2020 Hindsight

Back Home Again

I'm home again. It was a lovely (and short!) trip. Cross your fingers, I've even got pictures. But some catching up to do before that.

The break from the net/email is nice, but I HATE spam. It's getting to be too cumbersome to communicate by email anymore. 67% spam. Ugh.

Fear and Loathing

I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.

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I've escaped La-La land and am watching the Oscars on my brother's big TV overlooking Elliot Bay from the historic Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle, Washington.

I'm also giving a during-the-commercials (and oh wait, let's go see Sidney Portier's speech for a moment) demonstration of Manila and weblogging for some friends who are escaping it all and heading off for two years away from the net (and civilization) at Holden Village.

Here's how easy it is to include pictures.

I just demonstrated uploading a picture. By the way, I don't think that I showed you the manner in which my one-year-old niece has recalibrated the cute scale. It's amazing.

Days Longer Than Nights (barely)

The longer days is the ongoing trend. Sunrise and Sunset are at due east and west. They're creeping north, though.

Why I love the net reason # 4,392. I looked up the name of a childhood friend on Google. Her first name and last name are unusual. Something between 5 and 10 links show up; one of them is a list of people who are in her kind of business, and lo, there was even a phone number. So now, after more years than we care to count, we are back in touch. Hey, D!

Sigh. My data file for Claris Organizer went kablooey. After searching for info on it, and downloading the new verion by Palm (who bought Organizer from Claris), I tried merging the file into a new one. Alas, no, it did not work. I think it's the data file that's corrupted, not the app. And that was my calendar. Aiyeee!!!! When was the last time I backed up my computer? Did you have to ask such uncomfortable questions?

First Day of Spring!!!

Happy Spring! It's the first day of Spring in the planet's northern hemisphere. First day of Autumn in parts south.

Today's Sun-earth day , a celebration of the equinox. I have it on good authority that today a local space-related lab has a telescope set up to look at the sun. I have been outside today. Yep. The sun is up there in the sky!

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Speaking of sun in the sky and the planet's southern hemisphere, an enormous floating ice shelf has broken off and fallen into the sea. Space.com has the AP story, with some NASA/MODIS images (of which this is one). It's been there at least 12,000 years (time of the last Ice Age), and it's about the size of Rhode Island.

When the weather turns warmer, expect scattered outbreaks of warfare. L.A. Times: U.S. General Says Enemy Is Regrouping

He predicted more Al Qaeda activity in the months ahead as the weather improves.

"This is traditionally the campaigning season. The end of March and into April and somewhat into May. So we expect to see some increased enemy activity," he said.

Million Clown March in Santa Cruz draws 80 clowns. I just wonder if anyone familiar with the movie Shakes the Clown yelled phrases like, "He's a mime! Get 'im!!"

This is 'Like' a Problem

Despite my best efforts to avoid this affliction, I discovered that “like” is completely contagious. While at home over winter break I mentioned that I was “like” so excited to be back in England. My father, always a stickler for pure language pulled the car over and asked if I wanted to get back on the plane.

NYT: The Fear Beneath the Burka "Just as the repression of Afghan women represented the political extremism of the Taliban, the shrouded figures of Afghan women today signify that real peace is elusive. "

The Great Nostalgia kick, for you Southern Californians: The Helms Bakery Truck. Did it come down your street? It did mine. Oh when the back doors were opened! Oh those wooden trays with all those wonderful donuts! And oh how wonderful to have a coin to give to the Helms Bakery driver, who'd put it in the coin-holder on his belt. That coin would get you and maybe your brothers and neighbors some wonderful donuts.

Vocabulary check: Okay now, what do you call those paper thingums used to grab baked goods:

• waxed paper

• tissue paper

• donut tissue

• donut paper

• pick-up tissue

• waxed pick-up tissue

• bakery tissue

More yummm My neighbor told me about this local dumpling restaurant that's not too far away. Now the L.A. Times has visited so the place will be discovered and a little more crowded. Better wait a few weeks and go at an off-hour. But I still wanna try it out.

Last Day of Winter

It's the last day of winter. It doesn't seem like it; my jasmine's blooming and I smell other delicious fragrant plants when I walk outdoors.

