Later On

I just read two dynamite posts on Ed Brayton’s blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars. They each consist of comments on and extensive quotation from another post, and those other posts you’ll doubtless want to read in their entirety.

But I won’t quote extensively from Brayton’s posts—the madness must stop somewhere… preferably after you read these two posts:

Why Beck is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

DOMA and Conservative Precedent

Having been prodded by a commenter into recalling that there are very good flashcard programs and many, many volunteered “decks” of cards that can be downloaded for free, I went looking and happened across this site that reviewed flashcard software for the Mac. I was bowled over by his strong and explicit endorsement of Anki, a shareware program, donation requested. (It runs on Mac, PC, Linux, and smartphones, among others.) If a guy who wrote serious reviews of all the Mac flashcard software he could find, and he comes out that strongly in favor of one particular program…

That’s the program for me. I downloaded, installed it, and have been using it for the past hour. I downloaded two enormous decks of Spanish vocabulary, the second one of which is the one I’m using: 10,000 most common Spanish words presented in order of frequency. Wow. And even if, for technical reasons, the count is really 8910 instead of 10,000—heck, I don’t mind.

And you can use the decks with images, audio, video, what-not. Scott, I’d love to see the Anki deck you could create on photography, using images—not just how-to stuff, but also informational decks on photographers, photographic techniques, history of photography (e.g., identifying famous photos). And someone I occasionally hear from wanted to learn about jazz—think what a wonderful deck it would be with audio and video clips. Oh, man.

I think these would have to be labors of love, but certainly there are enthusiastic amateurs who would begin a deck that could then grow Wikipedially.

I did some browsing and searching among the myriad decks they have, which include quite a respectable collection of Esperanto decks. (I’m thinking that once I’ve got the Spanish down, I’d like to revisit Esperanto—one of those aforementioned labors of love.)

At any rate, Anki is absolutely stupendous. And it’s obvious from the number, variety, and quality of decks available that I’m extremely late to this particular party. … Yes, just stopped to check: they do have a chess deck (879 chess tactical problems—downloading it now). Still, there may be some few who haven’t heard of this luscious piece of software (which, note well, is cross-platform).

UPDATE: The Wife thought Anki would be terrific for art history, so I did a search. TYD, take note of ArtHistory Greek:

This is a deck of flash cards for my ART History of the Ancient Mediterranean. It has cards covering 700-500BCE Greece art highlights.

You have to maximize the window and still scroll, but some nice stuff.

UPDATE 2: The “answer” portion of the 10,000 most common Spanish words deck includes links to the definition of the word in several different on-line Spanish-English dictionaries in case you want more detailed info. Awesome.

UPDATE 3: I would bet some of the decks grew over several years by teachers starting a deck for a class and adding to it year by year—e.g., a deck for a Spanish class could include vocabulary (tagged to lesson number), basic grammer, cultural facts, historical facts, and so on. Obviously, the teacher would have to know that students had computers or computer access, but within a few years of adding, polishing, and editing, the deck could become quite a tool. Indeed, students could also work on the deck, either as assignments or as volunteers: identifying the things in the course with which they need help, and then making cards that provide the help they need, with the teacher simply reviewing and advising. This would also help students become more self-reliant in their own education: solving their own problems, as it were.

UPDATE 4: I like to go through the cards in both directions, looking at Spanish and answering in English, but even more looking at English and answering in Spanish: that direction is, to my mind, the true test of knowing the word. The Anki deck that I’m using now, the 10,000 most common Spanish words, is Spanish->English. So I send an email to the author, who referred me to this FAQ:

How can I reverse the order of the question and answer?

If you want to flip the cards only once, go to Edit>Card Layout while reviewing, and click the flip button. If you are planning to switch back and forth, please read on.

Anki chooses the optimum time to review cards based on their easiness. Changing the direction of cards can make them easier or harder, so if you don’t track the review intervals separately for the two directions, this will lead to sub-optimal scheduling times.

Therefore, Anki allows you to create two sets of cards: one set for reviews in one direction, and one set for reviews in the other direction. You can do this by clicking the card button at the top of add items.

If you already have cards, and want to create new cards with the question and answer flipped, please see the next question.

