Emptying the trash: An epic journey

By dave | June 30, 2009

So, I got a new computer, which is really nice — a 24-inch iMac. I transferred my old files and software, hooked it up to my old components and I was ready to go, BUT…

There was one small problem.

I use Apple’s automatic Time Machine software for backup. Even though I was backing up all the same information, the new computer didn’t want to use my old backup files. When it tried to back up, it found there was no space on my external 500GB backup drive.

No problem, I figured. I could just copy the old backup on to my new spacious 640 GB drive temporarily, until the new backups were running smoothly for a week or so, then delete those files. BUT…

There was one small problem.

There must have been a few corrupt files, because copying the files to the new computer failed.

No problem, I figured. I still had the old computer, with a “backup” of all my old files. I could safely delete my backups from the backup drive, and if something dreadful happened during that process, I’d have my old computer to use for a disaster scenario.

So I drag about 95 percent of the contents of my backup drive into the trash (I keep a few other files there besides the automated backups). BUT…

There’s one small problem.

The Mac doesn’t count your files as truly gone until you actually “empty” the trash. My backup software still doesn’t believe there is enough room on the backup drive. Now, I have a confession to make. I hate emptying the trash. It just seems so … final. What if there’s a file in there that I need? Even though my backup software keeps old versions of files, it’s always seemed easier to recover files by sifting through my trash bin. So there is probably already at least 20 GB of data in the trash bin, in addition to nearly 500 GB of backup. There’s no way to specify which hard drive’s trash to empty. I’ll have to empty it all. Of course, I still have my old computer, with its unemptied trash, so I decide to go for it. It’s about 11 a.m. Monday. I select “Empty Trash” from the “Finder” menu. BUT…

There was one small problem.

It turns out, 500 GB is a lot of trash to empty, even for a brand-new 24-inch iMac. First the computer has to “Prepare” to empty the trash. It slowly counts upwards — 100 thousand files to delete, 200 thousand, more. This is really taking a long time. I decide to go use my other computer for a while. An hour or so later I return, and my computer is still counting upwards: 1 million, 1.1 million, more?

In four hours, I return again. Still counting upwards: 2.7 million, 2.8 million, with seemingly no end in sight.

At 4:13 p.m., my computer finally finishes preparing, and actually starts emptying the trash: 3.1 million files! By this time, I’m posting regular updates on Twitter.

Several people tweet back — Phronk: “I’m amazed that: 1) You’ve collected that much garbage; and 2) Your hard drive even holds that many millions of files.” Jmlynch: “if it was a windows machine it probably would have crashed by now ;)” Actually I think Windows computers automatically empty trash and don’t automatically backup, so I wouldn’t be having this problem.

It’s about this point that I realize I could have simply reformatted my backup drive, saving the few extraneous files I needed. I could still do this even now, but now I’m on a mission. Will it really work? Will my computer successfully erase my backups to make room for — more backups?

At 11:16 p.m. I tweet that I have 2.5 million files left to delete. Every once in a while the computer alerts me with a warning that it’s unable to empty the trash because some file like “bootX” is locked. Fortunately there’s a “continue” button and it seems to resume emptying. I go to bed, making sure to set my computer to stay awake all night and continue emptying.

I wake up and go for a run, forgetting momentarily about the momentous event occurring in the office. Finally at 8:55 a.m. I check again. Still emptying, and I tweet that there are now just 727 K files left! Brlittle reminds me that I could have just reformatted the hard drive. Yes I know, and Lewis and Clark could have just sailed around the Cape, but where’s the adventure in that?

I shower and check in again. 250 K files left, but I’ve got errands to run. I’m torn between staying and watching this epic struggle unfold, or just checking in when I return. I decide to go. I can’t let emptying the trash totally consume my life (as if it hasn’t already).

At 9:53 I’m at Panera on my laptop. Msanford tweets “If you’re on a #Mac, you can open a Terminal window and `rm -r ~/.Trash` which will empty any size Trash in about one second.” Holy shit! This is like learning that Lewis and Clark could have just teleported to Oregon!

At noon I return home and check to see if the files have really been erased. I’ve got 350 GB of free space on my backup drive! Success! — And I did it the hard way — it must have taken at least 24 hours! I notice another 10 GB of files I can go ahead and delete. What the heck, this is nothing. They’re gone in 20 short minutes.

The moment of truth comes when I test my backup software to make sure it really works. A window opens with the dreaded dialog: “Preparing…”

This could take a while.

