My Blog

Non-Consensual

jcb — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:29:46 GMT

One of my friends had a scary and awful experience New Year's Eve; I think she has handled it very well, and she wrote up her experience here: http://people.tribe.net/kimonogirl/blog?topicid=dd43d1df-8549-4a53-ac4b-9e7c5f271da2 so that people can hopefully learn something and someone else can avoid this happening to them. The post is friends-locked, but if you want to read it she will probably friend you. The lessons are: Not only does "no" mean no, but also "too messed up to contemplate the question" means no. Keep an eye on your friends at Burner events and make sure if they're really drunk or whatever, there isn't anything happening they might not be in control of that they wouldn't want.

Upper Newport Bay Bike Trail

jcb — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:49:19 GMT

I took some pictures ( http://jason.dragoness.net/bike/bikeroute.html ) when I biked around Upper Newport Bay this morning. I'm probably moving up closer to LA soon, and I'm already feeling pre-nostalgic.

Diet Cel-Ray Redux

jcb — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:55:56 GMT

So, I think I got it. A glass of half grapefruit soda and half club soda with 1-2 tsp of the weaker celery-infused vodka mentioned in the previous entry is pretty close and quite good. Unless you hate celery, that is - then I don't think I can help you. Thanks to all my friends who offered advice without which this soda would not have been possible!

Synthesizing Diet Cel-Ray

jcb — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:10:10 GMT

The current owners of Dr. Brown's Soda discontinued the diet form of Cel-Ray. Cel-Ray is great stuff; not liking it is a sign of an immature palate. So, I'm trying to fake up some Diet Cel-Ray. I figured I needed some sort of liquid celery flavoring and maybe Diet Canada Dry, since Cel-Ray has been said to taste a bit like ginger ale. Rather than look for liquid celery flavoring, I made my own. Lena suggested infusing the celery into vodka. I tried this, but instead of celery I used crushed celery seed. I added a similar volume of sugar, since this seems to help many other flavors infuse into vodka: evidently, I'm doing alchemy rather than chemistry. I made two batches; one with about 15g of celery seed in .2l of vodka (for making soda), and one with 10g of celery seed in .5l of vodka with no sugar (for making Bloody Marys or something - I had all this extra vodka and was running out of celery seed...) I used Ketel One, which is a decent vodka - the internet suggests that good vodka is going to have less strong flavor of its own, which is what I wanted. And, even premium vodka is not all that expensive - a .75l bottle of Ketel One is about $20. Once it had sat for three days, the stronger batch was starting to get a little bit of bitter taste, which is a sign that the spice has been infusing long enough. After pouring both batches through a coffee filter to remove the seeds, I put 5 tsp of the strong batch into a can of (regular) Canada Dry; that was too much. (I had previously tried 3 tsp - in retrospect, that was about right, so I may have enough here to do a 12-pack, and theoretically the full bottle could do 50 cans in this manner). It doesn't taste like Cel-Ray, it tastes like ginger ale with a strong celery flavor, but it has about the right amount of celery flavor. Next I'll experiment with different sodas.

Revenant Skunk

jcb — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:48:36 GMT

Tonight I ate with my dad at the Chart House; we were in the weird situation of the tail end of a period where their kitchen was overwhelmed by the Thanksgiving rush, so there were a bunch of drunk, angry customers cursing about the service, but ours was great (however, these folks said their food was better than ours, so technically it wasn't "a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.") Later I couldn't sleep because I had been reading something agitating - or maybe it was the tryptophan in the turkey; no wait, I had fish - so I went out for a walk. I have a frequent walk route which passes through a narrow park between expensive houses full of what the Communists would tell you are Bad People. These people have had a long-running battle with skunks: a skunk will spray one of their dogs; they will call in the skunk patrol, who will largely exterminate the skunks; but come autumn, a new crop of skunks will hatch to resume the fight - and this was the first skunk of the season. She was lurking in a bush, but nature has designed the skunk so that in full moonlight even lurking in a bush she proclaims "Hey, skunk here!" The skunk was a good omen! I was cheered. And I was ok before, cheery but agitated, now I was just doubly cheery. I passed from Revenant Skunk Park onto King Street, where the People are even Worse and the houses are nice beyond nice. This is the farthest point on earth from Black Rock City. And then out of the darkness, a guy wished me a happy Thanksgiving and wondered if I wanted a shot of his Smirnoff! I had some; it was just like home. His friend staggered out from behind a car and worried that they had just caused the downfall of a Mormon Missionary, but I assured him that no, there was only one of me (in case he couldn't tell) and while he maybe didn't believe this we both agreed that I wore no tie. Maybe it's ok to have mood swings if they are in response to stimulus swings. it would be deranged to NOT have mood swings in these circumstances! As my friend said, "yay booze!" And Happy Thanksgiving, and To All A Good Night.