UPDATE 5: I’m finding that Anki really will do everything I want, but it’s a complex program. I highly recommend that you view his videos on how to use the program. Here’s the first.

Pretty cool, if I say it myself.

A very nice shave for today, which is good: class day. The TOBS artificial badger made a fine lather from the Otoku shaving soap, then three passes with the Hoffritz Slant Bar. I had forgotten that when I first got the Hoffritz, it seemed a little more prone to nick than the Merkur Slant Bar. Later, I bought an ultrasonic cleaner, and after cleaning the Hoffritz I discovered that large (and ugly) deposits around the handle were not corrosion as I had thought, but simply hard water deposits that disappeared with the cleaning. Ever since, the Hoffitz and the Merkur Slant Bars have shaved equally well; in fact, I can’t tell any real difference between them.

A splash of Floris No. 89 and I’m ready to roll.

We assume that, as citizens, our rights are defined by the Constitution and laws and are protected by the government. But when it is the government that wants to remove those rights, what defense do we have? We’ve already seen quite clearly and repeatedly that foreign nationals have no rights whatsoever: not only does the government show itself perfectly willing to illegally kidnap and torture them and, even when they are clearly shown to be innocent, to refuse to allow them any redress at all—that’s bad enough—but we also routinely kill them and do little more than issue perfunctory apologies, although sometimes (as did Gen. Petraeus) we accuse them of killing and burning their own children to make us look bad.

So foreign nationals do not fare well under the new US approach to human rights. But, as it happens, neither do US citizens when the government decides to ignore their rights. The Obama Administration is vigorously defending the government against any legal repercussions for its misdeeds, however egregious, and (given the current Supreme Court) I would say that they are likely to be successful.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate has an excellent summary of arguments in a trial now underway:

When it comes to getting the old fur ruffled, there is a lot of action these days at the Supreme Court. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a scorching dissent, joined by no one, in today’s ruling that the Phelps Family Roadshow of Bilious Bigotry has a First Amendment right to protest at funerals. In Alito’s view, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can punch your face in. Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas has been thundering away (in private gatherings) about ominous-yet-existential threats to Liberty. Justice Antonin Scalia evidenced some Grade-A chest-thumpage in this morning’s oral argument about the right to confront witnesses against you. And as we all learned Tuesday, don’t even try to get on the wrong side of Chief Justice John Roberts and his Webster’s American English Dictionary.

But there is very little ruffled fur or uppity dander at this morning’s argument in a case about an American citizen held under brutally abusive conditions for over two weeks as a material witness—even though he was willing to testify and was never charged with anything. The party line here regarding Sept. 11 seems to be this: Mistakes were made. Knit. Purl.

Abdullah al-Kidd was born Lavoni Kidd, a U.S. citizen and former football star at the University of Idaho. He converted to Islam after college. In 2003, he was detained under the federal material witness statute , then spent 16 days in federal detention, sometimes naked and sometimes shackled, often freezing and in cells lit for 24 hours a day. Nobody suspected him of wrongdoing. He was simply an acquaintance of Sami Omar al-Hussayen, who was being investigated for ties to terrorism. Even though al-Kidd had cooperated with the FBI previously, the agency sought a material witness warrant based on the (inaccurate) claim that he was about to flee to Saudi Arabia with a first-class one way-ticket worth $5,000. (In fact, he had a round-trip coach-class ticket that he paid about $1,700 for. He was going to study for a doctorate in religion.) Although the authorities claimed they needed to detain al-Kidd so he would testify against al-Hussayen, he was never called to testify, and al-Hussayen was not convicted.

Al-Kidd sued many. This appeal concerns his suit against then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. As Adam Liptak pointed out, this detention was widely hyped at the time. “When the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, gave Congress a progress report in early 2003 on the agency’s success in ‘identifying and dismantling terrorist networks,’ his first example was the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. His second was the arrest of Abdullah al-Kidd.”

Al-Kidd’s claim is that Ashcroft created a policy that allowed the FBI to distort the material witness statute—a law aimed at preventing witnesses from fleeing before trial—as a pretext for long-term preventive detention for suspects they never intended to call to testify. . .