Posted in Psychology, Technology | 4 Comments

Literature review

By dave | June 9, 2009

Jim and Nora are both taking AP English courses next year (though I think they’re actually taking slightly different classes). What’s cool about this is that their reading lists have taking a sudden turn for the better — there’s some amazing stuff they’ll be reading.

In fact, I’m so inspired by the lists that I’ve decided to read along with both of them.

Jim’s teacher hasn’t assigned the list for the entire year, but for the summer he’s been assigned Genesis, Exodus, and Luke (King James version), as well as Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I’ve read Genesis, but I haven’t read any of the other works straight through.

Nora already has her entire year’s list:

The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Great Gatsby
The House of Seven Gables
Longitude (Dava Sobel)
The Known World (Edward Jones)
Going After Cacciato (Tim O’Brien)
Nickeled and Dimed (Barbara Ehrenreich)
Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Charles Seife)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
Waiting for Snow in Havana (Carlos Eire)

The last two are her summer reading books, so I’m going to start with those — I’m going to try to read the books at roughly the same time the kids do, so we can talk about them and I can record my (and their) impressions of the books here. Should be an exciting adventure; I’m really looking forward to it!

Posted in General | 1 Comment

A doctor shouldn’t have to be this kind of hero

By dave | June 1, 2009

Yesterday Dr. George Tiller was shot down in cold blood as he served as an usher in his own church in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was a hero.

He was a hero because he helped women who were facing death recover gracefully.

He was a hero because he helped expectant mothers and fathers grieve for the children they couldn’t have.

He was a hero because he helped prevent women from becoming infertile due to complications in their pregnancies, and gave them the chance to bear healthy children in the future.

He was a hero because he, like thousands of other doctors around the world, answered late-night calls to help people he had never met, perhaps disrupting family meals, gatherings, vacations, or just a good nights’ sleep.

He was a hero because he provided high-quality medical care even when it wasn’t easy or convenient for him to do so.

That should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

In order to safely remove an already-dead fetus from a woman’s womb, he had to be willing to face death himself.

In order to abort a fetus that couldn’t survive more than a few days outside its mother’s body, he was shot twice.

In order to remove conjoined twins, one of which was already dead and one of which probably would never survive and would certainly never be healthy, he and his family had to live locked in a gated community.

Because of forced-childbirth terrorism, it was estimated that there were only three (or fewer) doctors in the U.S. willing to do what Dr. Tiller did. Now there are two.

A doctor shouldn’t have to be this kind of hero.

For more on what Dr. Tiller did, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted in Contraception and abortion | 2 Comments

Behind Cognitive Monthly

By dave | May 5, 2009

Why did I start Cognitive Monthly?

They say science journalism is in a crisis mode. Many newspapers are cutting their science sections, and even the venerable Scientific American is struggling to find a business model that works in the age of the internet. So why on earth would I decide now is the time to start charging for a bit of rather home-grown science journalism?

Honestly, I don’t know. And I have no idea whether this idea will work. What I do know is that I’m unsatisfied with most science journalism produced these days, whether or not the whole business is in crisis mode. I also know that my experiences working with the traditional science journalism establishment have been unsatisfying. I don’t like deadlines. I don’t like selling ideas before I write them. I don’t like chasing down sources for interviews. I don’t like dealing with editors. I don’t like other people telling me what to write. Maybe that means I shouldn’t even try to be a “science journalist.”

But still, I’m also unhappy with the level of depth attained in a single Cognitive Daily post. Initially Greta and I started the site as a way to keep notes for a much larger work — a book, in fact. But all my issues with the science journalism world also apply to the world of trade book publishing. We’ve gone back and forth with several agents, even signed a contract with one, but in the end we simply didn’t want to be told what to write.

In the course of preparing sample materials for agents, however, I’ve found that I very much do enjoy the actual process of writing longer pieces. The problem is, a blog isn’t really the place to showcase a longer work. My eureka moment came when I saw how much Greta loves to read books on her Kindle. Here’s the perfect medium for sharing a larger work — and it’s even something people readily pay for. Why not give it a shot? Even though we don’t have an entire book to sell, just some sample chapters, we don’t actually need a whole book. The chapters can stand pretty much on their own. Since there’s no printing press, there’s really no reason you have to sell a book-sized chunk of writing all at once. You can sell it a chapter at a time.

There are also some interesting possibilities for synergy between the chapters and the blog. You can work interactively with readers to answer the bigger questions brought up in the comments section of a blog. Then you can put all that in your longer report, and sell it on Cognitive Monthly. It just might work.

I didn’t want to limit the project to just the Kindle platform, so I looked into other forms of digital publishing. Lulu.com offers exactly what I need — a way to charge people to download PDFs. As a bonus, they automatically transfer the PDFs to iPhone format. Yeah, I’ve covered all the hot personal technology devices!

