A couple of petty domestic gripes

Gripe number one:

The kitchen sink would not stop smelling of mold. Washing the dishcloths, liberal applications of bleach, nothing helped. Months of this. Finally nailed it down:
Do you see that knurled cap on the bottom? It's made of some kind of soft plastic that mold loves to grow on. This pic is of a Scotch-Brite dishwand, but I have seen the same thing marketed under the O-Cel-O name, also. (Both from 3M, so no surprise there.) It never occurred to me that mold would be growing on plastic. Replaced it with another brand with a hard plastic endcap, and no more mold stink in the sink.

Gripe number two:

I do like a big, shallow skillet. A 12" or 12.5" skillet is just right for a three-egg omelet, which can then be split between oneself and one's companion, at about 1.75 egg for one and 1.25 egg for the other. A French company called T-fal, or Tefal, makes skillets that seem like they would really fill the bill for this job. I have owned three of them. Why three? Because they start to warp right away. They get high in the center, so that if what you are cooking is more or less liquid, it takes on a ring shape, like this:

I dropped that egg in the middle of the skillet. It did not stay there. If you do omelets the right way, with the back-and-forth shake to distribute the egg, this warp produces voids in the middle, so that you have to turn the skillet so far on its side that you risk spilling the whole thing on the cooktop. The next big, shallow skillet will not be a T-fal.

Disclaimer: I have not been paid in cash or in kind to endorse these products.

Opera users beware

The new version, Opera 10.51, is called a security and stability upgrade. But it's more like an entirely different program. Menus are relocated, controls are missing; bookmarks are missing! It is not an incremental point upgrade, it's a radical departure. And it's odd that the Norwegians would go in the direction of removing controls and options. Opera, until this release, has always been the most tweakable browser around.

I have been using Opera since version 3 point something, back when you actually had to pay for it. I thought it was worth the price.

I do not like this new version.

The good news: if the automatic update thing automatically updates you, and you find the new version to be undesirable, you can revert to Opera 10.10 by reinstalling that version right over the new one. At least, it worked all right for me to do it that way. My bookmarks are back. I tried to get back to 10.10 using Windows XP's System Restore, but that was a miserable failure. The reinstall worked fine.

This 10.5 (10.51, whatever) upgrade seems to be an inadequately-tested beta release. The Opera forums are clogged with messages from users with problems.

Caveats: I'm on Windows XP, not Vista or Windows 7, and I like to be able to find menu items where I am used to finding them. Firefox point releases are good about this. This new Opera release, not so good.

Update: from the Opera forums, I glean that the way to stop the automatic updates is Tools > Preferences > Advanced tab > Security, where at the bottom of the window is a field called Auto-update, with a dropdown. Select "Do not check for updates" to avoid having to hit the "Cancel" button on the installer as soon as Opera starts up.

I think I'll stick with 10.10 for a while. One of the things missing in the new release is "Duplicate tab." Very useful, and not the same thing as copying the address and pasting it into a new tab. "Duplicate tab" preserves the tab's history. When a search gets to have many branches, some of which you might want to come back to, this is just the thing. Why lose it?

A funny thing happened ...

… at Making Light. Open thread 137 is 90% good humor, only about 5% politics. Good fun, for a while, over there.

I must correct one of the jokes: Skwid at comment #47 tells this one:

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walk into a bar. Each orders a Guinness, and as they're served, a fly lands in each pint.

The Englishman sniffs at the affrontery of the fly and pushes his beer away in disgust.

The Scotsman blinks for a moment, shrugs, and tosses the pint back.

The Irishman turns bright red, fishes the fly out of the beer, and holds it over his glass shouting at it: "SPIT IT OUT, YE WEE BUGGER! SPIT IT OUT!"

He or she has got the Irishman and the Scot mixed up, there. See, Scots are legendarily thrifty. (Says this third generation Scots-American. Dinna ca' us "mean" or "cheap." We prefer "canny.") So the Scot in the joke, who should have been the one delivering the punchline, would be objecting to the loss of the amount of beer that a fly could swallow, because of the ethnic stereotype. That's what makes it funny.

Speaking of thrift:

And speaking of jokes, I'm still working on this one, which came to me in a moment of perinspiration:

"How do you change a seal into a sea lion?"