Continue reading. The government’s position seems to be that prosecutors must never face scrutiny for their actions because that might make them consider whether their actions are legal or not, and we want prosecutors to feel free to take whatever course of action comes to mind, without regard to the law or to the rights of the citizens. I don’t agree with that.

This is a revision of the original post. I wanted to reorganize the thoughts and add more.

First, the basic approach I’ve used to date: I have been making my flashcards by hand. I use the flashcard blanks made by Vis-Ed: $6.95 for 1000. Making them by hand—writing out the English word or phrase on one side, the Spanish equivalent on the other—takes some time, but the time is hardly wasted: writing the cards begins the learning process, and a certain percentage (around 20%) I learn just from making the cards.

The new deck of cards gets a red rubber band, using this color scheme:

Red rubber band: Review these constantly, using the technique described below.
Yellow rubber band: I sort of know these, but shakily. Review these at least daily.
Green rubber band: I know these. Breeze through them a couple of times a week.

Cards are moved from one deck to another:

• Red-deck card: If I can’t identify the Spanish word, the card returns to the red deck I’m working on, but later in the deck (so I get another shot at it). Once I identify a card (one try or several), it goes into the “identified” pile. After I’ve gone through the entire red deck, and thus (ultimately) identified every card, I sort the cards. I keep in the red deck all cards that took multiple tries and also all cards that I had to struggle, even if briefly, to recall. Those that I identified quickly and with only one try go into the yellow deck.

• Yellow-deck card: If I identify it immediately and with certainty, the card goes into the green deck. If I don’t know it (get a blank or give the wrong word), the card returns to the red deck. If I do get it but slowly or uncertainly (or both), it stays in the yellow deck.

• Green-deck card: If I know it, great: I should. If I have trouble, it returns to the red deck.

After making a new deck, it’s a red deck simply because it’s new). I go through the deck looking at the English side, saying aloud the Spanish equivalent (if I know it), and then turning over the card to check. If I get it right, the card is set aside. If I get it wrong or don’t know, I look at both sides of the card, try to think of a mnemonic, and then return the card to the deck I’m working through, so I’ll encounter it again in this session.

When I complete that first session, I should have experience a successful identification (seeing the English, saying aloud the Spanish, and turning the card to confirm) for each card, though some would have taken two or more tries. But the (eventual) success of the identification is exactly the emotional glue to bind together the Spanish word and the concept or entity given by the English word: the little emotional satisfaction creates enough of a bond (in my experience) to establish the association that continued review will then strengthen. But that successful identification—and the little emotional pay-off—establishes the first actual link: the thread that becomes successively a string, a rope, a cable, and ultimately a wide, strong bridge.

I believe that the flashcard method as described works well for this reason: Once you have established a successful connection between the Spanish word and the concept named by the English word, the hard part is done. With the association nailed in place by that little surge of emotional energy, it’s relatively easy then to strengthen the existing association. As Antonio Damasio has shown in various books, our emotions are what enable us to learn and to make decisions (see, for example, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (2000), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003), or Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2005).)

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: when you successfully identify the right Spanish word, you feel a slight surge of pleasure, and this is enough to help you like the word—and those are the words you remember.

I discovered this because I was going through my flashcards, the way one does of an evening, when I discovered the “keep doing it until you get it right” technique, which seems quite successful. I had a pretty good stack, but I had just made them, so some of them I already pretty much knew. So I turned them to read the English side and say the Spanish equivalent aloud, then turn it over to check/reinforce. If I got it right, I put it in the “review tomorrow” pile. If I got it wrong, I put it back in the deck, around the middle of what was left.

That way I came to it again, tried again. If I got it right, I felt an immediate sort of emotional connection—”I know that one!” sort of thing. And somehow that emotional impact of getting it right, though not terribly strong as emotions go, was enough to make me remember the word better—a big step on the way to knowing it.

And if I got it wrong, it went back into the deck again. So, eventually, I get it right because I just saw it four cards ago. But the emotional connection that arose from seeing the English word, saying aloud the Spanish equivalent, and then turning the card over and seeing the Spanish word I had just said: that emotional impact was undiminished by my having had to take several tries. Once I did get it right, I really felt I knew it.

