out with a sputter

I kinda took today off, so all I learned is that there are around seven theories about the origin of '23 skidoo' and that there's a site devoted to misheard song lyrics.

Happy New Year, and party on, dudes!

waiters, detergent, and flour

1. You should not annoy a waiter, particularly one who can write.

2. I'm allergic to my laundry detergent. It may have been coming on before, but the supplement excitement pushed it over the edge in a horribly subtle fashion. I had assumed that when you became sensitive to your detergent that all your stuff bugged you equally. It seems to depend on how often you wash something and what kind of fabric it is. I had to recover enough - and this is typical - that I could appreciate that sort of thing.

3. My husband was starving again (nothing new there), so I tried out the water chestnut flour. It turns out that that and water in a 3:1 ratio is a dilatant material, which makes it hard to stir. I made what was characterized as a 'frying pan cookie,' which needed a sweetener, but otherwise would have been an ok cookie for having been cooked like a pancake. I tried making it runnier, and that mixture cooked sort of like egg whites, looked a little like fried-egg shaped noodles, and was reportedly more edible without a sweetener. And before you think to yourself, this guy will eat anything, no, he won't, so I'm apparently not doing too badly here.

this just in

I'm feeling way too proud of myself this morning because I slept through the night all warm and toasty and with no pain. This is really quite a feat for me lately, so everybody cheer.

Onward to things I learned in this article about a big hole in Windows security:
1. Security researchers who find holes in Windows promptly post them on the web so hackers can go to town with them.
2. You can use 'exploit' as a noun. No, not like 'his exploits were legendary,' but like this:

"Pretty much all of the spyware guys who normally use other techniques for pushing this stuff down to your machine are now picking this exploit up," Sites said.

I also spotted my first aptonym (aptly named person) this morning, not that it's a great one, but Eric Sites, the vice president of research and development for an anti-spyware firm called Sunbelt Software, is talking about bad things happening when people go to some websites. You know, sites.

blowin' in the wind

There's something blowing around in the wind here today, so all I managed to learn is that celebrities will wear anything. We expected it from people like Paris Hilton, but sheesh.

slept ok, so here you are:

Today I learned that you can sing "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to the theme from Gilligan's Island. Also, all of Emily Dickinson's work can be sung to Yellow Rose of Texas.

Now try to get Yellow Rose of Texas out of your head. The second link above suggests the method of singing Gilligan's Island to the tune of Amazing Grace.

hardtail vs full suspension

Today I learned about mountain bikes. For $500 to $800, you can get a hardtail bike, which has front suspension, and you will have to work hard on some trails, but you can get away with it. For more like $1100 to $1600, you can get a full-suspension bike, and you will be comfy anywhere you like and can get away with being a little sloppier.

So the jury is still out, mostly because everyone I know who rode mountain bikes rode them ten years ago, when suspension was less common, and they all seemed to have a good time....

I also learned that I don't tolerate this one brand of a supplement I rely on, and that resulted in a fair amount of pain this evening. Since exercise seems to help if you feel terrible, I went sprinting around the block as long as I could, and I do seem to feel better. If everything goes according to plan, I'll even get to sleep tonight, and maybe I'll be entertaining again tomorrow.

biscuit recipe

It's another freakish recipe from the broken physicist!

Cassava flour biscuits:
1 cup cassava flour
3 tablespoons oil
1/3 cup water
Stir the flour and oil together to get pea-sized globs. Stir the water in just until the dough sticks together, then divide it in three parts. Throw the parts into an oiled biscuit pan, shape 'em a little so they look like biscuits, and put them in the oven for 25 minutes.

Here's the screwy part, and blame my dad: you put them in the oven when it reaches about 350 F on its way up to 425 F. You can just preheat the oven to 350, put the biscuits in, and then turn it up to 425. Let me know if anyone comes up with something less complicated that works as well.

Since we love to do math, remember the post a few days ago about how many cups of flour there are in a pound? I just made an $8 batch of biscuits, but according to all reports, they were totally worth it.

UPDATED with correct amount of oil! Very sorry for the typo if you tried it!!

Merry Christmas

Today I learned that while the traffic may be better on Christmas morning, there is still too much exhaust for me to ride on the regular roads. It wasn't a huge loss because we had a good time pounding around the loop at Saguaro National Park, which you'd think would get repetitive, but it hasn't yet, mostly because chasing my husband is never boring.

We also learned to cook a standing rib roast, which is not much of a challenge if you can follow directions, but it turned out really, really well, so yay us.

flour, toys, and gambling

I only learned boring stuff today, but as it says under the title, you're stuck with it, too:

1. A cup of flour weighs roughly 4 1/2 ounces (125 g), so if you get a pound of flour, you have 3 1/2 cups of flour.

2. Toys will kill you. (Maybe not all of them.)

3. Out of the three new supplements I got that were making my life better, I'm allergic to the expensive one and the weird-tasting one. I'll check the third one tomorrow; maybe it'll work out. Potential bonus: it's not expensive or weird-tasting.

what'd you learn?