Here's one last tweaked palm photo from my series of photos of Palm Canyon. Yes, I diddled around in Photoshop for this one.

News

NASA to keep Shuttle Launch Times Secret Until Day Before Liftoff. Estimates are in a 4-hour period. But it's not as bad as having to wait for a utility repair person; 24 hours ahead of time, you get the real launch time. Here's hoping I tell you all about the launch in early May on this site! :D

The Guardian: History of tatooing revealed

Chicago Tribune: Bush-Senate fight brews over extent of U.S. secrecy.

New York Times: Andersen misread depths of government's anger.

Everyone's focused on the outcome of the HP of the HP Shareholder vote. Early Results: Merger is a go.

Slang Watch: In times of terror, teens talk the talk "Their bedrooms are 'ground zero.' Translation? A total mess. [...] Petty concerns? 'That's so Sept. 10.'"

Washington Post: Top Al Qaeda Official Captured in Sudan

 

Yummmmmmmm! I went to the Arboretum today to attend a class: Gardening and Cooking in a Mediterranean Climate. One hour Gardening lecture; One hour cooking demonstration—and tasting! Jill Vig taught the gardening section, and Steven Mary, chef at Pasadena's Huntington Ritz-Carlton is our chef. Today's focus: citrus. I took pix of the second half. Let your mouths water a little.

The menu:

• Salad of Citrus Supremes, Basil and Watercress with Orange emulsion Vinaigrette

• Citrus Cured Salmon—Gravlox

• Kumquat Compote

• Citrus Brûlé

• Citrus Sorbét

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Steven Mary demonstrates chiffonade— a way to cut several rolled up basil leaves for the salad. (thanks to Al for the link)

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Et voilà! Here are the basil leaves after they've been cut into smaller strips.

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Supreming is the process of removing citrus fruit from the membranes, pith (peel) and seeds. Here's a demo of the cutting technique.

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Steven Mary dresses the salad greens (mostly watercress, tho there's that bit of basil mixed throughout).

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This is salmon cured with a citrus mixture, or citrus gravlox.

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The first course, served on the finest paper plates: Salad (the supremes are spooned over the dressed greens), a kumquat compote, and the citrus gravlox. It was all to die for!

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The dessert is a citrus brûlé— half a citrus fruit, with a little brown sugar on top burned (brûlé means burn) with a blowtorch (look for the blue flame in this picture). If you don't have a blowtorch, use your gas broiler.

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Here chef Steven Mary serves dessert: the citrus brûlé topped with a scoop of citrus sorbét. Yum!

See the next cooking class: April 2-Olives

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egosurf Tom, oh Tom who wishes to climb up Google's ranks for Tom. Right, Tom? Tom! (Should I even try to do this for Susan? I do better with kitchens— just check! )

Gorgeous, gorgeous

Beautiful day after a rain. or, for local mountains, a snow.

Palm Canyon Yesterday was the wearin' o' the green as well as the hiking in the green—an oasis in the midst of the California desert. I went with some friends to *the* palm canyon and saw a spring that might be *the* palm springs—just outside of Palm Springs. Apparently the canyon I was in has the most palm trees in the world. I certainly saw more than I could count.

The place: Indian Canyons, on the grounds of the Agua Caliente Band of the Cahuilla Indians.

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a palm forest?

Males n Females | XYs n XXs | Fight-or-flight n Tend-and-befriend Over the weekend, Dave W commented on differences between men n women. 'Tis interesting in light of an article I was sent by email (and my Google followup): All those ol' studies on coping with stress that emphasized the human tendency toward fight-or-flight were done on males. When a coupla researchers conducted a stress study on females, lo, they uncovered a different set of behaviors: tend-and-befriend.

females of many species, including humans, respond to stressful conditions by protecting and nurturing their young (the "tend" response), and by seeking social contact and support from others - especially other females (the "befriend" response).

This "tend-and-befriend" pattern is a sharp contrast to the "fight-or-flight" behavior that has long been considered the principal method for coping with stress by both men and women.

[Read More]

There are different hormone combinations at work in each sex. Females emit oxytocin, which is linked to nurturing.

In terms of the fight response, while male aggression appears to be regulated by androgen hormones, such as testosterone, and linked to sympathetic reactivity and hostility, female aggression isn't.[...]

