Minor Thoughts from me to you

What a great story, from Popular Mechanics.

The microwave is beloved for its speed and ease of use. But what you might not know about your indispensable kitchen appliance is that it was invented utterly by accident one fateful day 70 years ago, when a Raytheon engineer named Percy Spencer was testing a military-grade magnetron and suddenly realized his snack had melted.

​> …

Spencer earned several patents while working on more efficient and effective ways to mass-produce radar magnetrons. A radar magnetron is a sort of electric whistle that instead of creating vibrating sound creates vibrating electromagnetic waves. According to Michalak, at the time Spencer was trying to improve the power level of the magnetron tubes to be used in radar sets. On that fateful day in 1946, Spencer was testing one of his magnetrons when he stuck his hand in his pocket, preparing for the lunch break, when he made a shocking discovery: The peanut cluster bar had melted. Says Spencer, "It was a gooey, sticky mess."

…

​> Understandably curious just what the heck had happened, Spencer ran another test with the magnetron. This time he put an egg underneath the tube. Moments later, it exploded, covering his face in egg. "I always thought that this was the origin of the expression 'egg in your face'," Rod Spencer laughs. The following day, Percy Spencer brought in corn kernels, popped them with his new invention, and shared some popcorn with the entire office. The microwave oven was born.

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Alberto Burneko offers some genuine words of wisdom, especially as snow visits regions of the country that it normally doesn't visit.

Which brings me to the first thing you need to know in order to drive the hell home in the snow: You are not actually required to lose your goddamn mind just because snow is falling. It is not the apocalypse. Neither physics nor society have been cancelled by it. It is not sulfuric ash. There are no abominable snowpeople stalking through it. It will not dissolve your body if it touches you. It is frozen water. You can drive in it, you can walk in it, you can stand in it long enough to help a fellow motorist get the fuck out of your way, you can ball it up and throw it at people who treat it like it's the end of the goddamn world. It is snow.

Accordingly, driving a car home in the snow is still driving a car. This probably seems like snarky, unhelpful advice, but actually it's not! Many drivers seem genuinely to believe that, when the road has snow on it, using an automobile to get from one place to another becomes a fundamentally different activity, with weird obscure properties that you don't know, and so you creep along at two miles-per-hour with the brake pedal halfway depressed the entire time and, like, your goddamn hazard lights on, gripping the wheel in white-knuckled terror, as though at any minute, for no reason whatsoever, your car might decide to hang a 90-degree left turn and plunge into a ravine.

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I, myself, am often reminded of life's little ironies.

The story begins in the early 1990s, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush—the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner—to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.

Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of "no confidence" in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig "would support his dream to become baseball's next Commissioner." It didn't work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush's dream job. He would preside over a players' strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history—something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn't accomplish—but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly '60s and '70s mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late '90s and early '00s. Selig was the proud steward of baseball's rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.

The commissioner's old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.

You'll remember that President Bush's Cabinet included Condoleeza Rice, who wants to be the NFL's commissioner. It'd be an interesting turn of events if those two ever end up in their true dream jobs.

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This is a very interesting service, from a local Madison company.

“A healthy diet is good for everyone. But as people get older, cooking nutritious food can become difficult and sometimes physically impossible. A pot of soup can be too heavy to lift. And there’s all that time standing on your feet. It’s one of the reasons that people move into assisted living facilities.

But a company called Chefs for Seniors has an alternative: They send professional cooks into seniors’ homes. In a couple of hours they can whip up meals for the week.”

“According to some estimates, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million seniors living in their own homes who are malnourished. In long-term care facilities, up to 50 percent may suffer from malnutrition. This leads to increased risk for illness, frailty and falls.”

“Part of the business plan is keeping the service affordable. In addition to the cost of the food, the client pays $30 an hour for the chef’s time. That’s usually a couple of hours a week of cooking and cleaning up the kitchen. There’s also a $15 charge for grocery shopping. So clients pay on average $45 to $75 a week.

And while there are lots of personal chefs out there and services that deliver meals for seniors there are few services specifically for older adults that prepare food in their homes.”