So, I just tested it. There are 37 cards, and these were all new words. Some are quite easy: to omit, omitir; to sell, vender. Others, not so easy: to forget, olvidar. But after going through the deck once, using the above method, I just now went through again and I knew all the cards except for 2. (Those, of course, I put back into the part of the deck I still had to go through.)

I edited this for clarity. The comment about the computer-based flashcards is helpful: the more tools the better, and I’ve already installed Genius.

UPDATE: Here’s a flashcard-software review site.

UPDATE 2: See my initial reactions to Anki, a cross-platform flashcard program that includes the capability of returning missed cards to the deck so you see them again the same session: when you look at the answer, you can click “again” (shows you the card again at some point in the same session), “good – 1 day”, “easy – 3 days”, or “very easy – 7 days”, and the card will be displayed again at the interval you state. Thus by clicking “again” until you successfully identify the card, you achieve the emotional reward of accomplishment as described above.

The Anki cards can also include links (e.g., to entries in on-line dictionaries for vocabulary cards), images, audio, etc. Incredibly impressive application—and free!

Via Open Culture:

If so:

a. Take a look at this recipe

b. Take a look at this way of trussing the chicken

UPDATE: In the comments Scott Feldstein just posted this video of Thomas Keller roasting a chicken, and I thought anyone reading the post should see the video. I knew the trick about taking out the wishbone, though I hadn’t though of then carving the chicken as shown, but the thing I love is how he trusses the chicken with a string: a wonderful technique, obviously effective, and (like installing software on the Mac) totally simple once someone shows you how, totally opaque otherwise.

As I mentioned to Scott in an email, it’s hard for a culture to understand its conventions until someone from outside the culture blunders into them: culture shock can be very disorienting. For example, I know now from my Spanish class that (a) Hispanic culture has a much different understanding than US culture of the volume of personal space one requires (I had heard this already), and (b) in Hispanic culture people have two surnames, not one: the first is their father’s first surname, the second their mother’s first surname. Add to this the fact that in marriage both partners keep their original names, and you get a situation in which the husband, wife, and child all have different surnames, although the child’s includes part of the dad’s and part of the mom’s. Still, to me (from my culture, which doubtless strikes those raised in an Hispanic culture, as being thin and stingy on the surname front) it seems weird in the extreme to have a family, each with a different set of surnames.

But that’s not why I’m posting. I’m posting because I’m starting to get the hang of iPhoto and so have freed a couple of photos that were residing on my pocket camera. These are pure iPhoto photos:

MPC campus: shortcut from parking lot to main campus

And here is Miss Megs, taking her ease the other day. She’s looking up at me on my Nordic Track:

Miss Megs, waiting for me to peel her a mouse

UPDATE: And Scott is exactly right about the power of tags in searching photos, and iPhoto lets you tag up a treat, including the faces in the photo. I have begun now to tag my SOTD photos with the things shown (e.g., Feather, Klar Seifen, Sabini) so I can quickly gather up photos of interest for a particular item.

The military often supports religious groups, concerts, and other such events for soldiers. So a group of atheists in the military wanted to have their own event. The military went nuts, as described in this post:

I’m not the one who owes everyone an apology, but I’m offering one anyway.

On March 1st we received the Fort Bragg Garrison Commander’s final decision letter, which by all indications was going to approve everything we asked for. Obviously, it didn’t. It placed so many restrictions and unexpected changes that we are completely unable to put on the Rock Beyond Belief festival. Additionally, the lack of similar financial support from government-controlled funds prevents us from actually putting on an event. We were not able to utilize the same system of funding that the Evangelical Christians did, nor were we presented with any alternative (or that there was a problem in this area before March 1st).

It has been a long process involving nearly six months of hard work from an all volunteer group of brilliant individuals. Our final packet that we submitted in early January (not the first packet either) started going through the appropriate officials and committees, and I would get  updates as it progressed. By mid-February, the packet had been with one of the very last stops on the journey for weeks: ‘LEGAL’. Our patience paid off, and on February 17th, they signaled to us that their official legal recommendations to the commander would include everything we asked for. Keep in mind, we made a point to ask for exactly the same treatment as Rock the Fort, in accordance with the Freedom Of Information Act documents that came out in early January.

