- Privacy and the Fourth Amendment – Our laws, or at least, our interpretations of them, desperately need to be updated to deal with information and privacy in a computer mediated world. What will be the framing cases, and how will they shake out? Apparently the warrantless wiretapping wasn't a big enough scandal to get us paying attention. Terrifying to imagine what it will take. (tagged: privacy law security technology )
- Moyers on America . Is God Green? – Bill Moyers (himself very Christian) investigates the recent emergence of green evangelicalism… (tagged: religion sustainability green christianity moyers environment )
- Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries – NYTimes.com – Asian cyberspies, able to watch and listen through your computer's camera and microphone, even if you work in an embassy? And they somehow leave the dashboard for their giant cyberspyring out in the open, on a website, with no password? Are you kidding? Is it just me, or does this reek of Neuromancer? (tagged: security internet technology espionage china tibet nytimes )
- The Quiet Coup – A withering op-ed by Simon Johnson on the policy disaster that is our financial sector. But he's still not willing to re-evaluate the underlying premise of perpetually debt fueled exponential economic growth. How, exactly, was this all supposed to work out? (tagged: politics economics finance bailout crisis policy banking imf )
- MASHSF – Fixies gone wild. Not my kind of riding, but hey, someone's having a good time! Looks like they're making a movie. (tagged: bicycle fixie video cycling )
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
- Compost reactor core temperature holding steady at 294 K. #
- I wanna make some kumquat marmalade. #
- Tyler Durden where are you? Your country needs you now! #
- Hmm, is it just me, or is everydns.net hosed? #
- is re-re-writing, paper and code, hammer and tongs. #
- Compost reactor core T=302 K and rising. #
- holy crap, it sounds like the EPA grew a pair… #
- falling asleep, despite the coffee. #
- Compost reactor core temperature: 309 K and rising! #
- Compost reactor core temperature 313 K and rising… #
- If only there were also a clause that said “nor shall public property be taken for private use, without just compensation.” #
- Compost reactor core temperature 315 K and rising. #
- Best fitting great circles requires that I get a better handle on this eigen-crap. #
- $stuff != $information http://is.gd/p1VL #
- Compost reactor core temperature 318 K and rising. #
- estoy tomar 15 kg de naranjas agrias para hacer un olla grande de esto: http://is.gd/p7UE #
- boiling marmalade. No happy endings forseen to the economy. #
- Hopefully the marmalade wil gel by morning… but for now I gotta go to sleep! #
- Compost reactor core temperature 321 K and rising. #
- 10 liters of un-jelled marmalade. Will code for pectin. #
- The first rule of Fight Club is: maltodextrin works just as well as pectin. #
- Compost reactor core temp 326 K and rising. #
- Disarmed the Jehovah’s Witnesses, by vigorously agreeing with them. Yes, I’m going to hell. Yes, I’m okay with that. Now please leave. #
- Planting tomatoes, making bread, sharing beer with the Stempels. #
- Setting up to watch a movie about Gypsies #
- going to dream about how the Chinese cyberspooks are watching me through my computer. In my sleep. Hopefully they don’t speak English. #
- getting up too early. Going to Getty Villa to see our namesake diety (and other things), then a beach picnic! #
- Well, we’ve successfully taken the neighborhood down a notch. Now our neighbors are parking on their lawn too. #
- Compost reactor core temp 328 K and rising. #
- glad Getty spent some of his ill gotten oil riches on a cool Roman villa in SoCal. #
- Postopolis LA – Presentations, films, talks slideshows, discussions and parties, centered around architecture, design, and the future of cities. Wish I knew someone who was going… (tagged: losangeles architecture design urban )
- Seville Orange Marmalade Recipe – Going to get a bunch of naranjas agrias from Jon and try making a batch of this. (tagged: recipe seville orange food cooking canning marmalade )
- Dear A.I.G., I Quit! – One might hope that all the executive collateral damage would provide a future incentive in other companies for people to call bullshit on each other when doing things that will get the whole company into trouble. (tagged: nytimes AIG bailout politics )
- Make Textbooks Affordable – Student-Faculty alliance to put the textbook publishers out of business (or, at least, force them to update their business model!). $100 textbooks are a joke. We should be providing grants and prizes for people to write free and open textbooks, that the whole world can use (and translate) instead of extorting cash out of the education system. (tagged: copyright openaccess creativecommons open education )
- skeptic etiquette – OMG, this woman should open a charm school for scientists and engineers. What *is* the right way to respond when somebody asks you at a cocktail party "What's your sign?" (tagged: science funny pseudoscience skeptic astrology )
This recipe is a variation on the no-knead bread made famous a couple of years ago by the New York Times.
Brewing beer at home means ending up with a gigantic pile of spent mash – malted barley and other grains that have been sprouted, roasted, and then soaked to release their carbohydrates as simple sugars for the yeast to consume. The remains are rich in fiber and protien, and also still have residual starches. They make wonderful compost, but it seems a waste to just toss out all that nutritious food!
