Infinite Perplexity

07:48 pm: bangs head
While directionality is hard to establish, it seems more plausible that satisfaction with sex fuels satisfaction with marriage than the reverse. That's because more people are very satisfied with their marriages than are very satisfied with their sex lives. If satisfaction with marriage drove satisfaction with sex, this gap would not exist.

Wow, social science is way easier than I thought it was!

04:12 pm: I looked up "hoyay" and, by a long and winding series of links, found myself here.

Personal favorite.

09:20 am: Andrew got eliminated from Top Chef. That's a pity, because every time he and Spike...well...did anything together, it always made me think of adogsbreakfast delightedly explaining "homosociality" to us over dinner at the co-op.

02:39 pm: Last night Kris and I made peanut butter fudge ripple ice cream with mini marshmallows.

For the base, I used two cups of half-and-half, a cup of crunchy peanut butter, a cup of sugar, and a tablespoon of vanilla. Once the ice cream was mostly frozen I added chopped mini marshmallows. Once it was almost completely frozen I added a mixture of chocolate chips, butter, and sugar, then stirred it just a few more times to complete the "ripple" effect.

It's delicious, and I think the ripple is a winner. If I were to go back and make the chocolate-Guinness ice cream again, I would make it with fudge ripple and chocolate chips.

Incidentally, we gave Kris's cat a spoonful of the chocolate-Guinness ice cream. He licked it, made a wincing face, licked it some more, winced some more, licked it some more, and so on, until the spoonful was gone. Perhaps his wee kitty brain couldn't comprehend the combination of cream, sugar, and hops?

08:16 am: You wanna know what's delicious?  Saint-Hilaire Blanquette de Limoux.  If you're a fan of extremely dry champagne, you've got to try it.  It's from France but not from Champagne, so it doesn't get the name.  But the label boasts that the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire were making sparkling wine back when those guys in Champagne were swinging from the trees and eating smelly cheese with their prehensile tails, so, you know, "wine with a story" and all that.

04:10 pm: Couldn't find much on the history of green salads.

I'm curious to know whether green salads have an exclusively European genealogy. If there were one ingredient that's been universally available throughout history, I'd think "leaves" would be it, you know? But apparently there was a time even in European history when green salads were looked down upon. Sanitary concerns may have been part of it.

03:21 pm: previously unpublicized consequence of home schooling
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5764886.html

01:57 pm: Recent.

Older.

08:56 am: haiku
The coldest winter /
on record is last July /
in San Francisco

01:07 pm: More political map geekdom.

12:16 pm: My reasoning is as follows:

( needlessly long )

12:02 pm: Poll #1184769
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Am I the only one who's obsessive enough that they already know who they want to be *Vice* President?

If you have a VP pick, who is it? (listed in alphabetical order by last name)

If someone else, then who?

04:46 pm: A question for anyone who knows more about FDA drug approval than I do...

I know, firsthand, at least two people who have had Ambien-induced hallucinations. Nearly everyone else I talk to seems to also know, firsthand, multiple people who have had Ambien-induced hallucinations. So it seems to me like the hallucinations are probably a fairly common side effect. Did the FDA know about these when they approved the drug? The hallucinations, as I've heard people describe them, sound extremely dangerous - they aren't the pleasant psychedelic sort that people can usually distinguish from reality.

12:11 pm: Thomas Frank and GIS
I figured out how to get the SAS GIS package to work, so I made some maps:

( Read more... )

One weakness of these maps is the groupings. I know full well that Utah is probably not much like the other Southwestern states politically, but it didn't have enough people to stand on its own, so that's where it went. Other states I simply don't know much about. I mean, Delaware? wtf? I'm sure I made errors. Surely someone can tell me why putting New Jersey and Delaware in the same boat was a mistake...

09:57 am: http://thepage.time.com/2008/05/03/you-cant-make-this-up/

Anyway, Slate's Hillary Deathwatch kind of bothers me. They move her chances up or down according to polls, primary results and so on. But that's kind of beside the point. If they want to track Clinton's chances of winning there are only two questions that matter:

1) How much time is left?
2) Has Obama had some sort of catastrophic meltdown?

Every day that Obama doesn't have a catastrophic meltdown is a day that Clinton's chances go down, even if it's a day she wins a big primary.

08:08 am: frushi
Richard seems like the clear favorite to win this season of Top Chef.  He towers over the other contestants like his faux hawk towers over the hair on the sides of his head.  And speaking of egotistical douchebags making pretentious food, I finally got to work on the fruit sushi project I've been thinking about for, ummm, years.

( with the help of my lovely assistant )

As you can see, there was some experimentation going on. I did some Google research and found that most of the links are about a restaurant called Orange in Chicago. They seemed to be serving pretty much what I wanted - sushi made with sweet coconut rice and brightly colored fruit. I was worried that the coconut milk would coat the grains of rice and make them slippery, but it turned out they were even stickier than sushi rice usually is. The biggest problem was that fruit isn't as sticky as fish so it tended to slide off, and jam != glue. Later I Googled some more and saw that someone had suggested honey.

The maki rolls are a bit more of a problem, because using nori is out of the question. Making inside-out rolls makes up for this a bit, but the ones I made with no inside wrapper turned out kind of amorphous. The lettuce wasn't perfect (broader leaves might have helped) but it got the job done, and Kris really liked the lettuce texture with the fruit. Another possibility is thinly slicing cantaloupe, honeydew, or cucumber.

(That's balsamic vinegar replacing soy sauce in the corner of the picture, and I considered mashing up some mint to make a wasabi-like paste)

02:46 pm: Anyone know of an online GIS application that could let me make simple choropleths using state or county boundaries (STD positivty rates in California counties, etc.)?

09:14 pm: "dubious charms"

We're not always good at exactly what we'd like to be good at.  Apparently my writing really shines when I adopt a prissy, mock upper-class British voice.  "It sounds like Frasier's brother!" chimed one ecstatic English professor.  In another context and genre, "Smacks of a Victorian edition of the Kama Sutra.  By which I mean, good work!"

Roll with it, I guess.

02:57 pm: ...Clinton didn't win by 10%. She won by $9.99 (plus tax.) WHY DOn'T TeH MEDIA REPOrT TISH!?!!?

11:39 am: http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php

Kind of gross, kind of neat.