Category: it could be called work

Ack! I been memed!:

Thanks to Jody and Sean…

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

So I’m Snape.

And I’m married to Hagrid.

Didn’t see that coming…

Who do I get?

A different kind of OpenCola. Compare with this recipe.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The real thing. Or is it?:

Brew it yourself

NB. 1 batch of 7x formula will produce three batches cola syrup, or approximately 54 litres of cola.

Step 1: 7x formula:

Using food-grade essential oils, assemble 3.75ml orange oil; 3ml lime oil; 1ml lemon oil; 1 ml cassia oil (nb. reduce cassia content for next production); 0.75ml nutmeg oil; 0.25ml coriander oil (6 drops); 0.25ml lavender oil (6 drops); 0.25ml neroli oil (optional/removed due to high cost).

Using a measuring syringe, measure out the oils into a glass or ceramic container. Keep covered to avoid volatile oil fumes escaping. Then dissolve 10g instant gum arabic (equivalent to 22ml) in 20ml water (low calcium/low magnesium, Volvic is good) with one drop vodka – Cube uses Zubrowka. (Be aware that total quantity of vodka will be 0.0007ml per litre of Cube-cola).

Place the gum/water/vodka mix in a high-sided beaker – stainless steel or glass are best. Using a high-power hammer drill with kitchen whisk attachment, whisk the gum mixture at high speed while your assistant droppers the oils. Mix in steadily with the measuring syringe. Continue to whisk at high speed for 5-7 minutes, or until the oils and water emulsify.

The resulting mixture will be cloudy. Test for emulsification by adding a few drops of the mixture to one glass of water. No oils should be visible on the surface. You now have a successful flavour emulsion, which should hold for several months.

Step 2:The mixers

This makes two allied concentrates, Composition A and Composition B, which can be stored separately before being mixed into cold syrup with the addition of sugar and water.

Composition A

Mix 30 ml double strength caramel colouring (DD Williamson Caramel 050) with 10 ml water. While stirring, add 10ml 7x flavour emulsion (oils/gum/water mix).

Composition B

Mix 3 tsp (10ml) citric acid with 5-10ml water, then sieve in 0.75 tsp (2.75ml) caffeine. Mix thoroughly using a pestle and mortar until caffeine granules are no longer evident. The mixture may behave erratically, turning either white or clear for no apparent reason. If it goes white, add more water. Pass through muslin or jelly bag to remove any anomalies.

At this point, A+B can be packaged separately and later reconstituted into cola syrup.

Step 3: The cola syrup

2 litres water; 2kg sugar

Compositions A & B

Make a sugar syrup (mix in a cooking pot on low heat to dissolve quickly) using 1.5 litres of the water and all the sugar. Filter if unsure. Mix Composition A into the remaining 500ml water. Add Composition B, then the sugar syrup. You now have 3 litres Cube-Cola syrup or approx 18 litres cola.

Step 4: The cola

As required, make up your cola as a 5:1 mix, five parts fizzy water to one part cola syrup. Cube uses 350ml syrup in a 2l bottle of Tesco Ashford Mountain Spring. This cola recipe is released under the GNU general public licence.

Reluctantly filed under Food. I guess it’s a food since it’s all made with identifiable ingredients.

Now that LazyWeb has been rendered useless, I’ll broadcast this over my much smaller network:

Is there some way w/in AppleScript to archive email programmatically? Say, all mail two weeks old or older gets shifted from the active inbox (deleted from the server to save time and quota space) to a local archive. Seems like it should be do-able.

Looking at it again, it seems there is a date received property for the message item. So I suppose opening a sorted mailbox and looking for items that are today – 14 days and passing that to a move command would work.

Some commemorations of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme today. This is one of the more moving ones. The author found 2 relations’ names in his search of the registry: I found 352 names in my search.

Cemetery for soldiers killed in the Battle of the Somme. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty

I wrote a paper on this in my college days, and still remember reading over the statistics and other details of the period. It’s not for nothing that WWI is considered the beginning of the modern age, with mechanized warfare, poison gas, aerial combat and bombardment, U-boats, all products of industrialization.

Thirty-five years ago, the NYTimes published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, allowing Americans to more fully understand what their government was doing in Vietnam.

When Do We Publish a Secret? – New York Times:

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.”

This week we have heard repeated calls for the NYTimes to be censored, for its management to be executed.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., wants to pull the Congressional press credentials for the New York Times. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., asked the administration to assess what damage the stories caused to the tracking program. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., accused the paper of “treason,” and Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., said, “The New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people.” King asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to begin a criminal investigation of the paper.

