Lee.org

Who knew there were so many rosary counting patents! Here’s a partial list from 5 minutes perusal…
2781591
2768787
2721398
2992495
3042302
3319599
3374949
3549464
2721398
2768787
2781591

Find them all at the USPTO (make sure to “Select years” “1790 to present”). To view the images, you’ll need to get this plugin (yes, the USPTO uses weird, nonstandard image viewing software)

And those are just the ones filed before 1976 in the class 235:123 “BALL BUTTON OR PUSH BUTTON INDICATOR”

Jeesh. And I thought it was part of your penance to have to do the counting yourself.

My cousin wrote a letter to me and 50 friends recently. Here are some excerpts (bolding is mine):

As many of you are already aware, [we] were in a car accident a few weeks ago.  We were hit by a young woman who ran a red light.  We feel so blessed and are so thankful that we were not seriously hurt…

We received a copy of the police report in the mail and it confirmed what [we] had suspected.  It noted that the other driver admitted to being distracted while talking on her cell phone, causing her to run the red light, and hit us as we proceeded through the intersection…

[Our oldest daughter], I might add, is outraged by the fact that the driver was on her cell phone and put us in such danger.  She has already emailed our local congresswoman, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, to ask for legislature to ban the use of cell phones while driving (or at least allowing only the use of hands-free devices).

But, for now, please consider avoiding using your cell phone while driving or, at the very least, minimize your use.

 
Here was my reply:

I’m so very happy that no one in the family was seriously injured! Thank you very much for writing about it.

I read some articles in the newspaper and did some followup research. It turns out that using a hands-free cell phone in a car is not safer than using a handset.

Making a hands-free cell phone law is like making a beer-only drinking and driving law. Everyone knows that it doesn’t matter whether you drink beer or wine or whiskey, the result is the same. You get drunk and are dangerous behind the wheel of a car. In exactly the same way, using a hands-free cell phone is just as dangerous as using a handset.

I hope you don’t feel I’m too long-winded about this but I think it’s important. Very important. Lives are on the line. The lives of my loved ones like YOU!

The problem isn’t that drivers are distracted holding the handset up to their ear. People are distracted by having a conversation with someone that isn’t in the car with them. I can understand that. When I am driving and on the cell phone, the other person will talk to me even if I’m in a dangerous intersection or an on-ramp, or in the rain. They can’t see what’s going on. But a passenger in the car will stay quiet and not bother the driver if they see something potentially dangerous.

As for using 1 hand, people in manual transmission cars are busy shifting with one hand all the time. And no one is calling for a ban on manual transmission cars. Every car has a radio with buttons and knobs that drivers are pushing all the time.

Please please please. Don’t ask for a hands-free cell phone law. It doesn’t protect ANYONE. If you want to protect people, demand that cell phones not be used AT ALL while driving!

Likewise, if you think that it’s too much to ask that people not use cell phones while driving, then you and I just have to accept the risks that go along with it.

Through all of this, I think the best advice for all of us isn’t to make any new laws but to do exactly what you suggested in your email, “please consider avoiding using your cell phone while driving or, at the very least, minimize your use.”

Every day over 100 people are killed in car crashes in America. That’s over 40,000 people every year! This doesn’t usually make the news for 2 reasons:

First, about the same number of have been dying in cars every year for the last 80 years. Yes, MILLIONS of people have been killed in car accidents. But it’s old news.

Second, on average, 1 person is killed for every 100 million miles driven. Put another way, on average you’d be in a fatal car accident if you drove round-trip from Nashville to San Francisco (a 3 day trip, non-stop) about 20 thousand times. That’s a LOT of driving! Driving is relatively safe compared to a lot of other things.

Sam, you wrote to your congresswoman asking “to ban the use of cell phones while driving (or at least allowing only the use of hands-free devices).” The problem with congress is that they listen to us! Your congresswoman wants to do the will of the people. It’s not her job to read traffic accident studies. She will listen to you. And if she does what you asked her to, she could easily make a law that might make you FEEL better, it won’t make you ACTUALLY SAFER. And I know that what you really want is to BE safer.

There are unintended consequence of making a hands-free cell phone law. It means the police will spend their time stopping cell phone users instead of real criminals. It means people will feel safer without being safer, which sounds downright criminal.

Here is a really good article from the New York Times that talks about this subject. I highly recommend you read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/health/13well.html
Fox News has a similar article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479186,00.html
MSNBC has a similar article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28609580/

The National Safety Council has lots of statistics and articles. Here’s a good article about it: 2008 Traffic Deaths Hit Record Low, Says National Safety Council

And here’s another article: Cell Phone Statistics

I am very glad that you and the family weren’t seriously injured. To help everyone, I would urge you to write a second letter to your congresswoman. Tell her what you’ve learned and how hands-free cell phones don’t help.

Please tell me what you think and what you’re going to do!

Lee

Ah, sweet relief!

