The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
I’ll be arriving Monday afternoon or Tuesday.
If you want to try and hook up with me at Burning Man, find my red Sebring convertible parked at 4:20 and L(ineage). My tiny 2-man tent will be just a little outbound from L. The tent is tan and brown with a silver tarp covering it and some plastic flowers tied to the rebar stakes.
I’m not a “420” nut but you’ll certainly have no trouble remembering where I’m staying :-)
I got schooled, Scam Schooled! I went to Encore Karaoke Lounge, 1550 California St. 2nd Floor, SF tonight and… well, you’ll find out why I suck at poker when the show goes live on September 3rd. Watch me suckin down Coors Light ™ and trying to beat a Royal Flush with 4 Aces*.
I got to talk with Mike (Brian’s right-hand man) and Brian Brushwood (who is a damned cool, witty and energetic guy) and Mitch (a camera man and editor)
* (I was a little tipsy and on the last poker game I played I won with 4 aces and a joker, 5 of a kind, so I gravitated to the aces, oop!)
I want your impression of the following. Don’t google for it, just tell me what you think. According to the following, can you use a cell phone with a headset? Can you use a cell phone with a speaker phone in a car?
23123. (a) A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while using a wireless telephone unless that telephone is specifically designed and configured to allow hands-free listening and talking, and is used in that manner while driving.
My interpretation:
a) Let’s say you have a cell phone with a speaker phone. If you turn on the speaker phone, it is certainly “configured to allow hands-free listening and talking”.
b) If you use this cell phone with the speaker phone activated in your car, then you are “using it in that manner while driving”.
c) Therefore, you may use your speaker phone even if you are holding your cell phone in your hand.
The California DMV believes that you are not allowed to hold the speaker phone in your hand.
Q: Does the “hands-free” law allow you to use the speaker phone function of your wireless telephone while driving?
A: Yes, as long as you are not holding the phone.
But the problem with the logic is in the wording of “configured to allow hands-free listening and talking”. Even if the cell phone user is using both hands and feet to operate their speaker phone activated cell phone, the phone is still “configured to allow hands-free listening and talking”.
That’s what the law says, so that’s that I’m going by. Find section 23123 and full California law here
For as long as I can remember I have taken multivitamins as a matter of course. Ranging from once a week to daily. I was getting ready to order more vitamins from Puritan’s Pride, they are having their yearly-ish “buy 1, get 2 free” sale. The topic of vitamins came up this weekend at a gathering where there were several smart people including 2 doctors and no one in the group eats multivitamins regularly. “Hmm,” I said.
So today I did some googling and found a study from the National Institutes of Health that says pretty much, “They are a little bit good for you and they are a little bit bad for you. We certainly won’t tell you that you should take multivitamins as a matter of course.” And I saw an article from the US Department of Health and Human Services saying much the same.
“Hmmmmm,” I said.
I eat healthy. Should I take multivitamins? I’m thinking that the answer is “no.” What do you think?
They say you can peer into a man’s soul by looking at his bookmark file. Well, have a gander. To me, it looks like the yearly booksale at the library of Alexandria.
Unfortunately it’s impossible for you my dear reader to tell which links I use all the time and which ones I’ve only visited once. I apologize for that.
Rick bet me a dollar, saying that apples are a “negative calorie food”. IE: it takes more calories for your body to digest apples than the number of calories you get from them.
I was dubious to say the least. So I took the bet.
On about 7-14-09 I called the University of California at Davis at 530-754-9708. I spoke with a woman named Judy. She referred me to Dr Scott Johnson.
I called Dr Scott Johnson, Extension Pomologist at Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis. He didn’t know the answer but said I should try 3 folks at the Department of Food Science and Technology at UC Davis:
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* Dianne Barrett, Specialist in Cooperative Extension, UC Davis School of Food Science and Technology (left message 7-14-09 4pm) no response.
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* Christine Bruhn, Specialist in the Cooperative Extension, UC Davis School of Food Science and Technology (left message 7-17-09 12pm)
I spoke with Doctor Christine Bruhn she says that some of the nutritional values of foods in the USDA nutrition lists are determined in part by having people eat the food and then they measure all of the outputs (breathing, pooping, peeing, etc) to see how the body digested it. So the USDA nutrition info is pretty correct. If it says that celery has 6 calories per stalk, that accounts for the calories it takes to digest it… IE: Celery is a positive calorie food. Raw unpeeled apples really do give you 81 calories (page 28 of the USDA Nutritive Value of Foods book, or search for foods here)
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* Adel Kader, Professor of Postharvest Physiology UC Davis (spoke to him 7-17-09) said that there is no such thing as a negative calorie food… and that he didn’t know of any studies suggesting otherwise. I asked about how fiber might take more energy for the body to attempt to digest. He said, “Fiber facilitates thing moving quickly, so it might even end up taking less calories”.
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Next week I’m going to call my favorite science talk show, Doctor Karl and ask! I’ve always wanted an excuse to call him. He’s on 11am Thursday… errrr. That’s 6pm Wednesday PST, the show is in Australia :-)
In the mean time, I’ve asked Rick to get that dollar ready for me.
I have generally thought of “Arse Elekronika” as just a humourous play on “Ars Electronica”. Kind of a “heh” thing. But the call below is very curious indeed!
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Call for Papers, Performances, Machines and Sponsors.
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Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called “Culture” in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the “Culture” are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete – on command
– mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs – and control over the associated nerves – to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.
Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species.
And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough.
“Bizarre enough for what?” — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don’t you think, replicants?+++++++++++++
Please send us [arse2009 AT monochrom.at] your papers, ideas, machines!
Deadline: July 31, 2009!+++++++++++++
Festival Schedule:
October 1: Film festival(*), opening ceremony and Prixxx Arse
Elektronika(*) Gala
October 2: Literature, fiction, reading
October 3: Talks and discourse
October 4: DIY workshops
(*) Separate calls will be out shortly.
A Scanner Darkly 6-25-09 – cool… but sad and twisted.
Stranger Than Fiction. I liked when Harold Crick ate his first home-made cookie 43:15–43:35.
The Bucket List. Maybe I should have found it sappy, but I didn’t. I enjoyed it greatly.
That’s Rodin’s Gates of Hell at a garden museum at Stanford. I went there last Friday before going to SubZero. You can see The Thinker up top. Yes THAT “The Thinker”. He was originally designed to sit atop this piece so that be could ponder the sorry souls that were going through the gates.
The piece is astounding. I would say “simply Astounding” but there is nothing simple about it.
And that’s Adam and Eve standing beside the gates. Interestingly, The cowering Adam is the piece in this garden of naked people with the most fully formed junk. All the others have “tastefully” partially formed naughty bits.