There were a few technical glitches along the way, number one being the fact that there’s no easy way to go from Apple Pages to HTML, required for the Kindle (you have to take a cockamamy path via RTF and TextEdit). Lulu has its own set of hoops to jump through. Greta, who’s been very involved throughout the process, wanted to edit the final version, which meant editing two different versions of the file, then re-uploading each to its respective online distributor.

Next, we had to set a price. Obviously we can’t charge a book-level price for a chapter-length report. $1 is as cheap as you can go on either Lulu or Amazon, but that seemed a little low — almost like we weren’t placing any value on the product — so we settled on $2. On Lulu, this translates to $1.60 for us. On Amazon, only $.70. But we figured Amazon, plus the Kindle, might generate more impulse buys, so it’s probably worth it to be there. If we sell a few hundred copies a month between the two sites, it’s a worthwhile experiment. If we sell over a thousand, about 1 percent of the monthly visits to Cognitive Daily, it’s almost a sustainable career. Plus, 12 issues corresponds roughly to the length of a book. If a book is worth $24, then surely a chapter is worth $2.

I don’t expect to sell that many right away. As Bora Zivkovic notes, there’s a built-in tendency to expect to get stuff for free online. But that’s changing. We pay for music. We pay for movies. Now we’re starting to pay for books using devices like the Kindle and iPhone. Even newspapers and magazines are starting to move to Kindle. But why pay for a subscription if you don’t want to read every article? Doesn’t it make more sense to read just the articles you’re interested in? If the answer to that question is yes, then we might actually have a business model. In any case, it certainly seems worth it to try.

The other nice thing about an online monthly is that it never goes out of stock. Most people will decide not to buy this month, but maybe next month’s topic will seem more interesting to some people. If they like that article, they might decide to buy the back issues. Month by month, assuming we have a good product, sales should grow faster and faster, because there are more and more articles to buy.

Right now, neither Amazon nor Lulu offers a “subscription” model for mere mortals, but that would be an awesome next step. I could see a lot of people who might balk at $2 per month decide that $12 per year isn’t a bad deal, and I’d take that guaranteed payday over the iffy month-to-month prospects. Amazon also has a weird quirk. You set your price, and get a 35 percent royalty based on that price. But then they can turn around and sell it at a “discount,” which they did. The book now retails for $1.60 at Amazon. Fortunately, our royalty doesn’t decrease based on our adjustment. Clearly it costs them much less than the $1.30 they’d make at full-price to sell the book. I’d rather they not sell at a discount and just give us a bigger royalty, but I suppose if their discounts get too obscene, we can just increase our suggested price on Amazon. I’d rather people buy it from Lulu, where we make $1.60 per book.

One very unnerving aspect of the whole process is the way you can watch your sales roll in, in real time. In some ways, I’d rather just get a report once a month or so, so I don’t obsess about it. This is a long-term project, and its success is best not measured on a day-to-day (or hour-to-hour) basis.

I really hope this thing works, not just because the money would be nice, but also because it is a model that other writers and creative people might be able to follow. You could produce anything this way — a serial novel, a play, a TV soap opera, a record album — whatever you want. Creative people would be freed from the overlords who’ve controlled the means of distribution for centuries. Either that or I’ll sell 20 copies over the next four months and have to figure out something else to do with my life.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

How you know your daughter’s spring break is too long

By dave | April 14, 2009

Nora has had a pretty good spring break. Early in the week, her cousin Benjamin and aunt Lisa visited. We went to an amusement park and rode every inverted roller coaster in sight. We went to the National Whitewater center and rode the rapids, and took a thousand-foot zipline ride across the entire complex. We had a huge Easter feast.

But at her school the break extends to the Monday after Easter, and that might have been one day too long. My evidence? Behold:

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Nora decided to rearrange the kids’ entire book collection — by color. Here’s the second bookcase:

This has created some odd combinations and separations. The Harry Potter books, for example, are all over the place:

The other four are a little closer together at the bottom of the other bookcase. The Oz books are similarly randomly distributed.

Even the uniformly-pigmented Little House books were split across two shelves:

Don’t ask what Nora’s thinking was here. Let’s just call it “creative liberties.”

Both kids agree that this is an entirely reasonable organization system. “It’s just the place we put the books when we’re done reading them,” Jim said. I have to say, in some ways, he’s right. Most of my books are simply stacked up in no order whatsoever. At least this looks interesting — and at least these books were read.