"Remove one of its electrons!"

I think it's funny, but that's just me. Can this possibly work anywhere but in a chemistry classroom?

Update: In the Making Light thread that gave rise to this post, Erik Nelson links to a nifty collection of surrealist jokes.

Acorn is back

Back in the black. Here is proof that the Obama administration can do more than one thing at a time. In the midst of the Obamacare battle, they have re-funded Acorn.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

Ya gotta have goons … lots and lots and lots of goons. (To the tune of "You've Gotta Have Heart," of course.)

Update: re-organizing and changing names. Much more about ACORN (or whatever its names are now) from Anita MonCrief. Both of those links come from a comment by freedom4me at this over-optimistic article: ACORN Folds! Will Cease All Operations Within Months.

Stupak did what he said he would do

That is, make a show of resistance, talk about principles, then abandon resistance and principles. Or as LauraW puts it at Ace of Spades HQ, "Stupak Did Not Cave, Because In Order To Cave You Have To Have Principles In The First Place." There's video from a town hall. He told the people that he would do it, and he did it. Too bad this video did not surface sooner.

"Locations of Ancient Woolworths Stores follow Precise Geometrical Pattern"

Ley lines, ancient geometry, etc.

I should have a "bad science" tag. But I would have to go back and add it to all the warming posts. So, not right now.

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

Neo-Neocon quotes Lenin. Read these, and see if you don't think they match the Obama agenda.

Rich people, big houses, no smiles

Unhappy hipsters.

And their somewhat happier pets.

Related: Look at this hipster.

Irish whiskey resources

A few:

Sláinte: The Irish Whiskey Blog

Irish Whiskey Notes

The Irish Whiskey Society. Not much on that home page, but some discussion in the forums. Those of us who do not get to Ireland regularly can only dream of tasting the essences discussed there.

What Does John Know? I hope he does not know anything about me. He knows plenty about whiskey.

St Patrick's Day approaches, and my thoughts turn to booze and stepdancing.

Porpoise bubbles, hippo, zebra

Althouse has had the critter posts, lately.

How to create and play with a bubble ring under water. Porpoises, what can't they do? Build a fire, for one thing. But this is amazing.

And another of those Althouse posts in which she tests the possibilities of concision, I'll quote the whole thing:

How does a hippopotamus get its teeth cleaned? Zebra.

That last sounds like a "No soap, radio" joke.

Stepdancing into the future

This reminds me of Star Trek. We've crashed the Enterprise on some planet or other, and the saucer is broken open to the sky; what shall we do? Dance!



The band is Tuk Tuk Skip. (Google's English version.)

Here's one that's more on the mellow side:



If this is the future, let's go.

Newspeak lexicon

At The Peoples' Cube: Neologisms (For inclusion into 2100 Biden-Webster Dictionary).

A taste:

• Condecession: set-asides or subsidies to groups one feels sorry for.
• Defaulty setting: Something incorrect that's widely believed because it was the first explanation proposed rather than because there was any actual evidence or proof.
• Dimprovement: A bad, dimwitted improvement that isn't better, often worse. (Can you say New Coke, Vista operating system or nationalized health care?)
• Feelosophy: positions and policies adopted because they make you feel good or virtuous rather than on any reasoned basis or because they could possibly work.
• Iconoklatch: group of nonconformists who uniformly conform to an "alternative" set of standards.
• Infopinion: The intermingling of news and opinion so that it's hard to tell which is what. Often called analysis.
• Literateur: Someone who talks about and refers to books they've never actually read. Think Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital.
• Malapropitization: Needlessly adding prefixes and suffixes to words to make yourself sound erudite, more scholarlisticalful.
• Nincomproof: A line of thinking both logical yet so unreasonable only an idiot or an intellectual would buy it.
• Oprahtunity: The chance to cash in on fame in one area in another area you really have no qualification for. (Al Gore for instance.)
• Psychophant: A lunatic follower of a lunatic leader. (See Marxist-Leninist)

There are more.

This is not the Faceb00k l0g1n page

Or, More fun with Facebook.

