The monthly and category archives seem to have broken on me, probably because of me messing with the archive template mappings. Excuse the breakage while I try to figure out what I broke this time. Entry archives still work.
Update: Ok, the category archives seem to have magically unborked themselves. Oddly, only the April and May monthly archives are broken. This is very strange.
Finally getting around to trying out the teas I picked up at the Charleston Tea Plantation's First Flush festival a couple of weeks ago.
Before me, I have in one mug their regular American Classic tea. In another mug, the 2008 First Flush tea. Both were brewed using water just off the boil and steeped for 3 minutes.
Both teas brew up quite a bit lighter than I would have expected for black teas, about the same colour as an oolong tea. The taste is remarkably similar too I think, only milder. Admittedly it has been a while since my last cup of oolong, so I might be mistaken. I'm all out of oolong tea too, so I'll have to go find some and do a comparison.
The first flush tea is definitely different than the regular American Classic. It brews a little bit darker with a little stronger and somewhat more 'green' and woody flavour (to my very untrained palate).
They're both pretty mild flavoured teas compared to other black teas I've had, but quite enjoyable when sitting down with a book or lounging in the rocker on the porch. Stop by for a cuppa and we can compare notes.
It's been a year since I dumped Windows from my desktop at work. Not so long ago i also dumped Windows from my computer at home. With the exception of my laptop and a Windows VM living Windows free has been pretty easy. Don't really see myself wanting or needing to going back to a Windows box on the desk. There have been a few issues with hardware finicky-ness, but for the most part I haven't had any problems getting everything done that I need to do.
Go Linux!
Started doing lunchtime runs with Max today. 9 laps (1 warmup, 6 slow jog and 2 cool down) on the rooftop track of the Wellness Center. Since the track is 6 laps to a mile, total distance is about 1.5 miles.
It was hot up there, but being outside at least there's a little bit of a breeze to keep things tolerable.
Had a good jog up there. Plan is to keep doing it every day at lunch. It'll be tough to keep up during the summer heat though.
I took about 120 or so pictures of Mel at the dog park the other day, and out of all of them I ended up with 5 decent ones.
I had the camera on burst mode, so most of the pictures were just 3 shot sequences of Mel in various stages of looking up, down, to the side, away from me, taking off to check something out or trying to leave nose prints on the lens.
BTW, Mel is available for adoption so if you're interested or know someone who might be, contact the folks at Wild Heir Lab Rescue. They'll be happy to help you out.
Mel's a very sweet and gentle dog who will absolutely soak up as much love and attention as you want to give to her. She's pretty shy around new people, but it's nothing that a few cookies and treats can't break through. Once she's accepted you though, she'll stick to you like white on rice. She gets along great with other dogs and hasn't had any issues with any of the dogs she's met at the dog park. She knows sit, and is trying to learn down but could still use some obedience work. Mel gets pretty hyped when she sees the leash coming out (because it means she gets to go outside!). She likes to run and chase things (especially bugs), but isn't what I would consider a highly active dog. She's pretty happy just finding a spot at your feet and gnawing on a Nylabone.
How can you say no to a face like this?
One of the reasons I like reading Bad Astronomy Blog is The Bad Astronomer's (aka Phil Plait) penchant for calling out states, school boards, educators and who-not trying to push alternative "scientific" theories into schools (which for the most part are fairly thinly veiled attempts at pushing a creationist teaching agenda). Phil does this really well.
I find it all quite amusing, ironic and sad all at the same time (the politicians and their bills, not Phil).
Consider this. You can hardly go a day without hearing someone bashing or criticizing the state of public education, or reading about the latest study on how kids in the US fare so poorly in compared to other countries. Everybody complains about the sorry state of public education in the US (despite the efforts of all the good teachers out there). Yet just about everywhere you turn, there is some politician out there who insists on dumbing down the curriculum even more. They create bills or rules that supposedly allow educators the 'freedom' to teach 'alternative scientific theories' (we all know what that means) at the expense of the real science.
It's the Doomination of America I tell you. Doom! DOOM!
Think about it. Instead of letting teachers give kids a real education or trying to improve the state of public education in the country, they want to fill the curriculum with crap. I mean really, what are you thinking! The only thing kids are learning these days is how to pass those stupid standardized tests (and most of them aren't even doing that!). You want to replace what little science they're learning with crap and expect more students to pass??!!
Seriously, doesn't that just make you want to go WTF?
WTF! WTF!
Don't even get me started on the endless standardized testing and the idiocy that is "No Child Left Behind" either.
I like The Bad Astronomer. Phil's my hero.
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Some of the puppies that were at the WHLR meet & greet over the weekend at Lucia's Premium Pet
I had been planning on using some of the scrap pieces of wood in the garage to fashion a rack to hang the dog collars and leashes on.