Filemon tells me that Mozy and/or Google Desktop was thrashing while watching parts of Google Chrome’s Safe Browsing stuff so I set it so that Mozy doesn’t watch that stuff. I also disabled Chrome’s Phishing and Malware protection. Now my computer has stopped its insessent disk thrashing (at least for now)

I’m using Chrome 1.0.154.48 and Mozy 1.10.4.2.

(original)

Google Chrome  will thrash to disk a lot to disk, at least in version 0.2.149.27, build 1583 (the first publically available beta) in Windows XP. It is so bad that my entire computer locks up a bit and becomes unresponsive. Disabling phishing and malware protection seems to stop the thrashing:

1. Click on the monkey-wrench icon to the right of the address bar.
2. Choose “Options” from the menu.
3. Click the “Under the Hood” tab
4. Disable the “Enable phishing and malware protection” check-box

Last week I was babysitting Tommy. He’s a really good kid, smart, inquisitive, and as all 9 year-olds are, devious. This isn’t a “devious” story, maybe another time…

We had spent the entire morning indoors playing the card game Munchkin. It is kind of funny that he’d enjoy the game even though he has no idea what a role-playing game is, but I digress. So we had finished the game and he was diving into playing a game on my iPhone but, darnit, it was time to get a little sunshine.

I went onto the back porch for some air and came back in, leaving the door open. Then I found a balsa glider airplane that had been sitting on a shelf and started fixing it up, getting it ready to fly. I went out onto the porch, aiming to give it a toss (actually, I was trying to lure the kid outside… and it worked). As I stood there, he came out and we talked about how the plane might fly. He gave it a toss off the porch and it flew in a rather pleasing way. It ducked and bobbed a bit and then spiraled down the 3 stories to the yard below. We started to the front door to go out and find the plane. As he was running out the door, I told him to put some shoes on but he ignored me.

I stuck my head out the door and saw that he had almost made it around the corner. So I turned on my authoritative voice and called, “Come back here and put your shoes on.”

He stopped dead (wow, the voice works!), turned around with one shoulder sagging and asked, “But why?”

In a second I ran through 50 scenarios of him cutting his feet, stubbing his toes, losing traction, muddy footprints on the rug, washing his dirty feet… and simply hollered back, “Because I said so!”

He trudged back in (actually, he was pretty fast as trudges go), slipped on his sneakers and was off again to find the glider in the back yard.

:-)

Ok, forget what you know about making bread. Just forget it. Now read and do.

Reading this will take longer than it actually takes to make bread.

You’ll probably want to start with a single batch… just cut the recipe below in half to make 2 loaves… or quarter it for one loaf. The more bread you make in a sitting, the less cleanup there is. And refrigerated dough is easier to work with and tastes better because it ferments. But hey.

My four loaf recipe:

• 12 cups flour
• 6 cups water
• 4 tsp salt
• 4 tsp yeast

The types of flour, salt and yeast matter very little, young Skywalker. Really. Yes, really. Different ingredients make subtle differences but you’ll be so happy with how fricking easy it was to make this loaf, you can worry about that later. Try starting with All Purpose flour, Mortons salt and Instant Dry Yeast in a 1 lb bag.

Directions:

1. Put it all in a big bowl and mix together with your hand for 60 seconds
2. Let it rise for 45 minutes
3. Make into loaves
4. Bake
5. Eat!

Really. Just mix together until it’s all wet. I use 1 hand in a big bowl because dough is terribly sticky. If you use a utensil, it’ll get stuck and gooped up (and you’ll have to wash it). If you use 2 hands, then both your hands will be covered with sticky goo!

Don’t knead it or roll it or anything. I’ve tried a couple ways of mixing the ingredients so they mix evenly. I mixed the water in with the yeast. Or poured the salt into the measuring cup or… or… forget all that! Here it is with a bit more detail, what I do and it comes out fantastic every time:

1. Measure flour and pour into a big bowl (precision is not needed… I’ll scoop 1 1/2 cups one time and then 2 1/2 cups the next… it all pretty much averages out when you’re putting 12 cups into a bowl)
2. Measure salt and toss onto the pile of flour
3. Measure yeast and toss onto the pile of flour
4. Measure water and pour onto the pile of flour. I usually reserve a little water just in case things are getting too wet… and then I almost always end up throwing it in after a few seconds of mixing.
5. With one hand, stir and grab at the mix until it is an even, sticky gooey mess. Yes, the dough is probably much wetter and stickier than you were envisioning. Don’t remove it from the bowl, it’s too sticky!
6. Cover it and let it rise for 45 minutes. If it grows to 1.5 it’s original size, you’re good to go.

You now have 4 loaves worth of bread dough. Put some portion (3/4?) of the mix into a plastic container and throw in the fridge for bread later in the week.

With the rest, make bread!
I put flour on my hands and the baking sheet to keep the dough from sticking.