It seems that some Facebookers use search engines to get to Facebook, instead of typing the address in the address bar of their browsers, or using a bookmark. Well, that led to this (1989 comments at last count), which is more fully explained and commented on by Dan Grover, as part of his effort to develop a grand unified theory of n00bs. (The Dan Grover links come and go. If the one above does not work, you might try this one. Or Google's cached version.)

Via The Message Digest.

============================

And then we have Failbook and Failbooking. This stuff is public, and will be preserved. And laughed at.

Related: My Hope.

Snowdrops

Crocus are not up yet, but here are the snowdrops, in B's backyard in central Connecticut. I planted these two years ago. Last year there was no sign of them at all. This year, today, here they are.

Facebook virus now sending email

And I just got one. It's the Koobface worm, it says here: Koobface Re-Activated! and here, and here, and here, and other places, no doubt.

In my case it was an email that seemed to be from Facebook announcing that a friend had sent a message, but the style was unfamiliar, which should have been the tip-off.

Subject: Firstname Lastname sent you a message on Facebook ...

Firstname sent you a message.

--------------------
(no subject)

youtube
poison url goes here

(The url is disguised by having www.facebook.com at the beginning, but in my case at least continued to bit.ly as the real destination, which, of course, was not the real destination.)

That's it. There is usually quite a bit more stuff in one of these message notifications. When I took a look at Facebook, I saw the message in my inbox, but by that time, I knew not to click it.

Clicking the url takes you to a screen with Facebook-like fonts and colors that says "Leaving Facebook ... Never use your Facebook password outside of the Facebook site." (That's a paraphrase, I'm not going back there to look at it again.) It then goes to something that looks like YouTube. If you're quick you can see that it actually says YuoTube at the top of the screen. It then tells you you need Flash version 10.37, and the download starts right away.

Apparently the thing affects both the computer of the victim, and his or her profile.

Trend Micro has a chart of the botnet, or parts of one of them, anyway.

Happy Facebooking, everyone!

Update: Morgan Freeberg links, and has quite a bit more to say, particularly about those apps that seem so cute.

Mr. Brown goes to Washington

It's a start.

Concord, April 19, 1775; statewide, February 19, 2010. Almost 235 years between revolutions begun in Massachusetts. 85,743 days, if you like.

Well done, Scott Brown! Well done, Massachusetts voters!

Gerard van der Leun is pleased. (Mind the Nazis at the first link.) So am I. Now, to carry it on.

Update, a few minutes later: someone else is pleased. Freeman Hunt, commenting at Althouse:

Not even close. And it's Mass. And it's Kennedy's old seat. And Kennedy pushed for changing the rules to fill the seat.

The whole thing is delicious. I wish I could bake it into a cake and eat it.

Mmmm, tasty!

Memory and reminiscence

A few days ago I mentioned an article about the tricks memory plays. Here's a reminiscence of Navy days from Ron at Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta. The first paragraph is relevant to the memory tricks topic:

Before you get all up in my face 'bout what I'm 'bout to ramble on about, lemme first say that I know the human memory tends to heavily discriminate the stuff it stores, cataloguing things the way it wants to and reserving special places for certain select events, sounds, sights, smells, and scenes. And not only does it selectively edit things in and out, but it tends to embellish events with its individualized set of filters, ethics, morals, priorities, and tastes, magnifying some episodes and minimizing others.

Read the whole thing for comparisons of the Navy of fifty years ago with the Navy of today. Via Glenn Reynolds, who says, "Nostalgia aside, though, the new Navy seems awfully good at its job."

Paul Watson picks a fight, gets his name in the paper

Andrew Revkin put up a short post at Dot Earth on the collision between a Japanese whaler and a Sea Shepherd speedboat. It has garnered over 200 comments at this posting, many of them illuminating. Speaking of illumination, what are the Sea Shepherds doing with these green lasers?

Revkin seems to think that the Japanese ship was responsible for the collision. Some commenters wiser in the ways of the sea have endeavored to, ah, illuminate his thinking, but the main post still says "Sea Shepherd has released video from a distant vantage point that clearly shows the Japanese ship veering to starboard to close with the smaller protest craft."

Here's a video of a Sea Shepherd ship veering to starboard to close with another craft. What are they doing? Trying to capsize it?



That video comes from Sea Shepherd. They are proud of that. Sea Shepherd's tactics are reprehensible and criminal. But what could one expect from a group that uses this as an emblem?