Posted in Euro2007, General | 6 Comments

Today’s infographic: Historical distribution of songs with word “boogie”

By dave | April 13, 2009

Posted in InstaMunger | Leave a comment

Fallen monuments: Another tragic consequence of worldwide economic collapse

By dave | April 2, 2009

The global recession has reared its ugly head once again. With news of homes and even private boats abandoned, it was only a matter of time before the great works of artists and architects suffered a similar fate. Just a few months ago, a proud structure stood here, a testament to humankind’s creativity, ingenuity, and industry:

Now, see what remains:

This photo, perhaps, offers a better glimpse at the scale of the disaster:

The cinematographer in the foreground didn’t move once as I took this photograph of the scene. Perhaps he was paralyzed by guilt. Perhaps he had lost his job in the economic crisis and didn’t know what to do next. He just stood, leaning slightly back, as if he had been hastily assembled out of prefabricated plastic components, then abandoned.

Not far away was yet another relic, which in better times had been a sparkling new museum:

Now, just a battered shell of the monument remains:

I made this video to document the sad remains of the once-proud edifice.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Guidelines for Web credibility: how many do they follow?

By dave | March 23, 2009

This page has been getting a bit of Twitter buzz lately. It’s a set of ten common-sense guidelines for improving your online credibility. But how many of their own guidelines do they follow? Let’s see.

1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.

Good idea. Cite your sources. Indeed, sources are cited on this page. So far, so good: 1/1

2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.

Indeed. Link back to your sponsoring organization. Let’s see who sponsors these guys. I’ll just click on the link on the top of the page and … oops! Broken link! It says Stanford, so I guess that’s impressive, but Stanford clearly hasn’t taken the care to keep these links up to date. 1/2

3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.

Uh oh. Since all the links are broken, I don’t know who’s on your team. 1/3

4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.

Yes indeedy, though this seems a bit like a repeat of point 3 above. And once again, since the links are broken, you fail! 1/4

5. Make it easy to contact you

Well, there is an email, address, and phone number. I didn’t try to call, but a quick Google search for B.J. Fogg suggests that this too is out of date. 1/5

6. Design your site so that it looks professional

It looks a little clunky, but since it was made in 2002, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. 2/6

7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.

Sure, easy to use, and pretty useful. We’ll give you this one too. 3/7

8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

Uh, “last updated June, 2002″? I don’t think that counts as “recent” in the intersphere. 3/8

9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

Nary an ad in sight. But it would have been cool if there was a 2002-style pop-up ad for a Palm-Pilot or something. 4/9

10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

“Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.”

Ahem.

Well, it is up and running. We’ll give you a half point for that. 4.5/10

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments

The abortion debate isn’t about the right to life

By dave | March 17, 2009

PZ Myers brings up another chestnut from the seemingly endless vault of “pro-life” arguments:

From a biology or human embryology textbook in use on an accredited university campus (your own University of Minnesota-Morris campus would be fine), please cite chapter and page that unequivocally states that “human life does not begin at conception.”

And this would end the debate? Really? Because we could probably make that happen — it would save everyone a lot of trouble.

PZ’s response is to point out that Lewis Wolpert, a renowned developmental biologist and author of one of the most popular developmental biology textbooks, has said as much: “I’ve spoken to these eggs many times and they make it quite clear … they are not a human being.”

Heh.

Of course Wolpert knows as well as anyone that replying when spoken to isn’t an ironclad determiner of personhood, but he also makes it quite clear that in his opinion, a fertilized egg should not be granted an unconditional right to life.

Wait, anti-abortion activists aren’t convinced?

As I’ve said before, biologists are not going to answer this question for us. Appealing to biology is a convenient way to end an argument when the person you’re debating doesn’t know enough biology to realize it’s irrelevant. As I’ve suggested in the headline of this post, the abortion debate isn’t about the right to life at all.

We extend the right to life to many different things: Criminals convicted of anything other than murder or treason, “civilians” who don’t happen to be near a military target, endangered species, fish under a certain size, and so on.

Should we extend it to a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus? A fertilized egg outside of the uterus? After all, if “life begins at conception,” shouldn’t we do all we can to save the untold thousands of lives imperiled each year at fertility clinics? Once their clients have had all the kids they want, we could forcibly impregnate women of childbearing age with the remaining fertilized eggs.

While there are some who question the morality of fertility clinics, I suspect that the number of people actually advocating forced impregnation with excess embryos from fertility clinics could be counted on one hand.

If forced impregnation with excess embryos is so obviously bad, then what about forced impregnation with the semen of a rapist? Again, most people agree that this is wrong.