1. Grab a big hunk of dough and cloak it in your hands (see below) until it looks pretty.
2. As the last cloaking move, make sure the bottom of the dough has flour on it so it doesn’t stick
3. Set it on the cookie sheet and let it sit for 5-60 minutes.
4. Put it in the cold oven
5. Turn the oven to 425 and set the timer for 50 minutes
6. When the timer beeps, remove from the oven, let cool and eat!

Here’s what I did this morning with the dough I had put in the fridge… Total work involved: 5 minutes. Total time from fridge to bread: 105 minutes

1. Set out a cookie sheet
2. Take the previously mixed dough out of the fridge
3. Sprinkle the cookie sheet, the dough and my hands with flour (like 1/4 cup of flour)
4. Grab 1/2 of the dough, pick it up quickly and set it down in the dough gently (if you toss it too roughly, the flour flies everywhere)
5. Roll the dough in the flour until it isn’t all sticky, maybe 3 rotations.
6. Cloak the dough, rolling in the dough in flour a couple times when it gets too sticky to handle (cloak: kneeding very briefly by holding the ball in both hands, pushing the middle up with fingers and the sides down with palms, rolling the lumpy bits to the bottom and putting a  “cloak” of smooth pretty dough on the top of the loaf)
7. Stretch the dough to the desired shapes… I made 1 long loaf and 1 round loaf this morning
8. Put the cookie sheet and dough in the oven
9. Let it sit just like that on the cookie sheet for 60 minutes so the dough rises (else the loaf will be pretty dense… maybe you want that though!)
10. Turn the oven to 425 degrees and set the timer to 50 minutes.
11. When the timer beeps, take your amazing fresh bread out of the oven and enjoy!

Cleanup for the first batch can take a few minutes. Sticky dough is a mess to clean up. The dough from the second batch, from the fridge is easier to handle. Cold dough isn’t nearly as blob-like.

I’ve been developing a feel for this for a while but I have to thank Charlotte’s gift to me of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. It validates what I’ve been doing and gave me some excellent tips.

Sometimes I play with the temperature. I think it makes the crust thicker and heartier. But I could be wrong. Instead of 425 for 50 minutes from a cold oven, I do this:

1. Put dough in oven and let sit for a while.
2. Set timer for 18 minutes and oven to 550. (my oven gets to 550 in about 16 minutes).
3. When the timer beeps, set the oven to 400 degrees and the timer to 22 minutes.

I’ve tried using steam and boiling water and spray bottles to get a better crust and I can’t tell the difference between a steamed loaf and a not-steamed loaf. So I don’t do it any more.

How much yeast to use: I have a recipe book that says stuff like “add 2 1/8 teaspoons yeast unless it’s Blahblah brand and then add 1 7/8 teaspoon”. Forget that. Yeast is flexible. It grows. It’s a bug that grows in your food and it farts a lot. The longer it’s in your dough, the more farting it’ll do, making your bread nice and fluffy. I haven’t ever gone wrong with 2 teaspoons or so of yeast for a batch. When I let it set for a while, I can use less yeast (hence, I use 3 tsp and not 4 in the recipe above) because it’s busy growing in my fridge. I should experiment more with varying yeast levels. Suffice to say that I can’t recall ever having too little yeast, though once when I added too much, the bread tasted a little funny.

Which bread flour to use: It doesn’t much matter. Really. Most recently I’ve been using Giusto’s Artisian Bread Flour in a 50 pound bag because… well, Restaurant Depot sells a 50 lb bag of the stuff for $18. I figured something that sounds like “Artisian Bread Flour” might be better than “All Purpose” for bread but… I haven’t noticed much differences between different flours. Recently I made some nice loaves out of whole grain and white spelt, they came out great. I’ve used mixes of cake flour and all purpose flour, they came out great. I’ve used mixes of whole wheat flour and all purpose flour, they came out great. I noticed that partial-whole-wheat bread has less crust and tastes different. I sometimes add wheat gluten but unless I add a lot, like 3 heaping tablespoons per cut, it doesn’t do anything. When I use that much, the finished bread is stiffer but I’ve gotten little tummy aches from such high concentrations.

Treasure Island bike rack design competition: design due March 13th

Join me!

$700 award for the best 3 designs that reference Treasure Island.  And they’ll probably get installed on the island :-) http://www.sfbike.org/?treasureisland

You don’t have to build it, just design it. Hey, wanna work on it together?

Ping me.

More here:

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/03/06/the-future-design-of-sfs-bike-racks-may-start-on-treasure-island/

I wrote this email to my city Supervisor today

Supervisor Campos,

I recently received an email from the San Francisco “Save our Firehouses” campaign (http://saveourfirehouses.com) They urged me to write to you.

I don’t know if the budget should be cut for fire houses. But I -do- know that unions usually have too much sway. Since the fire department is begging to not have their budget cut, and their campaign does not seem to be driven by fire fighting statistics, but firefighters saving cute dogs (http://saveourfirehouses.com/about.html), then I suspect their budget is a little too large.

Thank you and have a great day,
Lee C. Sonko
[address redacted]