an intense response to the natural world through the use of innovative rhythm and language. Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, and was educated at Oxford. In 1866 he converted to Roman Catholicism, and he entered the Jesuit order two years later. Hopkins's poems, such as "The Windhover,""Pied Beauty," and "Duns Scotus' Oxford," attempt to capture the uniqueness—or inscape, as Hopkins termed it—of natural objects, by the use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and compound metaphor.In 1877 Hopkins served as a parish priest and teacher in England and Scotland before becoming a professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, Ireland, in 1884. His unhappy years in Ireland produced a series of poems known as the "terrible sonnets." With a few exceptions, Hopkins's poems were not published during his lifetime. The first collected edition was published in 1918; a second, complete, edition appeared in 1930.
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Analysis of the poem at:
"The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey..."
"The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language..."
"A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird's motion..."
""The Windhover" is written in "sprung rhythm," a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter..."
"This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins's sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections..."
"At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover's motion now give way to the phrase "my chevalier"—a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback..."
Sunday, January 5, 2020
How to remove a stuck epidural catheter
A clever trick to remove a stuck epidural catheter is to apply constant tension for hours. This method actually derives from a method to remove worms from patients.
"wind the epidural catheter around a tongue blade"
"Consider tying or wrapping a tongue depressor to the distal end of the stuck catheter until taut and tape to the back to allow continuous gentle traction during regular patient activities."
From table 1 in this paper: Surgical Management of the Retained Epidural Catheter Fragment Complicated by Postoperative Phlegmon
"The only way to get rid of the guinea worms was to wind them onto sticks, which nurses then twisted, slowly and steadily, for two weeks."
Thursday, January 2, 2020
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