This isn't what most people would think of as healthcare, but I'd call it healthcare innovation. Living a healthy life—and eating right— is a big part of staying out of clinics and hospitals. If people spend money on this service, they could very well be saving thousands of dollars in other healthcare expenses.

This strikes me as the kind of service that insurance companies won't want to provide but that patients would be willing to pay for, if they have control over their own healthcare dollars.

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That’s a little-known concept called the planning fallacy, which is a strong tendency to chronically underestimate task completion. The planning fallacy is one of the most difficult behavioral patterns to change, experts say.

…Roger Buehler, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, estimates that people on average underestimate task-completion time by as much as 40%. His studies have found the same issues for matters as small as mailing a letter and as critical as income taxes.

Researchers have tested several strategies that have been found to help people slow to finish their work. One involves predicting how long it will take to get something done based on past experiences. Another is breaking down a task into very detailed steps.

In a 2004 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Kruger and a co-researcher found that when “unpacking” a task—or breaking it down into detailed steps—individuals provided more accurate estimates of how long something would take to get done. The four scenarios studied were getting ready for a date, holiday shopping, formatting a computer document and preparing food.

I'd say that this is the biggest scheduling difference between my wife and me. I break things down in meticulous detail and she tends to just wing it. I think the end result is that we just annoy each other most of the time.

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I'd try this.

To make it, you cut a chicken in half, roll out a flour and water dough, cover it with sage leaves, cover those with bacon, and wrap each half chicken. Each ends up enclosed in successive layers of bacon, sage, and dough. You then bake it. The dough, especially the dough under the chicken that gets the drippings and the bacon fat, is yummy, the meat juicier than with an ordinary baked chicken.

This Christmas we decided to experiment with Icelandic turkey. The bird was about fourteen and a half pounds, that being the smallest we could get for five of us—my immediate family and my wife's mother. Out of respect to Christmas and Thanksgiving tradition I used the whole turkey instead of cutting it in half.

I made the dough with about ten cups of flour and three or four of water, enough to be kneaded into a soft but not wet dough. The turkey was stuffed, the dough covered with sage less densely than the chicken usually is, due to not enough sage leaves. The half of the dough that went under the turkey was covered with bacon strips, the rest of a pound of bacon went on top of the turkey and the other half of the dough on top of that. The two halves of the dough were sealed together.

… Anyone curious about the Icelandic chicken recipe can find it in How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes, webbed as a pdf on my site, available as a hardcopy from Amazon.

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This is the type of thing that worries me.

Holdren does do us a favor by raising a subject which doesn’t get nearly as much air time when this topic is debated in the media. No matter what you think about the viability of various climate models predicting the effects of various atmospheric agents on the biosphere, there has always been a long term question about what mankind will do when (not if) the next ice age comes. Rather than looking at hockey sticks for global temperature trends in the 20th century, a more alarming picture comes into focus when you look at our track record for the last half million years.

The relatively pleasant weather we’ve enjoyed throughout mankind’s rise across the globe is, traditionally, a fleeting thing. Eventually the glaciers come back and that’s something which our biggest brains have no clue how to stop once they start their southward march. Once the process starts, it happens pretty fast, too. (At least “fast” in geological time frames.) It might not spell the actual extinction of the species, but there wouldn’t be room for many people in the habitable areas. There are also theories out there which suggest that a sustained rise in temperatures can actually trigger a faster onset of glaciation. So when you’re done arguing about what to do when the ocean levels rise and swallow Miami, you can figure out how to grow corn on an ice sheet.

The Milwaukee Public Museum has an exhibit on the ice ages. It's a sobering thing to stand next to a scale replica of a glacier, looking up, and imagine everything that you know being kilometers underneath your feet.

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David Henderson shares this story, from LCDR Ilia K. Ermoshkin, an officer in the U.S. Navy.

I grew up in the USSR and became familiar with the healthcare system both from the beneficiary point of view and from that of a provider, as my grandmother was a dentist. The government owned and ran all health care, and it was free to the people. However, the quality and the "care" in the health care system were dismal: long waits for specialists and advanced procedures, etc. But, as anywhere, people have developed ways to get around and get what they want. Here are some examples of wonderful free health care in the USSR.

