Stumping the Net

There have only been two times that I remember stumping the net.

Once was in the late 90s when I was searching for the garlic crab recipe from Thanh Long in SF. The second time was around 2005 and I was trying to figure out the story behind several homes in SF that have windows with "Lipton Tea" etched into them.  Both were pretty obscure quests and both came up with nada, at least at that time.

Fast forward to yesterday. I was at the hospital with my sister who was having surgery (nothing too major) and in the midst of waiting I noticed that all of the electrical outlets are upside down (that's just me).  The nurse was of no help in figuring out an answer to this critically important question.  My other sister suggested checking the internet and writing a blog post about it.

My reaction? Yeah, right. Fat chance the internet will give up the goods on such an arcanely trivial inquiry. I was convinced stump #3 was forthcoming.

Wrong.  Apparently, there are a lot of people who wondered the same thing.

From This Old House...

This has been the standard at hospitals for quite some time. My electrician said it is because with the movement of beds and equipment, electrical devices can become partially unplugged, revealing the conductors. Should something (metal) fall between those conductors it would cause a short, which would be a bad thing in a hospital environment, so to prevent such catastrophes, outlets are installed "upside down" so that the neutral (ground) takes the "short", and the circuit remains unaffected.

A logical answer which makes perfect sense but I prefer this one from Yahoo Answers...

As a hospital nurse I have to be very aware of ways to make my patients anxiety level lower and to provide ways to divert their attention from their pain or illness. The outlets are one of many actions that better hospitals have done to help with this. First of all since you are laying down most of the time a normally placed outlet will look peculiar and may cause anxiety about if there is something wrong with you that makes the outlets look so weird. It is felt by the results of a vast number of double blind studies that the upside down outlets are perceived as being more normal when you are laying down and that there is scientifically valid proof of decreased anxiety in patients in the upside down outlet rooms as is evidenced by less use of pain med and anti anxiety med and fewer times with the nurses call light on. 

The other effect of course is it gives you something to think about (if you should be one of the very astute patients that realize that they are indeed upside down) instead of pain or illness.

Mystery solved.

Snowy Art

Similar concept, different medium.

From My Modern Met...

Along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, [Simon Beck] spends days plodding through the snow in snowshoes, creating these sensational patterns of snow art. Working for 5-9 hours a day, each final piece is typically the size of three soccer fields! The geometric forms range in mathematical patterns and shapes that create stunning, sometimes 3D, designs when viewed from higher levels.

He-Gassen

Ribald, strangely hilarious, and brilliantly Japanese. 

From io9...

Approximately 200-400 years ago during Japan's Edo period, an unknown artist created what is easily the most profound demonstration of human aesthetics ever committed to parchment. I am referring to He-Gassen a.k.a. 屁合戦 a.k.a. "the fart war." In this centuries-old scroll, women and men blow each other off the page with typhoon-like flatulence.  

Gassy competitions weren't limited to the scenes of He-Gassen (which is hilariously named in retrospect). Fart wars were also used to express displeasure at the encroaching European influence in Edo Japan — artists would depict Westerners being blown home on thunderous toots.

You can find the rest of the scroll, in its gaseous entirety, on Waseda University’s website.

Shrimp's Big Problem

Pesticides, viruses, poverty, carbon. 

It's time to think twice about shrimp (unless they're wild caught). 

From Mother Jones...

Marketing campaigns like Red Lobster's periodic "Endless Shrimp"promotions, crystallize shrimp's transformation from special-treat food to everyday cheap fare. What happened? The answer lies in the rise of factory-scale shrimp farms over the last generation. Twenty years ago, 80 percent of shrimp consumed here came from domestic wild fisheries, with imports supplying the rest. Today, we've more than flipped those numbers: the U.S. imports 90 percent of the shrimp consumed here.  

Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe took a hard look at the Asian operations that supply our shrimp. His conclusion: "The simple fact is, if you're eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world's poorest nations." 

Lest anyone think otherwise, these factory farms generate poverty in the nations that house them, as Grescoe demonstrates; they privatize and cut down highly productive mangrove forests that once sustained fishing communities, leaving fetid dead zones in their wake. 

A new study finds that the flattening of Southeast Asian mangrove forests is devastating in another way, too. Kaufman estimates that 50 to 60 percent of shrimp farms occupy cleared mangroves, and the shrimp that emerges from them has a carbon footprint 10 times higher than the most notoriously climate-destroying foodstuff I'm aware of: beef from cows raised on cleared Amazon rainforest.  

Love Ever After

Love Ever After is a new Kickstarter project (now fully funded) that attempts to identify the secret to long and happy marriages.

From Feature Shoot...