But forced pregnancy for a woman who had sex for fun, who neglected to use birth control? Now suddenly the numbers jump. Millions of people say that any woman who consents to sex without birth control and gets pregnant should be legally obligated to carry the fetus to term.

Why the difference? The concern clearly isn’t for the “rights” of the fetus. The most charitable way of putting the anti-abortion argument is that a women who gets pregnant via unprotected, consenting sex should have to live with the consequences of the decision she made. I bet you’d get close to fifty percent agreement with that statement if you put it to a nationwide poll. If you phrased it a little differently, you might get a different response: “Pregnancy and childbirth are fitting punishments for women who have unprotected sex.”

Few people would agree with this statement, because we don’t like to think of babies as punishment. Babies are sweet and adorable.

But what other justification could there be for the vast gulf separating the millions who support forced pregnancy when the woman consented to sex and the few who support forced pregnancy when she did not? It can only be out of a desire to punish the woman.

When we look at it this way, we see that the debate over abortion isn’t about the right to life at all. That’s why asking a biologist for his opinion on the matter doesn’t resolve anything. A biologist can tell you whether something is alive, but she can’t tell you how (or whether) to punish someone for a perceived moral failing.

That’s why I always place “pro-life” in quotes. These people aren’t pro-life. They’re anti-sex. They’re so anti-sex that they advocate forced pregnancy as a punishment for having sex. They think sex is so wrong, they’re willing to condemn any woman who does it to nine months of sickness, and hours of torture that may result in death. Then, ideally, this same woman would care for and nourish the product of her torment for the rest of her life.

Posted in Contraception and abortion | 9 Comments

A question of momentous importance for all who lived through the 80s

By dave | March 12, 2009

Depeche Mode or New Order?





Posted in General | Leave a comment

On Transience and Permanence

By dave | March 10, 2009

I’m a bit of a digital pack rat. I’ve got emails from all the way back to 1998 — not all of the email I’ve ever sent, but pretty close to it.

I’ve got the Excel spreadsheet Greta and I used to send out wedding invitations and thank-you notes in 1989. I’ve got a testimonial I sent to my grandma when my grandpa died. I’ve got all the books I’ve ever written.

But I still didn’t manage to keep everything. My B.A. thesis somehow didn’t make the transition from an 800K floppy disk to hard drive. I’ve got a paper copy, but that’s not the same thing. My earlier papers, composed on a Commodore 64, are digitally lost forever.

And, of course, not all these things can actually be read by my current computer. That Excel file from 1989 can’t be deciphered by any app I have. Most of the books are in Quark xPress format, and while I have a Quark 4 CD-ROM, I don’t have a computer that runs Mac OS 9 to install it on. The emails I sent from 1998 to about 2001 are, for some reason, all dated May 5, 2004.

One of the reasons I became a writer was out of a desire to create something permanent, or at least something that would last longer than my own life. Yet stuff I created less than ten years ago is now unreadable by my computer.

My dot-matrix printouts of English essays from 1985, on the other hand, are quite legible in the hanging folder they’ve now sat in for 25 years.

There’s some pretty old stuff available online these days. You can find the complete works of Edmund Spenser, for example, at several different sites listed here. But the searchable complete text, a really cool site when it was created in the 1990s and linked from the site, apparently no longer works.

All of this makes me wonder: If I want to make something that will last, is digital technology really the way to do it? Should I be blogging, or should I be writing in a more durable medium? And what medium would that be? The printed newspaper, magazine, and even book industries don’t seem to be doing very well of late.

Perhaps the web will stand the test of time and my blogging won’t be lost anytime soon. I kind of doubt it, though. The problems with spammers and hackers aside, I’m just not sure that the MySQL database that serves as the backend for this blog is going to be functional/compatible with server hardware, say, two decades from now.

Sites like Twitter are so transient that it’s difficult to find anything there that’s over a week old. Even assuming its database is technically capable of surviving, the site could be sold, go bankrupt, get hacked, or crash due to some unforeseen glitch.

And of course, as Shelley reminds us, even the strongest stone monuments will eventually crumble:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Posted in General | 4 Comments

What to do with CDs

By dave | March 5, 2009

Every now and then — and this is becoming more and more rare — I acquire music the way I did back in 1985: I buy a CD. Generally it only happens when I’m purchasing from the actual artist: I’m at a concert and he or she is selling CDs. A couple years ago in Europe we saw a pair of magnificent street accordion players, and instead of giving them a couple euros as a tip, we bought a CD for 15. Of course, that’s low-tech even for these guys. Now they’re on YouTube:

But as soon as I get home with my CD, the first thing I do with it is rip it onto my computer, where it can be shared across my entire home network, copied onto iPods, and played wherever I go. Other than the ones built into computers, we only have two CD players any more — one in the kitchen that’s actually used primarily as a set of speakers for music played wirelessly over our network, and one in our 1994 Plymouth Voyager.