At the meet & greet at Lucia's Premium Pet, I saw these and just had to have them.
Lucia's sells them for $4.99, but you can find them at IKEA for less. Unfortunately IKEA doesn't sell them online though. Since the closest IKEA is in Atlanta and with gas prices the way they are, it's a lot cheaper to just make the trip out to Daniel Island and pick them up at Lucia's.
Still need to find a place to put the third one I bought.
This past weekend I ended my 'No TV' experiment after 2 months. Wasn't exactly planned, but I saw that Discovery Channel was showing "When we left Earth: The NASA Missions" (Discovery Channel web folks: TV show pages + Firefox = FAIL. Fix please.).
Being a bit of a space geek, I just had to watch it and wasn't disappointed. The first two episodes covered the Mercury and Gemini missions with historic footage and recent interviews with astronauts and Mission Control staff.
There wasn't anything really new from a historical perspective, but there was a lot of cool archival footage. I enjoyed watching the first two parts of the series. People who only know the space program through shuttle launches will probably be impressed once they realize how much technology has changed between the early missions and now.
My lunchtime runs have been stalled a bit for the past week mostly because of being busy and working through lunch.
I'm actually finding it not so bad running on the outdoor track of the Wellness center. Sure, it's hot as hell and I'm dripping in sweat before I even get started, but most of the time there's a breeze for at least part of the circuit. Even with the heat, the actual running bit has been relatively easy.
The hard part, perhaps not surprisingly, is just getting out to the Wellness center in the first place. Just thinking about stepping out into 30C+ and a bajillion % humidity is enough to sap the life out of you. Finding the motivation to step outside is definitely not easy, but one of those things I just have to force myself to do. Not a lot of shade on the walk over to the Wellness center either, which makes finding the motivation to go doubly hard.
Ran into a Science Daily article about some research done at Duke that suggests specifying fuel efficiency in terms of gallons per mile instead of the usual miles per gallon may help people understand better how fuel economy changes as the numbers change.
the current standard, miles per gallon or mpg, leads consumers to believe that fuel consumption is reduced at an even rate as efficiency improves
most people ranked an improvement from 34 to 50 mpg as saving more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 18 to 28 mpg, even though the latter saves twice as much gas. (Going from 34 to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons; but from 18 to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons).
These mistaken impressions were corrected, however, when participants were presented with fuel efficiency expressed in gallons used per 100 miles rather than mpg. Viewed this way, 18 mpg becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 mpg is 3.6 gallons per 100 miles
I wonder if the researchers realized that this is how fuel economy has been specified in most of the rest of the world for years (albeit in terms of l/100 km).
There's stupidity in the news every day, but I usually don't see it in what little news I read. Yesterday seemed to be a day for me to encounter an unusual amount of it.
Just to show that idiocy in the legal system isn't the sole purview of the US legal system, there's this headline from Quebec: Court quashes dad's grounding of 12-year-old daughter.
A father plans to appeal after a Quebec court ruled that he didn't have the right to punish his 12-year-old daughter by barring her from a school trip.
And if that's not enough, Senators approve anti-spanking bill.
Bill S-209, which needs House approval to be made into law, proposes to eliminate Section 43 of Canada's Criminal Code, which allows parents, teachers and caregivers to use reasonable force to discipline a child and correct their behaviour.
Srsly. W. T. F.
And in my home town of Edmonton, city councillors are, IMO, making some very short sighted decisions about the iconic electric trolley buses that have ferried people through Edmonton's downtown for decades.
After gliding quietly along Edmonton streets for 70 years, the city's fleet of trolley buses will be taken off the road for good, city council has decided.
Why are they going away? Because a bean counter somewhere has projected that over the next 18 years, the fleet of electric buses will cost $100M more to maintain than replacing them with diesel or hybrid buses. That's a little less than $5.6M/year. City Council probably fritters away twice that much on other things. The trolley buses are efficient, quiet and non-polluting (yes, their electricity comes from a fossil-fuel burning power plant, but it's also generating the power that goes to your house at the same time) compared to diesel hybrids which, while producing less emissions than a regular diesel bus are still nonetheless spitting out pollution.
Where do you suppose gas/diesel prices are going in the next 18 years?
Went to my first meeting of the new Charleston SC Linux Users Group today (join the mailing list if you want to participate and learn more). It was a small group with 8 people at the meeting (3 I know already). On the agenda were a group mission statement, what to do with the website, commercial ideas for raising awareness and a couple of short presentations on Ubuntu Studio and PGP/GPG.
Seems like a good group of people enthusiastic about getting the Linux/FOSS word out to people.