Birth was to take place only at birth clinics, of which there were about half a dozen in a city of five million people. Husbands or any other family are not permitted to even enter, under the premise of keeping the place free of germs, etc. My delivery was very difficult for my mother, she was in labor for three days, and it was deemed unnecessary to give her any pain medication or do a Cesarean. So she roamed the hallways of this clinic/hospital howling with pain. Nobody was permitted to use the phone (there were only a few in the administrative offices), so she could see my father and her parents only through a window once a day. When I was finally born, I was taken away from my mother immediately to be placed in a post-birth unit (this was done to all newborns), and my mother did not see me until about 24 hours later. We were released from the hospital after 7 days, and that was the first time my father saw me. This is a story that was a fairly normal routine for the Soviet women, and no other options were available as it would be then nearly impossible to get a birth certificate for the newborn. When my mother told this to my wife, who is American, she was horrified and had nightmares about it. [DRH note: for similar stories about the birth process, see Red Plenty. I reviewed it here.]

When I was two, I got severe pneumonia. I was at home with fever of 42C [DRH note: this is over 107 degrees Fahrenheit] and the doctor decided that this was a lost case and would not even prescribe penicillin to try to fight the disease. It took my parents and grandparents pulling all their connections and bribing to get penicillin that fairly promptly took effect and saved me.

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It’s tempting for the muscle-powered recreation crowd (of which I’m a proud member) to argue that we’re lighter on the ground than those who roar into nature astraddle their growling snowmobiles and churning all-terrain vehicles. Surely motorheads are to blame for any problems in the forest.

The uncomfortable fact is, we’re all complicit. In a not-yet-published review of 218 studies about recreation’s impacts on wildlife, researchers found more evidence of impacts by hikers, backcountry skiers and their like than by the gas-powered contingent.

Cross-country skiers on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, for instance, can be more disturbing to moose than noisy snowmobiles, one recent study found. Grant Harris, a biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the main author of the study, explained that snowmobiles, while a noisy intrusion, announced their presence and then quickly departed. But cross-country skiers can sneak up on an animal without warning and then linger. Worse, animals “don’t know where the skiers are going to pop up next,” leaving them on edge.

This reminds me of my favorite quote about limited knowledge and unintended consequences.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." — F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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A new report released Tuesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit higher-education research organization, shows that 13% of students who enroll at one school end up graduating from another. With a six-year overall completion rate of 55.1% for the class that started in fall 2008, that means nearly one in four students who graduated were transfers, according to the study.

Such high mobility among students points out potential challenges in the Obama administration’s proposal to rate school performance, as well as state-level funding efforts tied to school success.

Figures currently reported by the U.S. Department of Education include as success stories only students who initially enroll on a full-time basis and those who graduate from the same school where they started. The college ratings plan largely has been put on hold amid pushback by schools.

“We’ve got to make sure that we don’t let students fall through the cracks in the transfer process,” said Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit that works to increase the number of college graduates and provided financial backing for the report.

He said historical assumptions about how students progress through school, including that they remain in the same institution, “run against the reality of the lives that today’s college students are living.”

According to the new National Student Clearinghouse data, one in four students who first enrolled at four-year, public schools in Minnesota graduated from a different school, as did 24% of those in Missouri. Forty-seven and 39% of students who started at such schools in those states, respectively, graduated from their original institutions.

In 22 states, more than 5% of students who started at public, four-year colleges in fall 2008 completed their programs in another state. For example, 8.4% of students who enrolled in public universities in Maine ultimately graduated from schools in other states.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." — F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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Way back in December, Sarah Skwire shared a story about how one family tradition came to be.

When I was growing up, we made gingerbread houses every year. They grew increasingly ornate over time–crenelations and portcullises were standard, and melted crushed lifesavers made exceptionally good stained glass–and they were always a highlight of holiday pictures. We kept the house around for weeks.

One year either my sister or I knocked the house off the dining room table. Lower lips began to quiver. Howls of despair and recrimination were JUST about to begin.

Mom stepped in.

“Oh good! You smashed the house on New Year’s Eve. That seems just right. Now we can eat it.”