Today I made brownies for the first time in about a year, ate wheat for the first time in six months, and went to a party, so I certainly did something today, but I'm not sure I learned anything.

Ok, well, I did learn something. If someone gives me a beanbag frog, it makes me happy.


I know, I know: it's funny looking and has shiny dots on it. I don't care.

small appliances

Today I learned that leaving a crock pot on high outside for 12 hours isn't long enough to decontaminate it, so I had a tough day, and you get a picture of last year's gingerbread house, complete with abominable snowman.


Freaking crock pot.

fun with faucets

We got the replacement parts for our defective kitchen faucet installed around 4 pm. It required a special tool that they didn't send us with the parts, but we found that an old adjustable bicycle bottom-bracket tool substituted quite well. Overall, the whole procedure took about twenty minutes. The hard part came when we turned on the water again and the ten-year-old O-ring on the hot water shutoff disintegrated and plugged up the faucet.

We extracted lots of O-ring fragments, but the sprayer hose was still plugged. I spent half an hour poking the remaining fragment with the end of a bicycle brake cable, and lo and behold, out came... a brand-new rubber one-way valve. We think the valve came out of the new part but didn't belong to it. We'll be speaking to Price-Pfister about it in the morning.

What I learned today is that you can't repair a faucet unless you have the correct bicycling paraphernalia. Also, you can use a combination of astrology, the Bible, and New Age something or other to predict the future.

what will they think of next?

Here you see the new Methamphibian x SBTG: Divide and Conquer Nike Dunk High “Sin”.

Finally, a sneaker for frogs on drugs.

why weird news is funny

I decided to catch up on my weird news (instead of serious news) and came up with an article about someone purposely crashing a car into a Home Depot. Quick summary: A disgruntled ex-employee drove a car at the crack of dawn clear into the paint aisle of a Chandler, AZ Home Depot, where the car caught fire. No one was hurt, and no name was released. Said the Fire Battalion Chief: "The car was gray or silver-gray when it went in the store. It was black when it came out."

Now I'm going to try to analyze this story using Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam's humor formula, which states that there are six things that make something funny: cute (like puppies), naughty, bizarre, clever, recognizable (familiar), and cruel. The more elements you get, the funnier something is.

You English majors may want to check me on this because, as a reversibly brain-damaged physicist, analysis of this variety is pretty hard, but it looks like five out of six to me:
1. Recognizable: I have, on occasion, been pretty upset with my Home Depot experience.
2. Naughty: driving a car into a store.
3. Cruel: destroying store property.
4. Bizarre: a car in the paint aisle.
5. Clever: "It was black when it came out."

It's less funny after you get done analyzing it, but nerdo here got to apply a formula today, so who cares?

threats, threats, and more threats

Remember the Montreal Protocol article, where the US decided not to ban methyl bromide (a particularly scary pesticide), and I made a comment about cheap produce being more important in the US than the environment?

Right here it mentions a press release from the peasant farmers of Mexico stating that cheap US farm goods have caused a depression in the Mexican countryside, so 15 million broke farmers will be illegally crossing the border next year, big fence or no big fence.

Right there you have it folks: pesticide causes illegal immigration.

Maybe it's time for me to stop reading the news again.

he stole what?

There is a guy who, by careful police work and janitorial monitoring, got caught stealing a lot of toilet paper out of the restrooms at the Oakland Civic Center.

Good quote: "You know, just the other day I was at a meeting, and the police chief was talking about how this was the season for unusual crimes."

fun with Tu Tuff

I promised yesterday to tell you what we did with the Tu Tuff, a 4 mil, polyethylene vapor barrier.

Polyethylene is the only plastic I tolerate, not that I would drink anything out of it. We taped it with aluminum tape to the floor of one of the rooms where we pulled up the carpet, and lo and behold, it holds in the carpet glue and pad chemicals. I can sleep in there. This is very, very cool because sleeping indoors is suddenly vitally important since the neighbors have started doing laundry at all hours of the night.

I kinda miss the stars, though. There's something really cool about turning off all the lights and climbing into bed by starlight, and sometimes you can hear the coyotes howling.

By the way, coyotes don't sound like wolves. They yip like a pack of toy poodles, which you just wouldn't expect for animals their size.

how to catch a cane toad

Just over two weeks ago, I learned that crows in Australia have learned to flip over invasive South American cane toads to eat them, thereby avoiding the venom sacks on their shoulders. Now it turns out the toads are susceptible to something else, and the headline says it all: Cane toads love those disco lights.

the stepping stone passes!