I don't like whaling, but I like Paul Watson (and by extension his group, Sea Shepherd) even less. "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." That's going to leave a lot of corpses.

A newish site on the subject: Lies of the Sea Shepherd.

At The New Yorker: Street Fight on the High Seas. The comments are better than the article, which is mostly an interview with Watson.

As if taxes weren't high enough already

Now the IRS wants to make tax preparation services more expensive, by requiring licensing and continuing education for preparers.

Update (via Reynolds): IRS Commissioner Does Not Do His Own Taxes Because of Complexity of Code.

Washington, DC's school voucher program is dead

It was killed by Democrats in Congress, according to this report at BigGovernment.

This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape.

"For the children," indeed.

Monckton's proposed personal briefing for Rudd

James Delingpole says, "If any of your idiot friends still believe in AGW, make them read this letter." Then he quotes some high points. The whole thing is at Watts Up With That.

Good luck with the part about making them read it.

Neuroscience meets global warming

See this at Wizbang:

ClimateGate (Inadvertently) Explained

Via a link from InstaPundit, here is an eye-opening article from the current issue of Wired: "Accept Defeat - The Neuroscience of Screwing Up":

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University.

... Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. "I'm not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into," Dunbar says. "I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so much to keep track of."

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."

You really need to read the rest, because it provides a fascinating insight into the frustrations encountered by research scientists on a regular basis. I spent the better part of a decade working in a testing and analysis laboratory. We never did "pure research" -- all of our work was based on well-known analysis methods and verified by standard quality control procedures. Still, we occasionally had to re-do entire sets of tests if our quality controls indicated errors. Researchers can sometimes trace unexplained results back to commonly encountered problems with laboratory equipment, reagents, or calibration standards, but many times there is no clear understanding of why the results of carefully planned experiments end up being "wrong."

The Instapundit reader who emailed this story to Glenn Reynolds wryly noted, "Wired Magazine unknowingly explains Climategate." How true. As I have previously noted, the ClimateGate scientists, most notably Michael Mann and Phil Jones, seem to have fallen prey to the temptations of celebrity recognition and unlimited research funding that are promised by those in power when scientific research seems to be producing the "right" answers. Mann, Jones, et. al. undoubtedly believed that they were on to something significant, but chose to disregard objectivity when confronted with the fact that much of their research data apparently resided in that damnable 50% - 75% category of errant or unexpected results.

There is more.

Scott Brown for Senate

I have donated. Keep up with events at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion and Sisu.

Sorting through the junk (DNA)

A large proportion of the human genome is far from being understood. Some of this is casually referred to as "junk DNA." Scientists are beginning to sort through this stuff. Glenn Reynolds links to this:

8 Percent of Human Genome Was Inserted By Virus, and May Cause Schizophrenia

The rise of psychopharmacology has led doctors to not only treat mental illnesses like regular diseases, but think of them as such as well. Turns out, schizophrenia may be more than just a disease in concept, but actually a virus itself. According to new research, as much as eight percent of the human genome consists of viruses that inserted themselves into our DNA for replication, including the gene that causes schizophrenia.…

Science has long known that some components of our DNA are relics of viruses that entered into our genome in some past infection. However, no one ever thought that virus remnants formed this much of our genome, or that one of the viruses might lead to disease, let alone something as complex as mental illness.

Sorting through the junk will pay off, as we learn to distinguish between trash and treasures. Next step, still a long way off: the clean-up.

Update: More on the schizophrenia virus: "Our DNA carries dozens of copies of Perron’s virus, now called human endogenous retrovirus W, or HERV-W, at specific addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7."

Found in parentheses

Glenn Reynolds linked a few days ago to this piece by James Pethokoukis, What Ben Nelson didn't tell Nebraskans. It's a good enough article on Nelson's omissions about why he became Vote # 60 for ObamaCare, but what left me feeling gobsmacked, after Reading The Whole Thing, was this bit, in parentheses, near the end:

John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics calculates that using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles as public corporations do, the total 2009 budget deficit would be roughly $8.8 trillion, not the $1.4 trillion reported on a cash basis.

Good grief!

Disambiguation: Walter J. "John" Williams of Shadow Stats is not Walter E. Williams of George Mason University.