We have a large collection of CDs in the living room, sorted by genre, which almost never get pulled off the shelf. There’s a pile of them in the kitchen next to the CD player, typically only used by visiting grandparents.

Yet still, when I get a new CD, I’m reluctant to throw it away after I put the data on my computer. I’m even more reticent about reclaiming the shelf space in our living room. Why? I paid just as much for the music I downloaded from Amazon and iTunes.

I asked folks on Twitter what they do with physical CDs, and got quite a few responses:

  • phronk: I have a CD rack I put them on. It’s basically for decoration now. (That sounds familiar)
  • samplereality: Trade the CDs on Lala.com (hmmm… I don’t think I can do that in good conscience while keeping the audio files)
  • jnjdad: my car will not work with my ipod, so they are for listening in the car at this point. After, I am going to make curtains (not exactly my style)
  • ellembee: My dad files the liner notes in large CD cases and throws out the jewel cases. I can’t do it. I’m a sentimental packrat. (Sounds like too much work for me)
  • SKasowitz: Data side up in the microwave. For a few seconds you get a beautiful show. Used to do that with the hundreds of AOL CDs we’d get (I’d be a little worried about my microwave!)
  • kejames: Old CDs make great scarecrows or wall art - constellations are especially nice on walls or ceilings (Not sure about the juxtaposition of “scarecrow” and “wall art” there. Aren’t they mutually exclusive?)
  • philipj: They’re the backup. (I thought that way for a while. Then I realized my computer already backs them up onto a second hard drive, plus they’re on several different iPods, which can be hacked into coughing them back up in a disaster scenario. How many backups does one need?)

Now there’s no room on the shelf in our living room, and I’m tempted to just toss my latest CD (an amazing collection of Afro-Peruvian jazz by Gabriel Alegria) in the trash. Why not? I wouldn’t even have the CD if I’d bought it on iTunes. Yet I can’t make myself get rid of it. There’s too much of a connection to the physical thing, worthless though it is, and almost certain never to be used for its intended purpose again.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

El Cafe Cocimiento Sauce

By dave | March 3, 2009

Another day, another request for an El Cafe recipe. Cocimiento sauce was one of the most popular sauces at El Cafe, and I haven’t been as successful at recreating it as the other recipes. But if you simply MUST have this sauce, I’ve created a pretty good approximation of it that tastes excellent if you eat it right away (and who wouldn’t?). This recipe makes four VERY generous servings. The quantities are approximate (I just eyeball it), so you can adjust it for whatever the size of your group is.

1.5 pounds grated cheese (half cheddar, half Monterey Jack)
1 pound of sour cream
2-3 fresh jalapeno peppers
3-4 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Salt and pepper to taste

Chop the jalapenos into a fine dice (remove the seeds unless you like it scorching hot). Melt all the ingredients in a saucepan over low heat (I use an electric fondue pot, which works great — set it at about 225 degrees), stirring frequently. Then, as I said, you want to serve this immediately — otherwise the oils will start to separate out from the cheese and you’ll have a real mess. It works well as an enchilada sauce, or as John suggested, over home-fried potatoes.

One of the most popular ways to serve it at El Cafe was over half a roasted acorn squash that had been stuffed to overflowing with diced chicken, walnuts, and raisins. Lately we’ve been substituting steamed broccoli for the chicken, for a vegetarian treat.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Pretty, worthless (actually, worth $20)

By dave | February 27, 2009

I just found a couple of 50-Franc notes in an old drawer. Someone had them leftover from a trip to France in the ’90s, and since I was planning a trip, they gave them to me. But I forgot to pack them, so here they remain. I asked about them on Twitter and the consensus is they’re worthless. I was thinking if they had any value, I could mail them to someone in France and they could cash them in — it would be about ten Euros, maybe enough for a nice lunch or a bottle of wine.

It’s a shame, since these are absolutely stunning bills, honoring Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of Le Petit Prince. The bills even have a picture of the famous boa constrictor digesting an elephant!

Update: Turns out they’re worth about 15 Euros. If you want ‘em, and you’re in France, send me an email (remove dashes) and I’ll mail them to you.

Update2: They’ve been claimed! Helen Jaques on Twitter wants them, and will provide updates on her attempts to cash in.

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Is a new printer worth this?