So instead, I’ve been trying to figure out the right way to reliably incorporate it into bread, and I think I’ve finally found an insanely simple recipe that works:
- 2 cups bread flour
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 2 cups spent mash grains
- 2 cups warm water
- a pinch of salt
- a quarter teaspoon of dry yeast.
Add all the dry ingredients together (the mash grains will be wet, but that’s okay – add them in too). Then add the water, and mix until it’s a big sticky ball. Let sit covered overnight, and plop out onto a floured surface for a second rise. Make sure the whole surface of the dough ball gets floured. Let it rise for an hour or so, covered.
Meanwhile, preheat your dutch oven (or other massive, heat retaining baking vessel with a lid) to 350F in the oven for at least half an hour. Drop the now risen dough blob in and shake it around a little to get it to settle. Bake covered for 45 minutes. Remove lid, and bake for another 45 minutes. Remove from the oven, allow to cool, and enjoy!
Still takes a long long time to go through an entire batch of spent grains. Best to separate them into several 4 cup yogurt containers and freeze them for later use.
Conventional economics says money today is worth more than money in the future. This is why people are willing to agree to pay interest on a loan (and why a creditor requires it). How much more money is worth today than in the future is determined by the discount or interest rate (depending on what kind of calculation you’re doing). This would hold true, say the economists, even if we lived in a hard money world (e.g. silver and gold), and even after accounting for the risk of default by the debtor, because of opportunity costs. Creditors and investors presumably have a choice as to what they do with their money. Sitting on your pile of treasure in a vault ensures that it doesn’t get smaller, but it also doesn’t get bigger. When they choose to make a loan or invest in an enterprise, they are, it is assumed, seeking the best possible (risk adjusted) return, and so the value of a given present pile of money at some time in the future is the principal invested plus the return earned between now and then. If you can make 10% per year on some investment, and you have $100, and someone offers to give you $105 a year from now in exchange for your $100 now, all else being equal, you refuse, invest at 10%, and end up with $110 next year instead.
This conception of money is somewhat problematic, as it tends to render everything in the time and world of your grandchildren essentially worthless in the present. Even at a modest 5% discount rate, $100 a century from now is only worth $0.59 today. I think the problem comes largely from the convolution of informational and material wealth, and our habit of representing both of them with the same currency.
Continue reading ‘The Time Value of Information and Material Wealth’
I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. It’s his personal account of working as an economic forecaster for an international infrastructure engineering and consulting company called Chas. T. Main during the 1970s (it’s since been purchased by Pasadena’s very own Parsons). If I remember correctly, I got this book from Arjun.
It was widely criticized when it came out as being the rantings of a conspiracy theorist, and I think that by the end of the book, it definitely takes on that tone. This is unfortunate, because a lot of the problems that Perkins points out really do exist, and it actually doesn’t matter much whether they’re the result of a shadowy global conspiracy, or a structural problem with our international economic and development system. But most good conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth, and at the very least they can provide a useful lens into how the same situation and facts can be interpreted differently by people in different positions, with different experiences, and different incentives. In that light, the book is asking the reader to consider what debt-based foreign development aid looks like from the point of view of the poor people living in the countries receiving the aid. This is actually a really interesting thing to think about right now, because our current financial and economic crisis has been described by some as similar in many ways to the kinds of crises which the IMF and World Bank have historically been called on to deal with in “developing” economies.
Continue reading ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins’
- incredibly, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to want. #
- coffee++ #
- had an unreproductive day. So far anyway… #
- Can bacon fat really make everything taste this good? #
- I’m wearing green. Trust me. #
- music makes working easier. #
- fiddling while Rome burns. But really, aren’t we all? #
- is it wrong to be mad that neither I nor anyone else suggested a better way to do this sooner? #
- having communication issues, with myself. #
- As systems, biospheres don’t consume energy, they consume order. We are all eddies in the entropic flow: http://is.gd/nZpr #
- eating peas and greens and habaneros from the garden, stir-fried in bacon fat with onions, bell peppers, garlic, and ginger. #
- I should buy some milk and bake a cobbler. #
- equinox. Here that means the sun is starting to get angry. #
- happy to have gotten some constructive criticism from peers on the NSR/TPW paper. #
- I wish Michelle and I could have watched the Power of Myth with my mom. #
- going for a bike ride. #
- just finished a three hour discussion about having kids. #
- is not in Houston. Thank God. Steamy post-apocalyptic petrochemical automotive flatland, periodically visited by the planetarians. #
- both disturbed and pleased that the best financial journalism available today is from This American Life, The Daily Show, and blogs. #