In terms of flight, fleeing too readily at any sign of danger would put a female's offspring at risk, a response that might reduce her reproductive success in evolutionary terms. Consistent with this idea, studies in rats suggest there may be a physiological response to stress that inhibits flight. This response is the release of the hormone oxytocin, which enhances relaxation, reduces fearfulness and decreases the stress responses typical to the fight-or-flight response. [Read More]

Ides

What are the Ides of March (besides the day after Albert's and the day before my Dad's birthday)? One month before taxes are due! Beware the Ides of March!

New Scientist: BT hyperlink patent claim hits legal obstacle

British Telecommunication's controversial claim to have patented internet hyperlinking faces a substantial legal obstacle after a US judge ruled that the patent in question applies only to "a single device" at the heart of a network of access terminals.

Blue Jet You've heard of the green flash? How about a Blue Jet? (a blue jet is a "thunderstorm's electricity tickling the fringes of outerspace")

UPDATE I just got email from my brother, who flies big jets for the Air Force. He just read the above and told me what he just saw on a flight in Asia.

Well we took off ... and flew over to here though a lot of convective/thunderstorm activity (at night), and we witnessed some of the strangest "St Elmo's Fire"/electrical discharge activity right in front/on our cockpit window--a ghosty/electrical blue that everyone who saw it said it looked like rain (we all kind of mistook it as rain at first)--yet we were at 35000 feet MSL and above most of the clouds so it couldn't be rain-- it was unlike anything any of us had ever

experienced before, and some on the crew have been flying since the 70's...then later on we went thru some more of the same & saw some discharges that danced around in more of the common fashion-- randomly jumping around like the discharge activity that is more commonly experienced on a jet's leading shock-wave area as it penetrates an area of charged ions or whatever the hell is resultant in the high areas of

and above highly convective clouds/thunderstorms.

oh, the ion-ry! ; )

Florida Today via Space.com: Panel: NASA Must Upgrade Space Shuttle Now

Remember all the "Microsoft has grown up now; we want to be trustworthy" hooplah in my Steve Ballmer/CeBIT links from a coupla days ago? I missed the Reuters story that Microsoft and DOJ are working together to fight terrorism. John Robb puts pieces together: US DOJ and MSFT in cahoots; and Ballmer's trying to get the same thing happening in Europe.

Historical perspective: Time Europe has a TIME Trail of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Einstein's Birthday

The fairest thing we can experience in the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, who can no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born 123 years ago. Andrea has more Einstein links, plus a link to a great page for finding your birthday in <pi> (pi)

Of the people, by the people, for the people Lawrence Lessig on copyright and Disney. [via Scripting News]

Every time the Disney copyright [on Mickey Mouse] is about to expire, the terms of copyright protection get extended.

[...] Lessig is currently working on a case that seeks to overturn the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

L.A. Times: Doing a Number on Violators Statistics, Databases and the ebb and flow of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo point to Milosovic.

The numbers, [Patrick Ball] said, establish a clear pattern: The culprit was an organized campaign of "ethnic cleansing" by Yugoslav military and paramilitary forces under the command of Milosevic.

"When we looked systematically and really carefully at the killing data, I found this pattern," Ball said during an interview before his testimony. "My jaw dropped through the floor. It blew me away."

USA Today: For Bush, secrecy is a matter of loyalty

Obscure Do you remember the show, My Mother the Car? It came out in the '65-66 TV season, along with I Dream of Jeannie, Lost In Space, Get Smart, Green Acres, The Smothers Brothers Show, F Troop, and The Wild Wild West. Now that was TV!

March Winds

breezy breezy breezy.

CNN: National Geographic tracks down the famous photo subject Remember that green-eyed girl with the haunted look on her face? She was about 13 at the time... married soon after. She never saw that famous photo....until she was recently located. National Geographic story about her: A Life Revealed

Bizarre six-month anniversary Mail from INS stuns flight school Your efficient government at work.

WASHINGTON -- Six months to the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Florida flight school where two of the suicide hijackers trained received letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating that the men had been approved for student visas.

Another story: Dead 9-11 Terror Suspects Get Visas

"I am astonished that while the INS is fixated on detaining and rounding up countless Arab-Americans without any justification, it has failed to take basic steps to ensure that visas are not issued to known terrorists," said Conyers, D-Mich.