Moral Hazard Maze

jcb — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:41:09 GMT

Yesterday some friends took me to walk around The Woodlands, a nice area outside of Houston. The town had built a hedge maze for the children. They weren't having much luck actually growing in the hedges on the walls (and it takes some serious brown thumb to fail to grow a hedge in Houston) but the maze had a wonderful innovation: if the kid takes a wrong turn and ends up in a dead-end, he is confronted with a big sign that contains a harmful fable! It increases the excitement of a maze if you risk being messed up for life! I paraphrase the first one: There was a tortoise who had a very nice shell. He saw birds flying in the sky and thought flying would be pretty cool. A couple of birds came down and said they would carry a stick between them, and if he clamped his powerful jaws onto it he could fly with them. He did this; it was as wonderful as he had imagined! The birds said, "Isn't this great?" The tortoise said, "It sure aiieeeeeeeee" for he had opened his jaws and plummeted to his death on the pointy rocks below. Moral: you were born to work in McDonald's; don't try to go to college. Presumably eventually the children who make wrong turns in the maze will fail in life, thus gaining lower reproductive fitness, and the residents of The Woodlands will evolve one-trial maze learning. Now THAT'S a master planned community!

Capybaras

jcb — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:12:48 GMT

In the 16th century, for reasons lost to history, the Catholic Church declared that capybaras (giant South American water rats, for those not in the know) were fish; this mistake has never been corrected. This means that they can be eaten on Lent, which they are in various parts of South America. The meat either looks and tastes like pork (according to wikipedia) or looks like beef and tastes fishy (according to http://www.nysun.com/article/11063 ). As fish, it may also be kosher (but maybe not, Alla says catfish aren't even kosher, which is a wise decision actually, catfish are gross), which would make it the ultimate holy meat - although I fear the method of deciding what is a fish is not "does the Pope say it's a fish?"

Basic Russian

jcb — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:33:11 GMT

Lately there's been some influx of Russians into my life, so I've been reading my father's old Russian textbook, Basic Russian by Domar (copyright 1961). It starts each chapter with a dialogue in Russian that's designed for the student to be able to pick his way through. These dialogues are great! Really they ought to be translated and get their own book. Dialogue #1: "I Suck": In which the teacher and student identify themselves, and the student confesses that he can't read or speak Russian worth a damn. The teacher reiterates this point in various ways. Dialogue #2: "I'm Sorry, I Really Really Suck!" In which the inattentive student is turned in by his classmates for not paying attention, and must discourse on the topic. He is then chastised by the teacher and the other students. Dialogue #3: "Yes, I Still Suck. Got Any Smokes On You?" In which a surprising change of subject occurs, and the despairing student turns to tobacco. Followed by musings on the inconsistencies of life, and the horrors of nicotine addiction. I'm now plowing through #4, in which we learn nouns (that is, In which the student is not allowed to go to a variety of exciting buildings, or interact with various objects, but instead must stay in the reading room and not smoke.)

Exploding Beer

jcb — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:30:20 GMT

This morning I was startled by a loud crunch-and-tinkle of breaking glass in the next room. I thought someone had thrown something through a window, but I couldn't find anything out of place. Later Alla found it: a bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen in our breakfast cereal closet had exploded. It exploded hard - shards of glass were embedded deeply in the walls and shelving. The cereal boxes were all soaked in beer and perforated with glass. Alla had to use a knife to get the bigger shards out of the walls. I poked around online to see why this happens. Apparently if you bottle the beer before it's done fermenting, the fermentation will continue in the sealed bottle and the gas pressure can increase until it explodes. The fermentation will go longer than expected if you add too much sugar, for example adding the sugar twice (which, says the all-knowing web, is a common error among homebrewers). Indeed this is a very sweet beer; the bottle that exploded smelled extra sweet. Or it could be the Terrorists.