‘This project was inspired by a letter my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during World War II, which I found after they had both passed away. They had been married for more than 50 years. This project is intended as a photographic series of ‘love letters’. The dominant portraiture of my series consists of New York couples who have been together for more than 50 years. This work includes photographs, voice recordings and text. In the past three years, I’ve interviewed over 40 elderly couples, photographed them in their homes and helped them to preserve their love stories.’

 A few of my favorites...

Everyday my wife expresses her love for me. She says, did I tell you how much I love you today?
Everyday. Everyday she says that. —Moses Rubenstein, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

"We met when we lived in China. I was on vacation in another town and we only saw each other for three days. We lived very far apart and so, when I returned home, we sent letters. At that time we didn't even have a telephone! We wrote letters each week but it took about 20 days for our letters to reach each other. We did this for five years."  Jin Lin Chen, March 15, 2011.

What is the secret to love? A secret is a secret and I don’t reveal my secrets!
—Ykov Shapirshteyn, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

The Food Forest

A brilliant idea that should be replicated across the country.

From Take Part...

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. 

All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest. “This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project. The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. 

So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes? “Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”

Seriously?

For some reason I thought Hollywood had already reached its pinnacle of bizarro mash-ups but along comes Tim Burton who turns Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter.

Who funds this stuff?

Super strange with an extra dose of weird but I just might have to see it.

This Little Piggy

Iberico de bellota carefully hand sliced at Borough Market, London

There are only a few foods that I'll passionately seek out when I'm on the road: ice cream from Bertillon in Paris, sushi at the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, mangosteens in SE Asia, and iberico de bellota whenever in Europe.  

It's a hard call, but that last one, iberico de bellota, just might be the best thing I've ever tasted.

From the the Boston Globe...

It weighs 13 pounds, glistens with fat, and is capped by a dramatic black hoof.

It's a ham, but not just any ham. This is jamon iberico de bellota, the be-all-and-end-all, Rolls Royce, ne plus ultra of hams: one that positively demands a party.

Jamon iberico's cult following stems in part from its mystique: nearly unattainable, dearly expensive.

Its provenance adds to that; the ham comes from pigs that are as coddled as the cattle that become Kobe beef. The pigs roam free, feasting on acorns ("bellotas" in Spanish). "They live in pig paradise," says Harris. "They grow up as a gang together for two years, then when it's time for them to meet their maker, they play them Mozart. After Mozart, they go to bed for the night. I don't know if they're tucked in. The next morning they get hot showers, then some mysterious carbon dioxide enters their atmosphere and they go off to piggy heaven." This is referred to not as slaughtering the pigs, but as sacrificing them. The hams then cure for up to four years in clean mountain air.

The piggy spa treatment takes place for a practical reason. "They want them very mellow," Harris says. "If they're scared, they produce epinephrine. If they're not stressed, the meat is fine. I'm not saying the ham people are pig lovers. They're meat lovers."

The main reason bellota ham is so coveted, of course, is its flavor. "It's very meaty, rich, marbled with fat," writes Andres. "Jamon iberico is the finest ham in the world. It is a ham that will ruin you for other hams."

Fine swine indeed.

Left Leaning

A fascinating study.

From New Scientist...

If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance. Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers.

To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, researchers asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright. The rest of the questions were asked when - unbeknownst to the volunteers - the board was altered so that it would give a "perfectly balanced" readout only if volunteers tilted slightly to either the left or right.

When Eerland's team compared the answers given by participants they found that, on average, people made smaller estimates when they were tilted to the left. The finding appears to tally with mental number line theory, which supposes that people who read from left to right mentally represent smaller numbers on the left. A different effect among people from cultures that count from right to left would be expected.

Starry Night

Van Gogh's famous painting comes alive.

From Petros Vrellis on Vimeo...

Today's Bread

Basically the same recipe as before but instead of 100% APF, I use equal parts APF, whole wheat, and bread flour. The add-ins this go round were fresh rosemary (courtesy of the garden), manchego and some other cheeses, and delicious Spanish chorizo that I muled over from London.

A Picture is Worth...

The photographer's description from Twisted Sifter...

“I remember clearly that it was about 5 p.m. on November 25 [2011]. I was just finishing an assignment photographing retired soldiers bidding farewell to their comrades at the train station. On my way out, I heard someone yelling from a corner and soon after lots of people gathered around. I ran towards the sound and made my way to the front of the crowd, only to find an old man dead on the bench. As I raised my camera, a Buddhist monk walked out of the crowd and went directly towards the dead man. The monk bent down to hold the old man’s hand and started to chant scriptures. I began to take pictures immediately. One minute later, police came over and cordoned off the area. After the monk finished the ceremony, he bowed to the old man and quickly disappeared among the other busy passengers.” [Shanxi Taiyuan Train Station]

Guns and Kids

For all of the gun lovers, second Amendment defenders, and guns-don't-kill-people-people-kill-people advocates, tell me this: if a handgun hadn't been easily available to this child is it more likely or less likely that his injuries would be less severe or that the other children wouldn't have been as traumatized?