Having a cow over Enron This is from Alan Abelson's Up & Down Wall Street column in Barron's magazine (1/28/02). It tickled my funny bone, and I hope that it fits into fair use. It's one of those ways of understanding various political systems, and Alan himself got it sent to him from an email.

Under feudalism, you have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk. Under fascism, you have two cows. The government seizes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk. Under communism, you have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government owns all the milk. Under capitalism, you have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies; you sell out, invest the money and retire on the income.

With Enron, you have two cows. You borrow 80% of the forward value of the two cows from your bank, then buy another cow with 5% down and the rest financed by the seller on a note, bearing interest at twice the prime, callable if the market cap of your publicly listed company, whose stock you've put up as collateral, goes below $20 billion. You sell the three cows to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at a second bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated unit, plus a tax exemption for five cows.

To continue: The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Islands firm secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report trumpets that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. All of the above transactions are cheerfully blessed by your independent auditors, who, of course, served as consultants on said transactions, but only after the fact.

You're all set now to disclose, via press release and conference call with analysts, that Enron, a major owner of cows, will begin trading cows over the Web. Analysts proclaim Enron the prototypical New Economy company, bull the shares to the moon, enabling you to sell huge gobs of the stock and use part of the proceeds to buy a top-of-the-line shredding machine.

Please, things ain't what they used to be, thank you very much The Decay of Manners [via MeFi]

We rush through life in such a hurry these days, that there is little or no time or thought for the refinements and courtesies that in the good old days of our grandparents were considered necessary to good manners.
From a newspaper dated 11/19/02葉hat's 1902

Reality Distortion

Talk about a reality distortion field In this Reuters story about Steve Ballmer addressing the crowds at CeBit in Germany, it states:

Only recently had it become clear to Microsoft that it had become an industry leader which needed to behave differently, Ballmer told 2,500 guests in the Hanover congress center ahead of the first day of the trade fair on Wednesday.

"I say to our people we want to be a trustworthy Microsoft in a world of trustworthy computing," Ballmer said in a speech at the official opening of the CeBIT technology trade show in the German city of Hanover.

Hello? only recently? how recently? What triggered it? Which lawsuit? the 1995 consent decree? the whole DOJ thang? After he became CEO? After they got on their kick about security (well, it's about damn time!)? Was this before or after they were all saying that they hadn't done anything wrong? Was it after they made some secret sweetheart deal with the Government post 9-11? Was this after Sun began to sue Microsoft for $1 billion?

Graeme Wearden reports before CeBit opens.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Ballmer said that Microsoft wants to be a responsible leader of the technology sector. "The industry wants us to be more responsible. We can't have business policies that are capricious or variable. We have to be reliable and consistent. We must redouble the emphasis on partnership," he said.

The Register quotes further from the Financial Times interview.

"It's fair to say that we thought that we had behaved in an appropriate way in the past. But the company has grown up since then. In the past we saw ourselves as the underdog that had to battle harder. We are now an industry leader and that implies a sense of responsibility," he said.

how far in the past? When did they grow up? How will we recognize the grown-up MIcrosoft?

The outspoken Ballmer recently used his deposition in the antitrust case to deny that Microsoft had entered into favorable licensing agreements with OEMs or taken retaliatory action against partners when they had supported rivals' products. However, Jim Allchin, Platforms vice president, appeared to contradict Ballmer's testimony, when he conceded that Microsoft had engaged in "unlawful" practices to maintain a monopoly in the PC operating system space.

The Financial Times article in English.

Artikel in Financial Times, Deutschland. In Deutsch, alas.

The killer app The web designers and clients thread that Robert Scoble pointed to has been a great read. I particularly like this one where the designer put a requisition for a software app called PsychicAbility Pro.

Duck and Cover A friend sent a link to Nuclear Blast Mapper, where you can enter a location and gauge the degree of destruction to the surrounding area. And seeing Operation Cue's test of a house being blown to smithereens led to Military.com remembers the Cold War and this civil defense image gallery. Includes how to build a fallout shelter, atomic artillery shells, and hardhatted men drinking coffee and donuts in the hours before a nuclear test blast.