So we did.

And now, Skwire family gingerbread houses are ritually smashed (with a meat tenderizing mallet) and eaten on New Year’s Eve.

Because it’s tradition.

May your holidays be filled with delightful and delicious emergent orders of all kinds.

This is a holiday tradition that I can support wholeheartedly.

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A nurse in Surrey, England was called into her daughter's school and informed that her daughter had punched a male classmate—twice. The mother was confronted by the teacher, the head of the students' year, and the school's head (fka headmaster). Then her daughter explained what had happened.

Daughter: “He kept pinging my bra. I asked him to stop but he didn’t, so I told Mr. [Teacher]. He told me to ‘ignore it.’ [Boy] did it again and undid my bra so I hit him. Then he stopped.”

(I turn to the teacher.)

Me: “You let him do this? Why didn’t you stop him? Come over here and let me touch the front of your trousers.”

Teacher: “What?! No!”

Me: “Does that seem inappropriate to you? Why don’t you go and pull on Mrs. [Head Of Year]’s bra right now. See how fun it is for her. Or on that boy’s mum’s bra. Or mine. You think just because they’re kids it’s fun?”

Head: “Mrs. [My Name]. With all due respect, [Daughter] still beat another child.”

Me: “No. She defended herself against a sexual attack from another pupil. Look at them; he’s nearly 6 feet and 11 or 12 stone. She’s 5 feet and 6 stone. He’s a foot taller than her and twice as heavy. How many times should she have let him touch her? If the person who was supposed to help and protect her in a classroom couldn’t be bothered what should she have done? He pulled her bra so hard it came undone.”

My daughters' principal and teachers keep indoctrinating them with the idea that violence at school is never justified. As this event illustrates, it's sometimes very justified. If school staff are unwilling to protect students, my daughters will have my full support when they defend themselves.

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Apparently, it's challenging to make a dress with sleeves that look good.

To designers, sleeves can be frumpy. They also pose design challenges. Sleeve peeves may be rising in part because it is so tricky to make a flattering sleeve that is roomy enough to offer a full range of motion. With more casual styles and the introduction of stretch fabrics from denim to silk, women have grown accustomed to comfort, and they are more likely to revolt against constrictive clothing.

“In the past, the tolerance for uncomfortable clothing was a lot higher than it is now,” says designer Trina Turk.

… But office clothing, with its tailored and more-fitted look, poses a design challenge. Structured construction makes it difficult to add a sleeve that allows complete freedom of movement, unless the fabric is stretchy. Ms. Turk’s ponte-knit “Monarch” dress style has slim, elbow-length sleeves that work because the knit fabric stretches.

So, mostly, dresses are sleeveless because the designers just give up.

Ms. Lepore, known for her curvy, flirty, colorful boho designs, says with each collection she aims to have a balance of sleeved and sleeveless dresses. Sleeves, she says, can make a dress look dowdy.

In Ms. Lepore’s recent resort collection, one tribal-look dress went through several iterations. It started with an elbow-length sleeve. The design team stared at the sample in the mirror trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. They tried a cap sleeve. Still wrong.

The dress wound up sleeveless.

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They found that at the right velocity on the right kind of soil (sandy clay works, but sand doesn’t) a falling water drop can trap tiny air bubbles under it. Those bubbles capture molecules in the soil. As the water drop deforms, the bubbles scoot up through the drop and jet out into the air, like champagne bubbles or spray from a crashing wave.

If the drop falls too slowly, it is absorbed; too fast, and it splatters without the bubbles emerging. “The sweet spot has to do with the velocity of the droplet and the qualities of the soil,” said Cullen R. Buie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. He and a postdoctoral researcher, Youngsoo Joung, reported on their work in Nature Communications.

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After reading this, I'm certainly willing to give baby bananas a fair chance. I just don't know if I'll be able to find any around here.

Is America ready for a second banana? For most shoppers, one banana fits all: the Cavendish. A foot long and weighing in at seven ounces, it accounts for at least 99% of national banana consumption. It also causes trouble for people who don’t want to slice a whole banana into a bowl of Rice Krispies.