Hysteria ensues:

San Francisco talk show host Melanie Morgan believes that Times editor Bill Keller should be jailed for treason for approving the publication.

The maximum penalty for treason is death.

“If he were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber,” Morgan, whose show airs on KSFO-AM, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. “It is about revealing classified secrets in the time of war. And the media has got to take responsibility for revealing classified information that is putting American lives at risk.”

Eeew: And Now, Your Adam Yoshida Moment of Zen

And these people claim to be true patriots. They have more in common with the monsters who conducted Soviet-era show trials and “disappearances.”

Who the hell does Stephen Hawking think he is anyway?:

So famous physicist Stephen Hawking is in the news these days advocating more shooting of humans into space:

“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

said Hawking in Hong Kong this week in a notable passive construction;

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species.”

OK, let alone for the moment the sheer hubris-laden assumption that within twenty years we’ll be able to build artificial ecosystems, sustainable over the very long term, that can support human life at population levels necessary to preserve a worthwhile percentage of human genetic, intellectual, and cultural diversity. Seems to me we tried doing that a few years back on Earth, where we had an entire planet full of tools at our disposal, and it worked rather more poorly than its planners expected. A description of the failure of the “self-sufficient ecosystem” Biosphere experiment, from that last link:

Throughout the experiment, oxygen levels steadily dropped, until the members barely were able to maintain consciousness. The rules of self-sufficiency were changed yet again as oxygen was pumped in to prevent brain damage. In the meantime, all the pollinators died, so that none of the plants could reproduce. Finally, all the birds and animals brought in for food also died.

For the humans, Biosphere quickly became a desperate exercise in fighting off starvation. The eight members, split into two factions of four — which to this day do not talk to each other — were reduced to hording [sic] and counting peanuts. Biosphere ended as an almost comical failure.

And that was on this planet, where the designers could just have a thousand yards of specialized concrete and a million square feet of tempered glass driven up to the site on flatbed trucks. I suspect an attempt to replicate the Biosphere experiment in the Valle Marineris would be a bit more difficult. The construction crew here could actually breathe without tanks, for one thing, and what happens when the New Martians realize they have the wrong gauge turnbuckles for the shadecloth awning, and all the lettuce plants get UV poisoning? We’re talking about an agency that forgot to do a English-Metric conversion for an unmanned Mars probe here. Would you really trust them to buy compatible plumbing fixtures from 400 million miles away?

But forget that for now. And forget that Hawking is saying this in a year in which NASA is re-emphasizing humans in space and — for consequent budgetary reasons — pulling the plug on unmanned missions to monitor, and perhaps thus help mitigate, the dangers he cites.

What pisses me off is this. I’m looking at the list of dangers Hawking cites: genetic engineering turning the biosphere into gray goo, climate change from burning of fossil fuels, nuclear war… and a certain commonality among them strikes me. I mean, we’re not talking the sun going nova, which is far enough in the future that a dollar a year budget devoted to extrasolar mass migration research would likely be more than adequate to get us there. And we’re not talking comet impact or flood basalt here. Every threat, every looming disaster Hawking’s talking about here is human generated.

There are two reasons why Hawking’s brainstorm is thus just utterly, unbelievably stupid.

You really should read the rest. If you can’t get your mind around the past 15,000 years of human history, the Biosphere II experiment should be fresh enough to understand.

Your Quiz Score: Liberal:

ACCORDING TO YOUR ANSWERS, The political description that fits you best is… . LIBERAL

LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

Interesting how the different categories break down:

Centrist 32.08 %
Right (Conservative) 7.73 %
Libertarian 33.98 %
Left (Liberal) 18.21 %
Statist (Big Government) 8.00 %

One could argue that the Statists are the most vocal part of the right: lumping them and the traditional conservatives together still doesn’t equal self-identified Liberals, who are supposedly the fringe party.

I’ve long claimed that one should decide what you believe in and find a party or organization that shares those ideals: I don’t think most people do that. My take on it has always been that people associate themselves with a party based on the social appeal. Liberalism has been stigmatized for the past 15 years as a result of the right-wing’s constant framing efforts: being conservative has been portrayed as reasonable and moderate, mature and responsible. Anyone who has followed the nation’s financial predicament and our train-wreck of a foreign policy would find a disconnect.

The other curiosity was the high percentage of libertarians, but I suspect that’s an artifact of this being an internet-based quiz. And I realize now that this quiz is offered by a libertarian activist group, so there is some skewing/framing in the definitions. The political compass does a better job w/o an agenda.

Joaquin Setanti:

Joaquin Setanti
“Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.”

Motivational Quotes of the Day