At that point, we only had to wait for the Garrison Commander to sign off, and we finally relaxed as the hard part was finally over. Unfortunately, his decision letter went against the recommendations of his legal staff (as is his right to do). This came as a total surprise to us, and completely blindsided everyone involved. I tried to do a face to face meeting and a formal rebuttal to his letter, but it did not have any effect. You can read our response to the letter below.

Sir,

I have reviewed your decision letter at great length. It is with great personal cost and heartache that I must inform you that we are abandoning hope for the ‘similar level of support’ to the evangelical Christian event that LTG Helmick referenced in September. Despite your own legal staff’s recommendations to provide everything we asked for, we are not getting anything close to that. Mr. Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, (MRFF http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org ) has offered to litigate on our behalf, and we are likely to take Mr. Weinstein and MRFF up on the offer. For the following reasons we view the limiting terms and restrictions embedded in your decision letter as making our event untenable.

Fort Bragg had officially endorsed and co-sponsored the Rock the Fort event, even going as far as to promote it as part of the Spiritual Fitness initiative. The stated mission for Rock the Fort was growing their membership, and converting as many people to their particular version of evangelical Christianity as possible. Every flyer, poster, and newspaper / radio advertisement contained official Fort Bragg phone numbers, and the press releases were all on Fort Bragg letterhead. I received several notices and emails on my official Fort Bragg email account, from both the Religious Support Office and Public Affairs Office. It is completely unreasonable to consider the demand to place a specific disclaimer that there is no endorsement for the non-religious themed Rock Beyond Belief event, and still claim that a similar level of support is given to us. We weren’t even planning to hold a membership drive like the evangelical Christian event, rather, we took the high road and avoided implying that people’s religious beliefs needed to be changed at all. The Rock Beyond Belief event was potentially a real force for changing the military’s climate of intolerance for non-religious and non-spiritual Soldiers. Instead this has turned into the reinforcement of those prejudices.

Additionally,

Continue reading.

And he is truly blind: no eyeballs. The article, by Michael Finkel, begins:

The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.

The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. “They get gummy,” he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.

Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.

He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.

But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does — he calls it “FlashSonar” — but it’s more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.

Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he’s able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He’s lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He’s a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see. . .

Continue reading.

Scott has been extremely helpful—hey, Scott, you should teach photography.

Here’s the deal: the Web Page option for export seems to want to create an entire Web Page of photos. Presumably it will then publish the Web Page someplace—and, hopefully, let you know where.

What I want is the first option: File Export, which (as the name states) exports the photo as a file, the very thing I wanted. And it does offer various resolutions. Here is medium—same photo as before, but click it twice for maximum enlargement to compare it with the earlier version, which is almost a full megabyte. This version is half the size (as a file):

Now that I can export and have learned how to crop, rotate, and enhance, I’m probably set. I’m not what one would call a “power user,” as you can tell by my struggles.

I suppose every long-lived computer system develops over time its conventions, and newcomers simply have to learn those. God knows Windows has conventions that I use without even thinking, but with the Mac I’m still thinking. And because the conventions are a kind of tacit knowledge, they are not documented well because “everyone knows that”—indeed, a tech writer who is accustomed to the Mac would not even think of documenting some of the conventions because “how else would you do it?”. And that, of course, is why usability testing is so important.

An example: Scrivener was developed originally for the Mac (and it’s truly a dynamite program), and it includes an “outline view” (in the Binder) of the various short documents that, together, make up what you’re working on. (The short-document approach is very powerful, since it lets you work on the project by the salami method: cutting off pieces and doing those.) The outline is drag-and-drop, so you can drag documents (the document title shown in the view) into new positions, as when you decide a certain section should come later (or earlier) in the document.

Well, I had a document that, in the outline view, clearly belonged under another document, which already had several sub-documents. It was already in place, it just needed to be indented, so that it was not on the same level as the document, but was a sub-document.

So I drag it over and drop it, and it snaps back to its previous left margin. Huh. Drag and drop, right? I drag it over again, it snaps back again. You can drag but you can’t drop? Makes no sense. I dragged several documents here and there, and they stayed. But when I pulled this one over, it snapped back.

By chance, I happened to drag it atop the document that was to be its parent. That did the trick: if you drop the document you’re moving NOT where you want it to appear, but directly on top of the document that is to be its parent, the program takes care of the move. But that certainly was not obvious to me.