By dave | February 19, 2009

I just got a new laser printer/scanner. I don’t use a scanner very often and my needs aren’t great — just basic scans for web pages. Every once in a while I scan an old family photo for this blog or for Cognitive Daily. But I was beginning to get tired of paying exorbitant prices for Canon’s ink, and I knew laser printers offered a much more affordable price per page. Now that laser printers are nearly as cheap as inkjets, it seemed like a reasonable time to make a change.

Since I rarely use a scanner and I don’t need high quality scans, it made sense to just buy a multifunction device. For about $50 more than just a printer, you can get a combo. But I wasn’t prepared for this. Here’s an example scan I just made from my new printer/scanner (A Brother DCP-7040 if you’re interested):

Not bad (and, of course, adorable), but take a closer look at the grays along the wall:

It’s not a smooth transition from lighter to darker gray — it’s okay for a fax, but lousy for a photo.

I don’t have this same photo on my old scanner (a Canon MP-500), but here’s a similar shot:

And again, focusing in on the grays:

See the difference? Now I’m faced with a dilemma: return the laser printer and suck it up with my old device, keep the old printer around just for scanning, or perhaps buy a separate stand-alone scanner.

A big problem with multifunction devices is that they often don’t work with Macs. Indeed, the Canon multifunction laser’s scanning features don’t work on a Mac, so the Brother is one of few options for me if I want a multifunction device.

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My brother made this

By dave | February 5, 2009

Wow, my stepbrother is amazing. He had been a sculptor for many years, working with stone, metal and wood to make amazing creations. But a back injury now makes that impossible, so he’s started taking jewelry-making classes. Here’s the first piece he felt it was worthwhile to share, a Christmas gift for Greta:

The piece combines several different techniques, each difficult to master. The key technique is reticulation, which creates the background texture on the internal silver rectangle. Learning this technique is largely a matter of trial and error, but the difficulty doesn’t end there. Soldering flat wires onto the now-uneven reticulated surface is also a challenge, as is polishing the smooth surface surrounding it.

What I like most about the piece is the composition, the play between textures and shapes. It’s really a miniature work of art, and I’m proud that my brother decided to create his first serious piece of jewelry for Greta, because it means I get to look at it whenever I want.

It’s been a long, hard road for Mark to recover from his back injury, but “recovery” is a relative term. He still can’t sit or stand in the same position for more than 30 minutes or so at a time, which means he’ll never be able to hold a regular job. He walks very slowly and laboriously, and walking more than a mile or so is out of the question. His house was nearly destroyed by a flood a year ago, and only one room in his three-room house (his bedroom) has been restored to full repair. Now he’s starting work on restoring his workshop, where he hopes to be able to produce enough jewelry to supplement the $600 a month Social Security Disability check that he scrapes by on. I think if he can produce four or five pieces like the one he gave Greta each month, he’ll end up doing just fine.

Here’s a photo of Mark I took last summer when I visited him:

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Comments on Casual Friday post about gender and bathroom use

By dave | January 9, 2009

Commenting (and posting) on ScienceBlogs.com is going to be down starting at about 1 p.m. EST today. You can use this post for commenting on today’s Cognitive Daily Post.

If you ask nicely, I might even consider adding some additional data analysis here, since today’s post was cut a little short.

Update: I’m home by myself this evening, so I thought I’d do a little more analysis. We had a few commenters who suggested that it was only the uptight Americans who subscribed to the foolish notion that gender-separate restrooms are a good idea. So I thought it would be interesting to break down responses by where they are from. Although the vast majority of our visitors are from Canada and the U.S., the rest of the world, especially Europe, is still well-represented. Here’s a graph showing the likelihood of using an opposite-gender restroom broken down by where the respondent is from:

For the most part, the data from the rest of the world matches the US. We don’t have enough numbers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or Australia/Oceania to establish significance. The numbers for European men verge on significance: they are somewhat less likely than American men to use the women’s room when there’s a long line at the men’s room.

If there’s anything else you’re curious about, just ask in the comments and I’ll see if I can get to it sometime over the weekend.

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Testing out Apple’s new software

By dave | January 7, 2009

Seems like the geekosphere is pretty disappointed with Apple’s offerings at this year’s MacWorld conference. There was only one new hardware product, a 17-inch Mac laptop that doesn’t offer much new other than a longer-lived, non-removable battery.

But I’m not in the market for new hardware this year, so I was actually more interested in the software products that took center-stage at this year’s convention. I use Numbers almost every day to create the graphs for Cognitive Daily, so I was very interested to see if it was an improvement on last year’s version.

