http://www.aquick.org/blog entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:49:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Go check out my work blog, my food blog, my photos, or follow my random musings on app.net or twitter. http://www.aquick.org/blog/2013/04/08/i-guess-i-dont-have-much-personal-stuff-to-write-these-days/ I kept seeing this pattern emerge, and couldn't find a good name for it (originally in reference to failures of the free market), so I came up with one. Simply put, The Tragedy of the Selfish is the situation that exists when an individual makes what is logically the best decision ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2012/07/24/the-tragedy-of-the-selfish-again-and-again/ I now feel compelled to share this, since many people have now discovered Jamie's writing due to that whole thing. But for me, it started long ago with just a single link. Time melts away in an instant when viewing web pages meant to be rendered in Netscape, and now it's ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/11/29/how-i-came-to-love-jamie-zawinski/ I backed the kickstarter project for coffee joulies, and my pack arrived yesterday. Initial reports have not been good. I used three of them this morning, in my normal Contigo West stainless mug, in lieu of the usual ice cube I normally drop in there to make it drinkable right ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/10/14/first-impressions-of-coffee-joulies/ I can accept that DVDs are a dying business with no future growth and _escalating_ costs. I can accept that Netflix wants to get out of that business and move forward, even if the streaming product is still nascent and not competitive yet. I like Netflix, and I've been a ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/09/20/my-problem-with-the-netflix-restructuring/ I came up with this dish in response to a food question, and it sounded so good I had to make it the next night. It was promptly devoured by all present. It's a great summer pasta dish. Dice 2-3 heirloom tomatoes (or more), 3-4 avocados (or more), and 1 large ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/08/19/guacamole-alfredo/ Someone on a list asked about influential food books of the past 10-20 years. Here's my list: Books that started the trend of deconstructing modern food chains: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals!! Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal!! This one is notable because it's one of ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/07/27/influential-food-books-of-the-past-10-20-years/ The Google+ Terms of Service include various provisions to give them license to display your content, and this has freaked out a bunch of professional photographers:'By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/07/09/why-all-this-mucking-about-with-irrevocable-licenses/ Here's an edit I did of the new "Food Plate" graphic. I think this is more accurate. http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/06/26/choose-real-food/ The NYT magazine ran this article on how sucrose is probably a poison that causes cancer and a whole raft of other ailments. Unfortunately, the article is so poorly written and presents so little actual evidence that I'm shocked at the number of otherwise rational people who are simply taking it ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/04/20/sugar-may-be-toxic-but-that-nyt-article-doesnt-demonstrate-it/ A few years ago, I decided to eat a salad for lunch at least 5 days a week. It's a great way to make sure you get a lot of vegetables, and if you do it right, it's very satisfying. I didn't want to do Bittman's "vegan before 6pm" diet, ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/01/24/some-thoughts-on-salad/ "Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other dudes. Dudes would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any dude in that country. Strange dudes would stand with their mouths open and look ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2011/01/08/my-huck-finn-edit/ Sous Vide eggs are tricky, because the yolk sets at a lower temperature than the white. If you cook a whole egg in the shell, you either get a properly cooked yolk with a runny and gelatinous white (some people like this, some think it's like eating a ball of ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/10/06/sous-vide-poached-egg/ After a great success with scrambled eggs, I wondered if it would be possible to make french toast in the SVS. I've had some good results with french toast the regular way, but it requires a lot of advance planning, and I find it difficult to ensure that the egg ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/09/22/sous-vide-french-toast/ Drawing on some inspiration in this post on creme brulee at SVKitchen, I decided to try a custard. Since I bought entirely too many blueberries this season, and the last of the bunch is rapidly aging in my fridge as I try to use them up before they go bad ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/09/02/making-sous-vide-custard/ The following is a catalog of my somewhat unscientific objections to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), across a number of different axes: Health / Chemical It's not "Just like sugar" Proponents of HFCS claim that it's "just like sugar", but that's not strictly true. Even the form of HFCS that's closest in chemical ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/08/25/why-i-dont-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup-hfcs/ I couldn't find a recipe for making dried beans sous vide for my Sous Vide Supreme, so I winged it. It worked really well. 1 cup dried black beans, rinsed 1 diced medium red onion Roughly the same volume of beans in ice cubes Preheat SVS to 180F. Seal all ingredients in ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/07/28/sous-vide-black-beans/ Since I