Those of you following the carpet-replacement/tile saga will be pleased to know that the grout we made with AFM Safe Seal successfully held in the nasty chemicals in the thin-set we used, and will thus be able to hold in the carpet glue chemicals that soaked into the slab in our house. We'll seal the grout tomorrow, but things are looking good.


As proper EIs, we sealed up the back of the stepping stone with aluminum foil and aluminum tape so I didn't get in trouble with the chemicals in the cement board backing.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about our adventures with another popular product with EIs: Tu Tuff, a polyethylene vapor barrier for building. I'd tell you tonight, but I rode my bike up a big hill today, and I'm too tired to write coherently.

self-cleaning ovens

Say you've roasted a few greasy ducks and the inside of your oven looks like, uh, well, pretty bad, and you've scrubbed it until your fingers came apart. Do you use the self-cleaning feature you've been warned against? You can't take the smoke from baking anything, but self-cleaning will make some really bad smoke. You decide you'll be out of the house for four hours one day, and you go for it, extra fans in place.

I tried that yesterday. We returned after seven hours, and after we opened some more doors and windows, I could sort of be inside, which brings us to the resurrection of the bedwarmer we made back when I tolerated one (1) blanket and had to sleep with all the doors and windows open to the 40 F (5 C) air.


Before you, you see a cot strung with rope (the cover stank) with fifty feet of copper tube, a pond circulating pump, and a little immersion heater in a stock pot. You also need a little hose and a hose clamp to connect the tube to the pump, and the meat thermometer reads about 110 F in this picture:



What I learned today is that if you use this system outside, you need a second immersion heater, but I didn't find that out by getting cold. I found that out by feeling the tube when I woke up at 5 am because some one of the neighbors started doing laundry. (5 am!!) Fortunately, the house was fine again by then, leading us to the conclusion that self-cleaning is all well and good, but it takes between 12 and 18 hours for the house to be ok again.

clown beetles

Clown beetles stand on their heads when threatened, imitating the stance of stinkbugs, which apparently stink. I threatened this guy by opening my front door, and no, he didn't leave. He was still there to be threatened and photographed hours later.

stoplights and cars

There are people who believe flashing their brights at a red light will make it change faster. It probably also keeps the elephants away, because when was the last time you saw an elephant at a stoplight?

And speaking of cars, it looks like about 50% of the brown haze in the picture accompanying this article comes from cars, and that's why the diesel exhaust seemed to really hang in the air when I went riding yesterday. And yes, you can take a charcoal mask on a bike ride and pull it out of your pocket for emergencies.

ecash

In Japan, they're going cashless by putting chips in cards and cell phones that scan fast and don't need PINs or signatures. They freely admit that people spend more that way, and that the security wouldn't work here in the US because Japanese people return lost wallets and things, but Americans are a bunch of greedy thieving ba-- never mind.

cat beds, sugar, and cocaine

1. The Southern Arizona Humane Society collects fuzzy toilet lid covers to use as cat beds. I can't say I would ever have thought of that.

2. In an effort to widen our diet, we went in search of more sugars. We turned up beet sugar, palm sugar, and sorbitol. We were already familiar with beet sugar, which is an easy substitute for cane sugar. Palm sugar comes in a roughly four inch disk, and my husband reports that it tastes sort of like maple candy. I have no idea what to expect from the sorbitol.

3. In other news, we wondered what the heck freebasing cocaine was, since it's mentioned in Richard Pryor's obituary. What we learned is that cocaine is really cocaine HCl, and to make it properly smokable you need to remove the HCl, thereby 'freeing' the 'base.' It involves some chemistry and explosive substances, and I cannot believe that kind of information is just floating around on the web. I mean, I can, but I'd rather learn about cats and toilet lid covers, thank you.

call Mr. Scott!!

Previous studies have shown that the strength of the Earth's magnetic shield has decreased 10 percent over the past 150 years.

That's from an AP article found this morning, everywhere, about Earth's magnetic field drifting.

Ok, so a magnetic field deflects charged particles, like the solar wind, but nobody calls it the Earth's magnetic shield.

repressed memories

My parents added onto our house starting when I was in the eighth grade. You know that thing where your parents get into something when you're a kid, and you have to help, and sometimes you'd really rather be goofing off? Apparently I paid too much attention because when I watched my husband mix up some grout today, he was explaining how you have to get the consistency just right, and when he got there, I recognized it.

Also, there is a road here in Tucson named N. Super Chicken Dr. (Zoom in once to see it.)

not much to report

I felt good today and wore myself out actually doing stuff, so I'm impressed I managed to learn anything, not that it's very impressive:

Today I learned how to broil lamb chops. I know I'm a little old to have just learned this, but I met picky-meat-chef-man ten years ago in grad school when I was content to eat things out of cans, and, y'know, he's just so good at it.

slept better, thank you

NSFW means 'not safe for work.' I didn't learn this until today because most of the potentially objectionable websites I come across are posted on Dave Barry's blog by Judy, his assistant, and they are marked WARNING: DO NOT OPEN AT WORK, OIYDWYMTTY(NY)G. If you were curious, that last bit stands for 'only if you don't want your mother to think you're (not your) gay.' (I think.)