Gripes about Close Encounter Ratings Scale

jcb — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:03:01 GMT

In my previous entry I mentioned a close encounter of the fourth kind being eating the alien. Well, I looked up the actual Hynek closeness scale ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter ), and I am Very Disappointed. As I guess one might expect given American culture, the scale gives primary placement to violence - the top-rated alien encounter is Kind 6, which is close encounter resulting in injury or death. So if I - have sex with the aliens - have dinner with the aliens - eat the aliens for dinner - shoot one of the aliens and mount his head over my fireplace next to the other aliens - am sued by the aliens I'm still stuck at Kind 3, and the Bloecher Subtypes aren't even relevant. (I guess the lawsuit one might be the Kind 5, if they don't show up in person but do it through their lawyers....) As far as the Kind-3-Subtypes, whether I engaged in sex/dinner/xenobalism apparently isn't as important as whether we did it at my place or theirs. Also, what if I see some lights in the sky and wreck my car and get a bruised arm? Is that a maxed-out Sixth Kind encounter? It sure seems like it is. Oh, you've been abducted? Big deal! That's Kind 4, I am totally at 6!

An Encounter with Uni

jcb — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 03:00:55 GMT

It's Alla's birthday so we went out for sushi. We ate at Sushi Sho, which is good and also obscure enough that even at 7 on Friday night there's no wait. I know Alla likes uni (sea urchin gonads, although it's usually translated as "roe") but she doesn't order it because it's too expensive, so I ordered it and said I'd have some. Now, I've tried uni before, and I remembered it as being the most awful food ever, but it had been years and Alla really loves it so I figured I would try it again. And I did, and I didn't gag or even grimace, so yay me. But yes, it's still the most awful food ever - Alla, who loves it, describes it as "like a tide pool pudding". It is slime; it tastes sort of like iodine and sort of like chlorine (I guess having the same valence those taste pretty similar). It's never good for something to taste like one element - only two-or-more-element compounds (for example, salt, or water) are at all appetizing. If I remember the notation from the 70s when UFOs were big, I think a "close encounter of the fourth kind" was when you actually chewed up and ate one of the aliens.

Flitch or Gammon?

jcb — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:46:44 GMT

Married? Happy? Love bacon? Then you should know about the Great Dunmow Flitch Trials ( http://www.dunmowflitchtrials.co.uk/ ), a tradition of more than half a millenium whereby you can convert your nuptial bliss into cold, hard bacon! No, I'm not kidding! Look at the website! LOOK AT THE WEBSITE! (As seen in The Canterbury Tales: The Wife's Tale - I swear, in England you can't walk down the street without tripping over some ancient tradition that appeared in one of the first works of English Literature!)

A Tale of Political Activism

jcb — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:06:10 GMT

I have a friend in Houston whose daughter is autistic. In early May, a bill went through the Texas state legislature which mandated that insurers cover Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy for children ages 3-5. This therapy is apparently intensive (20-40 hours a week) and commensurately expensive, but incredibly successful: half of the autistic children who receive this therapy are able to function in normal schools with minimal or no support. This therapy has been recommended by the Surgeon General since 1987. Also, it makes long-term economic sense for the state becasue the autistic person doesn't need as many state services later in life - it saves an estimated $3 million over the person's life. Texas State Rep Larry Taylor added an amendment to the bill that un-mandated ABA therapy coverage. This would mean that the therapy mostly wasn't going to happen, and autistic children who might have benefited would likely just end up wards of the state. (Taylor is famous for bills requiring elective courses for academic study of the Bible, and for providing state funding for "Choose Life" license plates.) He's a former insurance agent who's in the pocket of the insurance industry. My friend has a widely-read blog. He posted this story along with detailed instructions for letter writing and calling the most relevant state congressmen to shepherding this bill along without the bad amendment. And, after a few weeks of heart-wrenching setbacks, it worked! The original bill died (amendment and all), but it reappeared as a House bill which languished in committee, looking like it wasn't going to go anywhere, but on the last day of the session (when the legislature doesn't normally conduct any new business like bringing new bills up for a vote) it miraculously came out of committee, was voted on, and passed! The governor has indicated that he'll sign it, so the ABA coverage mandate will become law. Here is what my friend did to get this bill passed: - he understood exactly which congressmen were responsible for what, and targeted his communication effort at them, instead of trying to get votes in general. For an unglamorous topic like this, a pretty small number of congressmen are interested in the bill, and it's them who cause it to succeed or fail, not the congress as a whole. - he posted a blow-by-blow saga of the bill with updated instructions for how to help as it went through its various incarnations and adventures - he had a lot of articulate, active friends. I wouldn't be surprised if a dozen people had composed and written letters. But still, a dozen letters is well within the reach of most people with some political target.