- We turned the compost! It’s like magic. Kitchen scraps, leaves and urine goes in, beautiful black dirt comes out. #
- Just watched Milk. Sad. Encouraging. Interestingly, all the promiscuous sex with strangers, much weirder than that it was gay. #
- A New Way Forward – Grassroots banking policy? Who'd have guessed? Their plan is "Nationalize. Reorganize. Decentralize." The N-word has some bad connotations, but what they're really advocating for is an FDIC style managed bankruptcy, i.e. letting the banks fail, cleaning out the shareholders and management, and applying real anti-trust laws to the financial industry. I never thought I'd go to a banking protest. (tagged: economics bailout finance fdic activism banking policy )
- MailStopper – Is $20/year too much to pay to avoid junk mail? Would it really work? The self-monitoring aspect is interesting too. Would be great to be able to watch your name and address as it propagates through the ocean of direct marketing databases, and credit reporting agencies. (tagged: green junkmail sustainability internet )
- YellowPagesGoesGreen.Org – I hate the two kilograms of cellulose that the phone company insists on littering my doorstep with each year. I was a little bit drunk when they showed up last week, and threw them in the street. I don't even have a land line. Why would I want a phone book? Who uses those things anyway? Thankfully, someone else has already created an opt-out system… too bad I'll have to wait a year to see if it actually works. (tagged: environment recycling paper yellowpages mail green sustainability )
- The Age of Stupid – A new combination sci-fi documentary on climate change… framed as a man looking back and trying to understand why we failed to act, from the year 2055. The movie was "crowd funded" – the filmmakers sold shares of the profits to individuals (and the crew) in exchange for cash (about $1 million total). The trailer looks fairly good… (tagged: climate film green environment )
- Mistrial by iPhone – Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials – Another example (cf death of record companies, newspapers) of technology upending previously stable social and legal systems. 9/12 jury members found to be doing research on the trial they were sitting on, via their cell phones and the internet. People don't consider the meta-brain to be a separate entity any more. Certainly not for weeks of sequestration on end… (tagged: law technology internet phone jury trial )
As animals, and especially visual animals at that, we have a particular experience of the light. For us it is illumination, information about our surroundings. For that purpose moonlight or even starlight will do. And for tens of millions of years, that’s all we ever saw. Somehow a few of us made it through the Permian extinction, and into the Triassic, but the ascendancy of the dinosaurs eventually forced us into the darkness of the night. Our world became dim, and our eyes went colorblind. Most mammals today see only two colors, but a few of us have re-evolved a third photoreceptor. Three colors is still inferior to the four or five or six seen by many near-surface fish, birds, reptiles, insects, and other arthropods. The stomatopods are almost biological spectroscopic imaging systems, with 12 color channels in each of their independently movable trinocular eyes. We are lesser than the eyes that never left the light. They stole the colors from us and made us hide within the night. They kept the sun for themselves, not knowing that our small and furtive ways, our burning endothermy and our fur would see us through the aftermath of the KT impact.
- City of Pasadena bicycle survey is up (English and Español) and ready for your input. It’s very short, 5 minutes max: http://is.gd/mAB2 #
- is smoothing with weighty functions. #
- “Almost everything in this room is in a landfill and just doesn’t know it yet” @AlexSteffen #
- just sent in payment for a year’s worth of rack space @cernio. Hopefully the last time I ever have to think about hardware. #
- After two (dollar weighted) years of investing my portfolio is worth exactly 1/3 less than I invested. Not so bad, given the circumstances. #
- secure in the knowledge that I have cumulatively spent years enjoying voluntary homelessness. #
- The holes in my woolens are a feature (and a bug): http://is.gd/mObh #
- I’ll miss all the great little ethnic grocery stores someday. #
- mysterious and horrible computer hangs… thankfully on somebody else’s machine. #
- scheming as to what citrus I will juice next… #
- eating homemade tabbouleh and hummus, with bulgarian feta and kalamata olives in a whole wheat pita. #
- heading to Lucky Baldwin’s to talk about Mars. Or something. #
- To the phone company: keep your ad filled slab of cellulose to yourself! #
- Making toast and coffee #
- prisoner, monk and soldier. maiden, mother and crone. #
- annoyed that the Pasadena district 7 runoff is between two pro-traffic candidates. Businessman v. police chief? I probably won’t vote. #
- home alone, what to do for the evening? #
- is going to start assuming NREL is not interested as of tonight. #
- incredibly, we only used 5.34 kWh/day on average over the last two months. Down 50% from last year. But what did we do differently? #
- I think I finally understand why James Honaker and Eric Dickson changed their majors from physics to political science: http://is.gd/niFC #
- packing up for a weekend citrus raid. Consensual, of course. #
- Got backed into by a careless driver. Lost it. Smashed his spoiler with my fist. #
- definitely not getting scurvy this week. #
- definitely not getting scurvy this week, despite my mutation. #
- misses sleeping with someone who gets up and makes coffee when I feel like a log in the morning… #
- Heading over to michelle’s place for grapefruit #
- anybody else in Pasadena have citrus they aren’t using? I’ll split the juice with you 50/50 if you let me pick and sqeeze… #