In other news, I am told that a good bike costs 50% more per pound than a $670,000 Ferrari, assuming a 16 lb, $5000 bike. It evens out at the low end:

Kia Rio: $10,200/2400 lb = $4.2/lb
Wal-Mart road bike: $150/29 lb = $5.1/lb

Just so you know, in case you ever needed to put that $26, 2 lb loaf of cassava bread* into perspective.


*can be found here or here. Cassava is tolerated by lots of EIs I've talked to, and practically nobody tolerates wheat, so we take our breads where we can.

sunrise

Today I woke (at 2 am) to learn that if you're allergic to something in or on your blankets when you go to bed, you should not try jettisoning the worst ones and making do with the leftovers. 'Nuff said; have a sunrise from two weeks ago:

big day

Today I learned that:

1. If your taurine-related detoxification pathways aren't working well anymore, you can try adding glycine and SAMe, which work on different pathways. So far all I know is that SAMe is freaking expensive, so I'm hoping glycine will do the trick.

2. That perfume smell we keep getting over the fence is not the neighbors, but the people down the wash and across the street, probably 75 yards away.

3. If you're not in the correct demographic, you should not look at sites like this one, or you risk losing your lunch.

Tile update:
The tile czar has found that Portland cement with sand and AFM Safe Seal instead of water doesn't hurt me after a couple of days, but he hasn't gotten around to trying it out on the stepping stone (see Oct. 28).

why marketing confuses me

I'm sick, and most over-the-counter and prescription medications will make me sicker, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise to me when I see commercials urging people to join the lawsuits against Zyprexa and Bextra if they've developed certain conditions. Now, there are plenty of conditions for which drugs are very necessary, but I've learned what drug companies don't want me to: if you saw it advertised on tv, it'll kill you.

what now?

I discovered the reason I've felt bad for the past few days is that I can't have a wool comforter loose in the house, anywhere. So I'm feeling better, right? The air in the house is improving; things are looking up.

I tried going outside this morning (well before Laundry Fest), and it was horrible out there. After an escape to the grocery store (hahaha), we drove around the neighborhood and discovered a castle-shaped moonbounce.

I'm allergic to children's birthday parties.

why tv might not be funny

Tv and movies have some very exciting and unintentionally hilarious physics errors. One of my favorites is in Speed, where they jumped a bus over a break in a freeway ramp. Without all the work the stunt guys put into that, the bus would have made a nice parabolic arc and hit the ground, smack. It makes me laugh every time I see it. And don't get me started on Jack Bauer testing a suicide cord by shorting it last season on 24.

So here's a little background on a different topic brought up by tv recently: I got sick from stachybotrys mold, and we 'moldies' call it stachy ('stacky') because we're so familiar with it that it needs a nickname.

The reason this is important is that I finally watched the season finale of Fox's Prison Break, and they knew enough to know that stachy is bad, but they pronounced it all wrong. I recognize I have good reason to know about mold, and I'm not dumb, but for heaven's sake, couldn't they have looked it up in the dictionary?

What I learned here is that physics mistakes are funny, but mold just isn't.

Also on Prison Break, they had a weird discussion of AC vs. DC for electric chairs that I can't remember, which means that it didn't make any sense, so that's not funny either. I don't know about that show.

non-native species

I hear roughly an eighth of Australia is a great place to grow sugar cane. At some point, cane beetles from South America were accidentally imported, and some genius decided to import cane toads to eat the beetles. The cane toads proceeded to eat easier prey and didn't make much of a dent in the beetle population.

Cane toads are poisonous; they have venom sacks on their shoulders, and if you eat them, you die.

Nothing was making any kind of dent in the poisonous toad population until recently, when crows figured out that if you flip the toads over, you can eat them and not die.

Crows are smarter than I thought.

editors are not a guarantee

I made a comment yesterday about bad fan fiction, but I didn't realize there was an annual Bad Sex in Fiction award put out yesterday. And here I thought if you were actually published, so real editors had seen your stuff, this sort of thing didn't happen. Here are some previous winners, some of whom claim to have been being humorous on purpose.

On the whole, I may well stick to bad fan fiction.

should you learn this?

Before I was sensitive to ink, I read a lot of books. Now I take whatever I can find on the web. Today I learned that if you read bad fan fiction on the web, you come across sentences like this one:

"The mere implication was enough to tear his heart with a sound like unwanted wallpaper."