last wrote about cooking at home, I've been looking for more ways to try to cook at home. Cooking large portions in advance helps, but I think it's somewhat unsatisfying to eat that way on a regular basis. Those foods that can be more easily prepared beforehand tend ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2010/05/17/in-praise-of-the-sous-vide-supreme/ There's a bit of a debate going on about whether the lack of cooking at home is responsible for people eating unhealthily. Matt Yglesias has a piece arguing that cooking at home isn't fundamentally different from restaurant cooking, and "If someone - Jamie Oliver, for example - devised an appealing ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/10/15/cooking-at-home-is-different/ "I have purchased a number of household appliances, more than a few of them made by the Dyson corporation, and never have I been so embarrassed about any of them as I am about this Dyson DC16. I am embarrassed for myself that I didn’t immediately return this unit after ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/09/22/attn-dyson-inc/ We used to have a 6-at-a-time Netflix plan. We'd get 6 movies, but then sometimes we'd go months before watching them, or even just deciding that enough was enough and sending them back. And frequently, even among those 6 movies, there would be nothing we wanted to watch on any ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/07/22/something-interesting-about-scarcity/ First, I loved it. I think it was the best movie I've seen in a long time. It treated the source material with respect, but established its own direction. The casting was basically flawless, and each of the major characters settled into their respective roles as gracefully as putting on ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/05/11/thoughts-on-the-new-star-trek/ It just doesn't look like a very good movie to me. I didn't like 300 terribly much. It was visually accurate with the book, but I found it fairly boring for most of the way through. I'm tired of ILM demo reels masquerading as masterwork films. The actors, with the ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/03/06/why-im-not-going-to-see-watchmen-tonight/ BoingBoing reports that new rules on consumer safety threaten to put small producers out of business because the testing is too expensive. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/10/consumer-safety-rule.html I have a few thoughts on this. This is a pretty common libertarian vs. nanny state disagreement - should consumers be allowed to make their own choices, but I don't ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/12/10/toys-and-testing/ I've long been looking for a good replacement for teflon for making classical french omelets, and I'd pretty much given in to the idea that it needed to be teflon or nothing. Cast iron (enameled or not) gets a nice big hotspot in the middle from the gas flame, and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/11/possibly-the-perfect-omelet-pan/ Get out there tomorrow and do what you feel you need to. This country has gone astray, and we need to fix it. The next four, eight, twelve years are important, and what you do tomorrow will dictate the path for those years. We need strong leadership who will listen ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/03/vote/ Some number of years ago, I used to think that the ability to get any kind of fresh produce any time of the year was a mark of an advanced global civilization. We had conquered a small piece of space and time and weather to bring me blueberries in February. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/01/why-i-eat-what-i-eat/ My company (Morningside Analytics) has just launched our Political Video Barometer, which tracks the movement of YouTube videos through conservative and liberal blogs: http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/videobarometer.html The Barometer is updated 4 times a day and allows you to see which new videos are starting to break through within either the conservative or liberal blogs ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/24/shifting-the-debate/ This is a list I put together for my father. I thought you'd enjoy it. Got anything to add? I've been putting together a more detailed response for you. There's a reason why nearly every computer professional I work with has switched to the Mac in the past few years. This is ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/16/why-the-mac-is-better/ For some time, I was a staunch Libertarian. That lasted until I started to examine the boundary cases where Libertarianism didn't seem to offer a good answer. I still hold a lot of those principles dear, but I'm no longer convinced that complete Libertarianism can work in the real world. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/02/on-libertariancapitalist-intent/ This was posted to a politics discussion list I'm on. I've been meaning to write something similar, but he beat me to it. I thought it was good, so here it is reprinted with permission: Dear XXXXXXX, Over the years we have know one another, I've steadfastly avoided discussions of politics and religion, ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/26/martins-letter-to-his-mother-in-law/ Dear Senator McCain, Please remember that you are in America, and in America, we don't suspend elections. Have a nice day. http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/25/dear-senator-mccain/ I've been very busy lately, but this is just too much to not comment on. There are other articles about how the Google Chrome terms of service give Google an irrevocable license to use any content you submit through "The Services" (a nice catchall term which includes all Google products and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/03/the-google-chrome-terms-of-service-are-hilarious/ Nasa: ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/08/04/cool-photo-roundup/ Grace Piper interviewed local butcher Tom Mylan at the Unfancy Food Show, and used some of my pictures to illustrate: http://fearlesscook.blogspot.com/2008/07/unfancy-is-new-fancy-grace-interviews.html http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/07/21/my-photos-featured-briefly-in-tom-mylan-interview/ Salmonella-tainted tomatoes aside, gazpacho is about the healthiest thing you can eat, and I look forward to having some decent vegetables to make it with every year. It's pretty good with tomato juice, but I really prefer to use fresh tomato puree. I'm really not a fan of spicy tomato, and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/06/24/on-gazpacho/ Some people were asking, so I finally got around to making a short video of how I cut a bell pepper. I haven't been able to find anything on the web illustrating this, but I haven't actually looked very hard. [Update: Okay, yes, it's a stupid minor thing, but I made ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/05/07/how-to-cut-a-pepper/ In reference to this Gizmodo piece analyzing the rights granted by the Kindle and Sony e-reader: http://gizmodo.com/369235/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-are-no-longer-yours I think the analysis in that article is flawed. It doesn't make any sense to be able to resell the reader with the books on it, because the license for the books is assigned to ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/24/coming-to-a-rational-first-sale-doctrine-for-digital-works/ It's just extraordinary to me what a boon the PS3 is to the scientific community. "Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/13/ps3s-used-for-science/ We have different classifications for the crime of "killing a person", and those classifications encompass whether it was an accident or not, whether it was premeditated, and how many people were killed - e.g.: How serious a crime has actually been committed. But when we talk about terrorism, it's always ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/04/why-dont-we-have-degrees-of-terrorism/ I've put up a screen cast made with the very easy Screenflow. This is me trying to reorganize a large number of tables with attached comments in Numbers, such that there is no overlap and no tables cross a page break. As should be evident even without narration, this is pretty much ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/03/numbers-is-a-nice-idea-with-some-usability-disasters/ Our food labeling standards are completely out of whack. As an example, let's take "100% fruit juice". I'm pretty sure that at some point, "100% fruit juice" meant that what you got in the bottle was, prior to being put in the bottle, a piece of fruit that was crushed and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/03/fed-up-with-food-labeling/ Here's the thing. The past few years have overwhelmingly delivered a whole class of Apple devices I simply want. I've bought a number of them. Not so for anything announced this year. Here's what we got, and what I would have liked to see Apple have announced instead: We got: A ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/16/what-the-apple-keynote-should-have-delivered/ I've become a huge Apple fan over the past two years. I think they've done a number of wonderful things for desktop computing interfaces, and they've far surpassed Windows in usability, stability, and general pleasantness. I spend a lot of time in front of computers, and I try to make ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/15/disappointed-in-the-macworld-keynote/ Warner Bros., one of the big dual-format holdouts in HD video, announced yesterday that they're switching to Blu-ray only as of May 2008, abandoning HD DVD. The format war isn't quite "over" yet, but this is a significant victory for Blu-ray. This leaves Paramount as the only major studio still backing ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/05/warner-bros-goes-blu-ray-exclusive/ Just to add to the confusion: "On Standard-Def DVD, there are essentially only two competing sound formats to choose from: Dolby Digital or DTS.[...]The reality of the situation is that both Dolby Digital and DTS are capable of delivering very good, sometimes even exceptional sound quality on DVD.[...]The advent of Blu-ray ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/10/25/all-about-audio-options-on-hd-discs/ Dear Netflix: I would very much like your website to stop redirecting me to a page that tells me that Im using an unsupported browser. I know I use Opera. I like it. I understand if you dont want to support it, but at least set a cookie so I can ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/10/04/dear-netflix/ [I've posted this as a comment on a few HD DVD vs. Blu-ray blog posts elsewhere, so I thought I'd put it up here as well.] An HD format war is simply the height of stupidity, given the nice example of how quickly DVD was adopted by... everybody. This happened for a ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/28/the-hd-format-war-is-lost-by-existing/ "Picture an incident that throws a group of Romulans back in time. Picture that group of Romulans figuring out where they are in the timeline, then deciding to take advantage of the accident to kill someone’s father, to erase them from the timeline before they exist, thereby changing all of ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/02/new-star-trek-movie-apparently-reboots-with-an-open-time-loop/ Apparently, Sony dropped including the PS2 hardware in the 80GB model, and the last version that includes it is the now discontinued, recently price-cut $499 60GB model. If you care about playing older PS2 games and are thinking about getting a PS3, you probably want to get that one, before ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/02/newer-ps3s-apparently-use-software-emulation-for-ps2-games/