I had a similar problem the first time I installed an app: a little picture came up, showing the icon of the program, and an arrow from it pointing to an icon of the Applications folder. I was told to drag the icon to the Applications Folder. I did that, numerous times, and the GODDAMNED thing would not work. My frustration level zoomed. I think I called The Wife for help.

As it turns out, the instructions were wrong. They did NOT want you to drag the applications icon to the Applications Folder, though that was what they said. They want you to drag the program icon to the little PICTURE of the Applications folder, up in the illustration, but not to the Applications Folder itself. I, of course, wanted to beat in the head of the person who wrote the instructions with a large ball-peen hammer, but to a long-time Mac user—and now to me—the intention was clear, so the words don’t have to accurate, right? So long as you have a cute photo.

I’ve got to calm down. It’s unseemly for me to get so worked up about this stuff, but I do hate being told to do something, and when I do it, it’s wrong and they wanted me to do something completely different but were too diffident to make accurate statements.

UPDATE: Scott’s right: the tagging and categorization features are extremely nice. And I get it that iPhoto wants always to have the original photo on hand, regardless of how you’ve edited it.

The Wife tried a GOPM in which she put the rice layer as the bottom layer: no aromtics. It worked fine. She likes to take Italian sausage and make little meatballs for the protein layer. She put sliced tomatoes on that, and included some broccoli and cauliflower. She used lots of mustard in the pour-over mix, and it was extremely tasty, she reports.

I stuck with the aromatics layer first (leek and finely chopped celery), then rice and then a large, ripe, sliced heritage tomato and lots of ground pepper. Then a layer of Dover sole, with lime juice, crushed red  pepper, and some salt. Then: chopped parsley, sliced domestic white mushrooms, chopped yellow crookneck squash, a little chopped broccolini, several stalks asparagus cut into sections, and a full bunch of red chard, stalks chopped small, leaves chopped coarse. One Meyer lemon cut into chunks over the top, then I whisked together and poured over the top:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s vinaigrette
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
1 Tbsp mushroom concentrate
1 Tbsp homemade Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard

It’s sitting in the 3.5-quart Staub round cocotte (lemon yellow), and I’ll pop it into the oven after Pilates.

Very nice shave today, and I’m looking (on my Mac) at a very nice photo I made: Klar Seifen shaving soap and their Klassik aftershave, the Feather stainless razor, and the Sabini ebony-handled brush.

Great photo, and iPhoto seemed to do a fine job of cropping and enhancing. And it even saved the photo somehwhere on my hard drive, where I cannot find it. It also does not allow me to name the file that is saved, nor does it offer save for the Web. It is so fucking intuitive that I can’t figure it out. And, of course, the help is terrible. It did offer to register the app, but when I clicked that I was taken to a Web site where I had to pick the app name from a list on which it did not appear, but by consistently ticking “other” I did get to a registration place, where it required some manufacturer serial number that the software doesn’t have.

This product is total crap so far as I can tell. I’m sure that there are those who love it. I’m not one of them.

UPDATE: It’s such a cute program. I tried to mail the photo to myself so I could work with it on the Windows machine, where I could actually do things with it and find it on the hard drive, but the only way I found to email it resulted in the photo embedded in the email, not as an attached file, and I found no way to work with it as a file on the Windows machine. My frustration level is quite high at this point, in case you hadn’t noticed. I thought the Apple was so great with photos and the like. How in hell can people use it for that?

UPDATE 2: Interesting. The photo does show as an attachment in my iMail program. But even though I saved it at different resolutions, the program overrode my choices and all three emails have the same size file. That I don’t get—unless the program controls are fakes, put there to make the user feel as though they are in control.

I won’t be working with photos on the Mac. It seems not to be suited for it. I’ll try saving the photo (now attached to an email) as a file on the hard drive so I can find it, and then upload it.

Okay, that worked. It is actually pretty simple:

Go into iPhoto, fix up photo, email it to yourself, save the attachment (and here you do get an opportunity to rename the file) so that you can find it, then upload it to WordPress. Unfortunately, it loads the entire damned file (too large), so even though the Apple is so nice and easy, I will continue to use the Windows computer when I work with photos. There I can select an option to “upload for Web” that greatly reduces the filesize—and also doesn’t require the cumbersome workarounds.