If only bananas could be smaller. Well, some are. Of the 33 billion bananas shipped to the U.S. in a year, a tiny fraction are exotic cousins often sold as “babies.” That is demeaning; baby bananas are full-grown. At a third the size of a Cavendish, sweeter and creamier, a baby fits without waste into a peanut butter, banana and mayonnaise sandwich. No one slicing a baby banana into a bowl of Rice Krispies ever has to ask, “Who wants the rest of this banana?”

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Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by the idea of plant based meat substitutes. My interest is purely tech based. I'm not worried about the ethics of eating meat or about saving the environment. I just think that the idea of transmorgifying plants into meat is fascinating.

If Beyond Meat is right, it's an idea that may be closer to moving from SF to reality.

a box arrived at my door and made it easy.

Inside were four quarter-pound brown patties. I tossed one on the grill. It hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out. A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner. Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some more. And then I began to get excited about the future.

It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat, located a few blocks from the ocean. At that point, the Beast was still a secret, known only by its code name: the Manhattan Beach Project. I’d had to beg Ethan Brown, the company’s 43-year-old CEO, to send me a sample.

And it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Brown told me when I rang him up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk. More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It’s the ultimate performance burger.”

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My wife thinks I keep the temperature too cold as it is. I don't think she'd be a fan of this line of research.

The mild cold exposure he advocates might be as simple as forgoing a jacket when you’re waffling over whether you need one, not layering cardigans over flannels despite the insistence of the fall catalogs, or turning off the space heater under your desk. And if you don’t want to annihilate the environment by running the air conditioner to get a taste of sweet, calorie-burning, metabolism-enhancing cold in the summer, there are devices like the ice vest, which really isn’t as terrible as it sounds.

“The first time you put it on, it’s a bit shocking, to be honest,” Wayne Hayes, the vest’s inventor, warned me. “You feel like, Holy shit, this is cold.” But after wearing it a few times, he said, most people barely notice they have it on. That was my experience. (Hayes’s wife has become so used to the vest that she wears it under her clothes instead of over them.) Hayes recommends wearing the vest twice a day until the ice melts—which can take an hour or longer—though he has himself worn it as many as three or four times in a single day.

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That’s when I realized that I had a problem. In fact, everyone I know in the craft beer industry has a problem: We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore.

Hops are the flowers of the climbing plant Humulus lupulus, a member of the family Cannabaceae (which also includes, yes, cannabis), and they’re a critical ingredient in beer. Beer is made by steeping grain in hot water to turn its starches into sugar (which is later converted to alcohol by yeast). While the resulting liquid, called wort, is boiling, brewers add hops to tone down the mixture’s sweetness—without hops, beer would taste like Coke.

Every beer I've tasted is bitter and, I think, nasty. Especially the craft beers. Why can't I have a beer that tastes like Coke? I'd buy that in an instant.

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Using the latest in 360-degree scanning and 3-D printing technologies, Twinkind, a new company based in Hamburg, Germany, will turn you, your loved ones, or your pets into a marvelously detailed little statues. It might seem a bit gimmicky if the results weren’t so stunning. The final figurines, which can range in size from roughly 6″ (around $300) to 13″ (around $1,700), are strikingly, maybe even a little unsettlingly realistic, capturing everything from poses and facial expressions down to hair styles and the folds in clothes, all in full, faithful color.

It's probably a bit gauche to make a model of yourself. But why not put models of your family in your office, instead of just a flat portrait?

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I've been fascinated with underground houses ever since I read On the Banks of Plum Creek, many years ago. I think I'd really enjoy living in a modern "dugout" house.

Mickey Muennig has been building green-roof architecture for the past 30 years. One of his latest eco friendly buildings is the one on copper point where the roof is covered in a blanket of thick wild grass. He is a long time practitioner in eco-architecture and still remains an unsung hero of the green movement even at the age of 74. The copper point house is built into the landscape and has concrete walls on two sides with all-glass walls in between. The roof above is a continuation of the landscape which has thick covering of grass making the house more fireproof and also providing insulation at the same time. It is an ultra efficient house sporting solar panels grids.

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