The Olive & Cream Cheese Sandwich is not original with this Kirstin chick, though - this has been my absolute favorite for years. Try making it in a flour tortilla; you can slice it in little rounds for cute and ridiculously easy hors d'oeuvres. Do a whole party platter with cream cheese in tortillas and different "extra" toppings - olives, capers, shredded carrot, dill weed, anchovies, ham, raspberry jam, honey, or grated very dark chocolate are all good.
Another personal favorite sandwich is toasted wheat bread with cheddar cheese, dill pickle slices, and mustard. It's really good with a slice of salami in there too. [via Strange Brew]
What Laurel says - I can't believe I hadn't linked to The Road to Springfield yet. A single-elimination tournament to determine the best Simpson's supporting character. Vote on a different match-up each weekday. I'm pulling for Comic Book Guy...
Tell me that you wouldn't love this "Net Surfer Classic" chair. On the other hand, I'm not sure what I'd do if I walked into a living room full of only these "Chip Loungers". Hell, I can't envision a house with any of this store's stuff in it, except possibly some of the lamps. Well, maybe this blackboard bathroom tile is cool...note that it comes with a little tray to hold your chalk. But why would someone want a doorbell make out of wine glasses? [via Rebecca's Pocket]
Separate from the navigation question, it demonstrates differences in how men and women interact with virtual reality teaching devices - something worth looking at if you're building and relying on such a device.
I wish I understood why the idea that women aren't good at context-free navigation bothers me. In the real world tasks, the differences were not nearly as significant, and women seem to navigate fine out in the world overall. I think that if it were taken as just a difference, it wouldn't bother me as much. But I remember what happened a couple of years ago when the media got hold of some results that men use more of their brains than women. Even though it wasn't connected to intelligence, and the researchers stated this, you'd never have known that from some of the reports I heard. So I end up emotionally bracing myself whenever results like this come out because some idiots will always use it to explain why women really are incompetent.
Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard has to have been created by a geek. I'm fighting the urge to find someone to play it with me... [via PCJM]
I've been receiving about twenty copies of this spam Beth's talking about every day for the past week. It's wrong on so many levels...
The story of the Loch Ness monster always captivated me as a kid. After all - people said they saw her so she must be real, even if she was just a big fish or something rather than an actual monster. Turns out, she's probably just an earthquake.
Want to learn to field a fly ball? Learn to listen. A recent paper by a former official physicist of the National League (did you even know they had an official physicist?!?!) says that there isn't time for an outfielder to determine the trajectory of a ball visually and then respond. So, they listen for the sound of the ball coming of the bat to determine whether it hit the sweet spot or is going to fall short. Huh.
The jury is in - my friends and I agree that the people from The Fat Project did not, in fact, become fat, even after gaining almost 30 pounds. They did both start out very skinny. It bugged me a little when they started getting described as fat slobs. Yeah, yeah - the site writer is joking around. But I also noted he didn't make the guy sound anywhere near as disgusting as the woman. See, for example, day 22. I don't think that picture deserves a "holy shit, she's fat".
Still, I didn't really expect something tasteful from the creator of StinkyFeet Diaries...
These mini-reviews of various software that supresses pop-up ads may motivate me to actually research these products and try one out. I'm curious how they work, what type of information if any they expect from the user, and how much they slow down web surfing over an already slow modem. Anyone have any first-hand experience with this type of thing? [via RRE]
We have a cousin of this elevator in the building I work in. It is painfully slow and creaky. The doors take forever to open and even longer to close again. It's got a hair-trigger motion sensor to keep the door open if anyone is anywhere near it. I usually only ride in it to go from the basement to the fifth floor; it's almost time efficient for that long a trip. People who get on to ride up a single flight, adding two extra door openings and door closing, who I personally know could walk up the flight, make me very, very cranky.
While I simply don't understand why my weblog was found by a search on "animals and microelectronics", I know people are not supposed to be finding this site by searching on "peta naked pictures" and "free pictures of rael old ladies naked".
On the other hand, The Spark has the most irritating pop-up ad I have ever seen on it. It's so bad, I'm going to share it with you here....