Waterproofing gazebos

jcb — Wed, 30 May 2007 13:32:49 GMT

We just got back from a terrific weekend at Burning Flipside. We brought a 10x10 Rugged Exposure "Deluxe Gazebo" (their emphasis quotes, not mine) to cover our cooking area. These are flimsy-looking things that you probably wouldn't want to use on the playa, but they're cheap and Flipside doesn't have very high winds. When a rainstorm came through, we noticed the gazebo wasn't waterproof - not surprising, since it's made of some sort of shadecloth - so we quickly cut up and duct-taped together half a dozen trash bags to make a nice waterproof cover that we threaded under the roof. This worked great, and it looked just the same from the outside. That night there was a bigger storm, and the trash bags apparently accumulated a good load of water. Some time in the early morning, the legs buckled under the weight, and the shade structure was rendered into a twisted heap of metal. We were asleep; the neighbors across the road said it made a pretty dire collapsing noise followed by a prolonged sploosh of all that water departing. Beware the power of engineering! In the morning we packed up the shade structure remnants in trash bags except for the trash-bag-roof-cover, which we transferred to our tent roof, because also in the night we'd discovered that our tent's rain fly wasn't waterproof. The tent was evidently stronger than the shade structure, or maybe the trash bags were peaked enough to not accumulate water on the tent. What did I learn from this? Evidently I didn't learn not to add waterproofing to existing structures. I believe I didn't learn anything at all.

Why is this news?

jcb — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:37:55 GMT

For the last couple of days, cnn.com has run several front-page stories about the amazing confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This guy is one of the most famous people the military has been holding at Guantanamo. Presumably he's been tortured, at least by general (i.e. non-Cheneyesque) definitions of torture. We know that some people at Gitmo have been tortured, and if anybody has, as a "high-value target", surely this guy has. And lo and behold, he's confessed to pretty much every bad thing that has happened in the past six years! - he is the mastermind behind 9/11 - he personally beheaded Daniel Pearl - he was behind an assassination attempt against Pope John Paul in the Philippines - and partially or solely responsible for 30 other major terrorist operations! Now, torture's not good for much, but if Torquemada taught us anything it's that it's great at extracting confessions. However, none of these CNN stories make any mention of the fact that the guy might be lying... they all have the tone of "OMG we got the guy who did 9/11 and Daniel Pearl and killed Bambi's mom!!!" This is very annoying to me; cnn.com is not Fox News, they are supposed to be presenting a reasonably intelligent take on the news stories.

First Light

jcb — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:14:28 GMT

My 40 kHz ultrasonic transmitters and receivers for My Project came yesterday. I just hooked them up to a signal generator putting out a 10 V peak-to-peak 40 kHz sine wave and a scope, respectively, and I could see the signal! I was getting about 0.25 V peak-to-peak at 6" away, sometimes more, sometimes less. The best transmission appears to be at more like 42 kHz, or else this ancient signal generator is not putting out quite the frequency it says it is. I guess I could test that. Anyway, this is very good news.

Deflecting Responsibility

jcb — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 22:43:14 GMT

I've been reading "The Smartest Guys in the Room", a book about the Enron scandal. I come from Houston and have a few friends that worked there, so I'm interested; in fact, a fellow who appeared in that book numerous times was hired by my old company in Houston shortly after I left. (Isn't that amazing? It seems like their competitors could give all of their customers a copy of the book and say "Check this out, one of the bosses at this company is such-and-so who appears on this list of pages doing unethical stuff.") I think that all large organizations (such as companies and governments) can be configured so that the boss makes it clear that he wants his subordinates to do illegal things without his actually saying it in so many words. This worries me; it seems that he can reap the benefits of crime without risking punishment. For example, look at Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal. In the case of Enron, the boss basically said "We must meet these targets for earnings, but I am a big-picture guy, I don't want to hear about the details" and then gave earnings targets that were impossible to meet legitimately. This sent a clear message to his subordinates: act illegally or be fired. So, I'd been thinking this was a fundamental brokenness inherent in all large organizations. But really, human nature seems to defuse the problem to a large extent. Because, somewhere in his heart the boss knows what he's doing. He may try not to think about it, but he knows. And there are two ways the illegal doings can go: they can happen once and then legit things go great and there's no need to do it any more, or they can create a deeper and deeper hole. An organization that has already started down the illegal path generally won't hesitate to do the same illegal thing again next time they're in trouble. If that happens, then one day the boss is going to get asked to do something illegal; and when his subordinates are willing to do that, they must be in pretty deep trouble. And the boss is going to say "yes", first because he must have suspected these illegal things were happening all along, which means he's not ethically opposed to them, and second because by that point the consequences of not doing it will be pretty dire. So then he gets involved in the actual illegal acts, and can eventually go to jail. I can sleep better now.