You don't have to be a total Linux/computer geek to join. Even if you're just interested in finding out more about FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) feel free to join us at the next meeting!
So why is it that out of all the shirts, pants, socks and everything else that goes into the laundry, my boxers are the only things that always get turned inside out?
Much to my surprise, this blog turns 5 today!
5 years of babble, geek speak and other random things.
In the past 5 years, I've gone from feeling alone in the blog-o-verse to discovering a whole bunch of local bloggers and meeting the people behind them.
Looking forward to what the next year of blogging brings.
While Heather's off enjoying her rainy Myrtle Beach vacation, I'll fill in a bit with my small subset of TBB and some random clicking through the blogroll.
Big news this week was the death of George Carlin, marked by several LC bloggers.
Allison at modern.charleston notes the North Charleston Farmer's Market has moved.
Geoff goes from pirate to legit.
From illegally bitorrenting some of the tracks in the first place, to legally downloading all of them off of iTunes, I then decided that what I really wanted was a copy of CD to keep forever, because - well - there's something still a teeny bit odd about buying something and JUST having it as an AAC or MP3 file isn't there. Isn't there?
YDPC is back with more pictures of tasty nom-noms.
Her rhubarb crisp is really really good.
A poop story only a parent could come up with I suppose :)
One day I dumped the entire grocery bag full of dirty underwear into the washer without sorting it first. I washed the load and then transferred it to the dryer. About fifteen minutes later I started to notice that my house smelled odd, which was funny since I was cleaning my kitchen at the moment. But rather than the smell of Comet wafting through my home, there was another "odor" that I couldn't put my finger on. Thirty minutes later the dryer buzzed that my laundry was done. At this point the house smelled FUNKY.
Don't forget the last Thursday meetup is coming up in a couple of days!
If you're messing with the Movable Type release candidates, the Comments template will need to be edited because the CommentReplyLink tag has apparently been renamed to CommentReplyToLink between RC2 and RC3.
Many years ago when I was a lowly undergrad, I heard mumblings about physicists working in the financial and economic fields. They weren't changing careers, they were applying math and physics concepts to create financial and economic models.
Today I ran into an article (registration required, but it's free) over on PhysicsWorld about some econophysicists who analyzed recent oil prices using statistical physics methods and came to the conclusion that much of the run-up in oil prices is due to speculation, rather than increased demand.
Abstract:
We present an analysis of oil prices in US$ and in other major currencies that diagnoses unsustainable faster-than-exponential behavior. This provides evidence that the recent oil price run-up has been amplified by speculative behavior of the type found during a bubble-like expansion.
From the paper:
Based on analogies with statistical physics and complexity theory, we have developed in the last decade an approach that diagnoses bubbles as transient superexponential regimes. In a nutshell, our methodology aims at detecting the transient phases where positive feedbacks operating on some markets or asset classes create local unsustainable price run-ups. The mathematical signature of these bubbles is a log-periodic power law (LPPL). The power law models the faster-than-exponential growth culminating in finite time. The log-periodic oscillations reflect hierarchical structures as well as competition between the trading dynamics of fundamental value and momentum investors
In conclusion, the present study supports the hypothesis that the recent oil price run-up, when expressed in any of the major currencies, has been amplified by speculative behavior of the type found during a bubble-like expansion. The underlying positive feedbacks, nucleated by rumors of rising scarcity, may result from one or several of the following factors acting together: (1) protective hedging against future oil price increases and a weakening dollar whose anticipations amplify hedging in a positive self-reinforcing loop; (2) search for a new high return investment, following the collapse of real-estate, the securitization disaster and poor yields of equities, whose expectations endorsed by a growing pool of hedge, pension and sovereign funds will transform it in a self-fulfilling prophecy; (3) the recent development since 2006 of deregulated oil future trading, allowing spot oil price to be actually more and more determined by speculative future markets and thus more and more decoupled from genuine supply-demand equilibrium
A pre-print of their paper, The 2006-2008 Oil Bubble and Beyond, is available from arxiv.org. It's actually a pretty interesting read.
Wild Heir Lab Rescue is in need of a few foster homes for 8 labs that are coming out of boarding in the next couple of days. If you're willing and able to provide a temporary home for one of these dogs, fill out an application form. The dogs will love you for it.
If you haven't got the room to foster, then come on out with your dog to WHLR's next event, Worthy Creatures (formerly Kreature Comforts) Pet Spa Day on July 12 from 12 to 4 PM. Get your pet pampered with a doggie bath, nail trimming and doggie massage. Worthy Creatures is located in the Shoppes at Seaside Farms, 1690 Riviera Drive, Mt Pleasant, SC.
Spoil your pet and help out a great rescue group while you're doing it!