Note how, if you aren't looking closely, you might just click the "button" to dismiss the window. I nearly did that, figuring it was just another random Windows/Netscape error that I wasn't going to do anything about anyway, especially since there was no "Cancel" option. The "Warning" bar and the exclamation point sign are perfect. Top it off with the way you have no idea where clicking the "button" will take you, even if you realize it is an ad. I guess that's one way to improve your click-through rate.
Tell me this image doesn't improve first-person shooters for you:
I love Doom dearly. But there isn't much plot, and I usually end up inventing stuff. For instance, I like to pretend I've got a caddy standing behind me. Because you know how you can just switch between seven different weapons at will? It seems like it would be ungainly to have a shotgun, a plasma gun, and a machine gun all within easy reach, so you must have someone else there keeping track of everything. "Hand me my #5 Rocket Launcher, Jimmy." "Sure thing, boss!" [Montykins]
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (+)
- Jane Austen, Persuasion (+)
- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (+)
- Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (+)
- Kent Haruf, Plainsong (+)
- Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything (+)
- Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (+)
This has shown up everywhere, but this Java applet based on the film (and I think book) Powers of Ten, is just great. Start looking at the Milky Way from 10 million light years from Earth, and move in by an order of magnitude per step until you are looking at a single proton within a leaf on a tree in Florida. Don't worry about catching the whole thing the first time through - after it finished running you can step forwards and back through the frames manually.
Neutrinos have mass. Or at least, we're more certain of it now - I've seen this announcement come out before. See, for example, this 1998 article "Neutrino Mass Discovered", which also has a nice, slightly more technical description of how the Super-Kamiokande project (a precursor to this project which the current article cites as giving only indirect evidence of neutrino mass) worked and the implications of neutrino mass. My physics might be totally wrong here, but I thought one of the cool aspects of the search for neutrino mass was that, if they do have mass, that could materially alter whether the universe will continue expanded forever, reach an equilibrium point, or collapse back in on itself. I think that that is a piece of the "dark matter' question referred to in both of these articles. I've always felt that it gave a striking sense of how large the universe is, and how delicate its balance, to realize that the absolutely miniscule mass that a neutrino might have (upper bounds on its mass have been known for a while) could, when summed up across the entire universe, have a literally cosmic-scale effect.
England has some bills in the works that spell out major changes, particularly to civil liberties. [thanks KC] There are some positives, such as a school and hospital reform, and improving the transportation system. Then there's the moves to abolish double jeopardy in murder cases, allow police to seize assets of suspected but unconvicted and even uncharged "criminals", allow imprisonment of anyone not reporting known or suspected money laundering, and possibly limit rights to jury trials. These all seem like very bad ideas, and having them all suggested at the same time as part of a package would make me very nervous. I'll be interested to see what comes of this.
All issues get harder when you are talking about children, I think. Here, schools take on the First Amendment (again....), setting guidelines for what students can write in yearbooks. Specifically, no profanity, no racial slurs, no sexual innuendo, and no threatening language - not just regarding the student but regarding the teachers as well. When I squeeze my brain up into parent-think, I can understand wanting to keep students from harassing each other in their yearbooks. But it seems to be that that can be prevented simply by saying that if you write something in a yearbook that would get you in trouble if you said it to the student in school or wrote it as a note that you passed in school, you'll get in the same degree of trouble if you write it in their yearbook. I can't believe that students are getting suspended right and left for using profanity when talking about a teacher - are they? I would have thought that got you a detention, maximum.
I don't know - perhaps they are just trying to hold yearbooks to the same rules they set for other school interactions, but it seems like they are going further than that to trying to make sure everyone gets to go home with happy, friendly yearbooks. Specifically, happy, friendly 8th grade yearbooks. Please... nobody looks back on those years fondly, sanitized yearbook or not. [via Glumpish]
I believe I have a couple of friends who were curious about the internet game connected with the upcoming movie A.I.. This CNN article has some basic detail and suggests some starting points for getting involved. It's an interesting idea, but I suspect the movie won't live up to it, preferring to attract the mainstream, feel-good audience.
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