This past Wednesday’s NY Times had a Minimalist article on dark meat, in particular chicken legs and thighs. Yes, it’s fattier than white meat from the breast, but not nearly as fatty as red meat and so on.
Here are a few recipes from the article to try out later:
Read the rest of this entry »
We moved to Cleveland at the beginning of June. Actually, that’s an exaggeration: Grace and almost all the furniture have moved to Cleveland, and I came back to New York for the last few weeks to see through the sale of our apartment before packing what remains into a rental car and joining my wife.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m mucking around WP1.2 now. The old image hack (iv.php) has been modified to conform with the way WP does things, so I can still reasonably display all the pictures that had been posted here. The old b2print.php and b2mailpost.php need to be rewritten (so does iv.php for that matter, mainly because of ugliness). My other major b2 hack was b2search, a concordance-based search for the site. Major rewrites for this one, too, mainly because WP has a plugin-and-hooks architecture that I can use, instead of the messy changes to the b2edit.php.
I’ll probably put in the minor navigation tweeks, such as the vBulletin-style navigation links to go quickly across the pages. Something can also be done with the monthly archive list.
I’ve adopted Alex King’s 3-column stylesheet. It looks neat. I’ll probably change the background and header images at one point or another. To what, I don’t know.
I’ve relaunched this site after upgrading the old, hacked b2 to WordPress 1.2.
Most of my old hacks are no longer valid: either they’ve been superceded by new WordPress functionality, or I have to go about writing new versions if no one else has written the proper plug-ins. I’ll have to investigate whether the “printable” and “email to a friend” functions exist, for example.
My dippy little image view needed relatively minor modifications to get running. I’ll have to enhance the functionality of it, mainly by putting in a caption functionality at long last. As well as a good way to edit picture order, captions and so on. I just installed Gallery for Danny and Jill, so they can show off the baby pictures. Gallery is slick, but I want something a bit better integrated to the blog.
Boing Boing has a pointer to a profile of Ricky Jay in the June issue of Smithsonian magazine.
I first heard substantially about Ricky Jay in a New Yorker profile of him from 1993 and managed to miss Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants from around that time. I had seen House of Games in college, but, of course, didn’t realize one of the world’s great magicians was on the screen before us. We did catch him a couple of years ago when he was performing On The Stem in New York, where he did some utterly baffling card tricks on stage. No flicking playing cards into watermelons, but awe and wonder.
I had no idea he was involved with Deadwood. I’ll have to point Tivo at it now (after first ordering HBO from Adelphia). Boing Boing also kindly points to Jay’s site, which has an archive of his radio shows on public radio in Real format. I’ll listen to these later.
Next time he’s in New York performing on stage, I have to make a point of flying back to see it. As the Smithsonian profile quotes Charles Krauthammer, some people can tell their grandkids that they say Ali box; I can say that I saw Ricky Jay deal.
Some photos taken on Tuesday near Battery Park City and the greenway along the river. This was to burn off the remaining film in the roll for the graduation photos. It was a nice day, in any case, and it was the first time I’d been in the Winter Garden since before 9/11. I hadn’t realized the greenway and the parks had been so well developed.
It’ll be “that’s Doctor Gracie to you!” from now on. Graduation exercises for SUNY Downstate were held this past Monday at Carnegie Hall. The walk across the stage to have the green hood draped across your shoulders is the conclusion of four long, hard years of work: blood, tears, sweat and toil (the climax of these four years was the Match). Now, we look forward to five or six years of even harder toil at CCF.
Anyway, here are the photos from the joyous event and the dinner afterwards at Fontana Di Trevi, the old school Italian restaurant across the street from Carnegie Hall (the destination of several post-graduation dinners):
Last week, we had the last of the wedding receptions that we had spread out over six months. This was primarily for East Coast family and family friends who could not make it to California for the actual ceremony, and was perhaps the most formal of all of these: there was a wonderful, delicious wedding cake from Bruce’s Bakery (Baker to the Stars!). There was the photos taken at each table with various groups of relatives and family friends. There was the somewhat embarrassing yet endlessly amusing slide show. All with took place at my cousin’s restaurant, Pearl East, which served excellent food for the occassion.
Here are some photos from the reception and afterwards:
Here’s the slide show we put together for 6-month/for-family wedding reception/Grace’s graduation party lunch thing. There are a lot of pictures:
There’s currently some Epson ad talking about the longevity of their inks, so that embarrassing photos can be preserved for future generations. This is possibly the wrong way to think about it: we’re more likely to preserve the files instead of the paper, and future generations can be embarrassed by slide shows and less by physical albums. This set of pictures is just an example of this technological change.
I’ve been spending far too much time recently playing Bejeweled on my Palm. I really should be finishing The Iliad, a goal I set for myself after seeing a trailer for the new movie last year; I’m only on Book IV, and Diomedes has just swindled some guy of his fancy gold armor.
But it’s an interesting puzzle game. Rather, it’s not quite a puzzle game, but a game of quick pattern recognition against a cluttered background. You have to get at least three of the same type of “jewel” in a row to clear out that set. Since you can only swap horizontally and vertically, only a small set of patterns of jewel placement are useable. So, you can through the board repeatedly, looking for two-in-a-rows or V-shapes. My screen is black and white, so this is a bit harder than in color. I also play the timed version, so the scan-and-recognize cycles have to be very quick. The untimed game seems uninteresting, since you can fully scan the board to look for the correct patterns at your leisure.
One thing to note is that, unlike in, say, Tetris, which Bejeweled is compared to for some reason, you can’t improve your position. Because of the randomization of the filled in board, your start position is more or less the same as at any other point in the game. The only difference is that your own scan of the board for patterns has already happened for a given point in the game, so you can narrow your field of vision to some extent.
To the extent that video games can be educational, provide hand-eye coordination exercises, or simply provide rewards for being an arbitrary and difficult task, Bejeweled (hopefully) exercises the pattern recognition portions of the brain. My progressively higher scores (both top and typical) are getting higher (but will probably plateau at some point), which may mean I’m seeing these abstract patters a bit better, or maybe cycling through my neurological buffers more quickly. Or at least I’m conning myself into believing this.
Here’s an interesting article about how the brain may only recognize about four things at once, mainly because evolutionarily we didn’t need much more. A classic experiment suggesting this involves asking psych volunteers to concentrate and count how many times these two basketball players would pass the ball the each other. While immersed in this task, many of them simply didn’t see the gorilla-suited woman casually strolling across the scene. There’s evidence to suggest that some people, such as racecar drivers, are able to recognize more objects, or can flush their buffers (so to speak) more quickly and efficiently than the rest of us.