I haven’t yet had a chance to test it thoroughly, but at first pass it looks pretty good. Several key graph types have been added — most critically scatter plots and trendlines. And finally you can rotate the column headings!

This graph actually charts reader response to the keynote on MacRumors.com. As you can see, Mac fans were largely ambivalent about the software updates, divided about MacBook Pro, and overall, very negative about the keynote. But more importantly, I can now actually fit the column-headings under each column. Hooray!

One rather annoying quirk in the first version of Numbers was an incompatibility between the formatting of numbers on the spreadsheet and the graphs. If you formatted a number as a percentage on the sheet, the number was converted (behind the scenes) to a decimal: 25% = 0.25. But when you tried to graph it, the number would display as 0.25%. Oops. This is now fixed:

Of course, this is the way things should have worked from the start, but it’s good to see that Apple’s fixing bugs with this update, not just adding new whiz-bang features.

I’ll probably have more on Numbers later; that’s it for now!

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Updating WordPress…

By dave | January 5, 2009

I’m upgrading to the latest version of WordPress software. This means things may go a little wacky for a bit. I’m also going to trash my template, so if you’re used to that warm, fuzzy yellow design, I’m sorry. It’s going to disappear. I’m not going to replace it with anything fancy either, at least for the time being.

Here’s hoping this solves some recent problems with comments and the influx of spam… wish me luck!

Update: Okay, we’re upgraded. Hoo boy, this looks ugly. It may take a while for me to get things back into shape. But hopefully the spammers will be contained.

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Even more on teaser blogs

By dave | January 5, 2009

Kevin Drum has responded on his blog to my point that it’s often okay to require users to click to see the entire blog posts. He makes some good points:

Occasional long posts, especially ones that have a limited audience, are fine candidates for this treatment. Putting spoilers below the fold is fine. I’m not quite sure what kind of content would be so bandwidth heavy that this would be a good excuse, but I suppose this works too. And doing what CogDaily often does, which is to summarize a new piece of research in enough detail to let you know if you might be interested in reading the gory details, and then putting said details below the fold — that’s fine too.

But my plea is to use some discretion here. Actually, use a lot of discretion. 600 words isn’t that much, and there’s no need to cut a post that long in half. Spoilers are uncommon unless you’re running a movie review site. And scrolling past a post you aren’t interested in only takes one or two seconds. So please: do this sparingly. The world will be a better place for it.

Actually, 600 words might be a pretty decent point at which to shift from the single-page to multiple-page option. Many Cognitive Daily posts are upwards of 1,000 words, encompassing four or more screens of vertical space on my laptop display. Drum’s longest posts aren’t much longer than 600 words, so for him it makes a lot of sense to nearly always keep things in a single post.

But some CogDaily posts are shorter than 600 words, and they’re *still* split. Take a look at this post, for example. It’s just 539 words, including citation, and I’ve split it into two chunks, right after the poll. Why did I do that? In fact, even though it’s short on words, it’s got three large graphic items (including the poll), and that means it still takes up three browser screens. I don’t think it makes much sense to force readers to scroll down three screens to get to a new post if they’re just browsing my blog. It becomes difficult for them to quickly get a sense of what’s there.

Drum’s readers complain about his mid-column “recent comments” box, which forces them to scroll a significant distance if they don’t want to read his first post (admittedly Drum has no control over the layout of his blog). Whether his posts have 300 words or 700 words, the recent comments box adds nearly a full screen of scrolling just to get down to the next post, and readers do find this annoying. In my view, two screens’ worth of scrolling is about the breaking point — most readers aren’t going to want to scroll farther than two screens past content they don’t want to read.

So if you look at the main page on Cognitive Daily, you’ll find that no post takes up more than two screens, and most take less than one screen — so if one post doesn’t interest a reader, she can already see the next one and decide whether to read further.

Notice, too, that if you click on an individual post, a “recent posts” box appears in the left sidebar, above the “recent comments” box. This provides readers with another way to find additional content beyond what they see in a single post. There’s no need for “recent posts” on the main page, since you can easily scroll to see the posts you want.

The other reason to use “continued” links on posts is selfish: we get paid on a page-view basis, and if people must click to see the rest of a post, then we get two page views instead of one. We actually did an informal study a couple years back on CogDaily, and the results were convincing: page views went down when we included the entire post in the RSS feed and on the main page. We might lose a few die-hard RSS fans this way, but most readers either don’t mind our system or actually prefer it.

On one point I do agree with Kevin: You’ve got to provide enough content in the “teaser” to give readers a fighting chance at deciding whether to read your post. Just a sentence or two doesn’t cut it.

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