And apparently the electric bike (which folds and can be put in with the spare time without diminishing trunk room) will be an accessory to VW cars in the near future. Brief video clip of the bike in action here. It looks pretty good.

Fascinating array of (undocumented) choices. I’m going to have to try some—I immediately liked the sound of a mustard-grilled burger with grilled onions and chopped chilis. But take a look and see what you’d want.

Fascinating column by Joseph Hallinan in the NY Times:

It has been more than three years since the beginning of the Wall Street financial crisis, yet we continue to hear about new evidence of glaring errors and widespread misdoings. Even the smartest minds in finance are left scratching their heads: how did we not catch any of this sooner?

When I hear this refrain, I am reminded of Boris Goldovsky.

Goldovsky, who died in 2001, was a legend in opera circles, best remembered for his commentary during the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he was also a piano teacher. And it is as a teacher that he made a lasting — albeit unintentional — contribution to our understanding of why seemingly obvious errors go undetected for so long.

One day, a student of his was practicing a piece by Brahms when Goldovsky heard something wrong. He stopped her and told her to fix her mistake. The student looked confused; she said she had played the notes as they were written. Goldovsky looked at the music and, to his surprise, the girl had indeed played the printed notes correctly — but there was an apparent misprint in the music.

At first, the student and the teacher thought . . .

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Last night I fell to contemplating my finances and spending and decided that it was suffering the same problems that my eating had suffered, and probably from the same cause: insufficient consciousness of what I was doing.

So now I know the drill: I immediately started two journals:

• Money Journal: to collect objective, timely, and accurate data about my money flow (in and out), just as my Food Journal collected such data regarding diet, weight, and exercise; and

• Reflections Journal: to collect my thoughts and ideas on what is going on as I begin to suss out patterns and causes; here also I can figure out priorities and future directions.

I suspect that this routine—a journal to collect objective data and a journal to collect one’s thoughts, observations, and ideas concerning the data—applies to any number of activities, whether one is dealing with a problem or simply trying to maximize the payoff from one’s efforts. For example, I imagine that serious athletes keep such records, even if not directly using the two-book method I’ve described.

UPDATE: After using this approach for a couple of days, I’ve noticed that when I contemplate a purchase, and start thinking about writing it in the Money Journal, I look on it with much the same perspective as a skeptical on-looker, with some good questions about the prospective purchase, beginning with exactly what need am I addressing. Three times in the past two days a purchase impulse has withered under this simple step—purchases that I feel sure I would have made had I not interrupted the flow (broken the trance, more like it) by thinking about writing it down. And thank heavens for all those movie reporters, hard-bitten, cynical, asking hard questions as they jotted the answers in their notebooks: I think I just automatically shifted into that mindset.

Very interesting article by Jon Hamilton at NPR:

Most plastic products, from sippy cups to food wraps, can release chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen, according to a study in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study found these chemicals even in products that didn’t contain BPA, a compound in certain plastics that’s been widely criticized because it mimics estrogen.

Many plastic products are now marketed as BPA-free, and manufacturers have begun substituting other chemicals whose effects aren’t as well known.

But it’s still unclear whether people are being harmed by BPA or any other so-called estrogenic chemicals in plastics. Most studies of health effects have been done in mice and rats.

The new study doesn’t look at health risks. It simply asks whether common plastic products release estrogen-like chemicals other than BPA.

The researchers bought more than 450 plastic items from stores including Walmart and Whole Foods. They chose products designed to come in contact with food — things like baby bottles, deli packaging and flexible bags, says George Bittner, one of the study’s authors and a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Then CertiChem, a testing company founded by Bittner, chopped up pieces of each product and soaked them in either saltwater or alcohol to see what came out.

The testing showed that. . .

Continue reading.

The article strangely omits the stance taken on this issue by scientists and regulatory agencies in (for example) the EU, the UK, and Canada. The EU, for example, already has in place a ban on BPA in baby bottles.

File for when soup sounds good: a choice among a dozen soups, three in each of four categories: creamy, brothy, earthy, and hearty. And here are four more.