From WPTZ..

A New Hampshire elementary school was placed under lockdown Friday after a 14-year-old student shot himself in the face in the cafeteria with about 70 students present. As of Friday afternoon, the student was in serious condition in the intensive care unit.

Ethan Symonds, a seventh-grader who was sitting at a table near the boy in the cafeteria, said he heard something "a little bit louder than a chip bag popping." He said he did a double-take, saw blood and ran. 

Eighth-grader Nick Phillips, who shares homeroom with the student, told WPTZ the boy had been passing notes during the week saying he was depressed.

From a 2010 Children's Defense Fund report...

The latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 3,042 children and teens died from gunfire in the United States in 2007—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 58 every week.

2,161 were homicide victims

683 committed suicide

198 died in accidental or undetermined circumstances

2,665 were boys

377 were girls

397 were under age 15

154 were under age 10

85 were under age 5

Almost six times as many children and teens — 17,523 — suffered

non-fatal gun injuries. 

There are a few things I have zero tolerance for and one of them is handguns.

Boxcar Grocery

Having been an urbanite my entire life, I'm very familiar with the corner store teeming with junk food, canned food, and just about every other "food" that in one way or another is just plain and simple bad.

Now, along comes Boxcar Grocer which hopefully signals the beginning of the end of the typical corner store.

From Good.Is...

As entrepreneurs and food activists attempt to bring fresh produce to more and more urbanfood deserts, they're setting their crosshairs on one target in particular: the corner store. Packed to the gills with cigarettes, lotto tickets, liquor, and processed foods, the shops do little to nourish the communities where they operate, and in many urban areas—particularly black, Latino, or low-income neighborhoods—these stores are the only places to buy any food at all. 

According to [the brother-sister duo of] Alphonzo and Alison Cross, founders of The Boxcar Grocer in Atlanta, this needs to change. Their just-opened corner store alternative, where local and organic food options get prime shelf space, is an attempt to respect "the fact that every community desires fresh food, and locally made food is just about as fresh as you can get," says Alison. 

The brother-sister duo's mission is to broaden the appeal of the food movement to embrace more black eaters...The store has enjoyed the support of "the entire Atlanta community" since its launch in November, with residents of other neighborhoods already asking the Crosses to open outposts. "The only real challenge," Alison says, "is how to keep enough food on the shelves on a daily basis." 

Good luck Boxcar!

Something I'm Lichen

Green moss graffiti...

Alvin Ailey

We went to the Kennedy Center the other night for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater opening gala.

I had seen Alvin Ailey many many years ago but watching them this time with older and hopefully wiser eyes I can unequivocally say the performance, particularly Revelations, is one of the most graceful, beautiful, and timeless things I've ever laid my eyes on.

Ant Metropolis

 

One never knows what lies beneath. 

From The Dish... 

This is simply breathtaking. In the video, researchers pump 10 tons of concrete down an ant hole and then slowly, carefully excavate the site to see what an ant colony looks like. The result is an intricate structure, equivalent in labor to humans building the Great Wall of China.

Dirt Cheap Drug

Yet another benefit of gardening.

From Yahoo...

Even if you don't love gardening, digging in the dirt may be good for your health -- and it has nothing to do with a love of nature or the wonder of watching things grow. The secret may be in the dirt itself: A bacteria called Mycobacterium vaccae that acts like an antidepressant once it gets into your system.

That's right. A living organism that acts like a mood-booster on the human brain, increasing serotonin and norepinephrine levels and making people feel happier. It was accidentally discovered about 10 years ago when an oncologist in London tried an experimental treatment for lung cancer. She inoculated patients with killed M. vaccae, expecting the bacteria -- which is related to ones that cause tuberculosis and leprosy -- to boost their immune system. It did that, but it also improved her patients' "emotional health, vitality, and general cognitive function." Later experiments with mice confirmed the bacteria's effects; the study was published in a 2007 edition of the journal "Neuroscience."

"What Breast Cancer Is, and Is Not"

She lays it on the line about breast cancer and the Komen Foundation. 

A must see...

 

"To My Old Master"

A classic to be read to the end. (Thx CP)

From Letters of Note...

In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below...

...As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

From Kottke, an update on how things turned our for Mr. Anderson.