Somebody (William?) had a lot of fun designing this stove.  All around, it seems like a pretty significant advance in stove-top tech:

[h/t Davison Creators]

It looks like a lot of fun to play with, but the designers don’t seem to address what I consider to be the #1 problem with electric stoves: thermal inertia.  Gas stoves are great because you have the option of instantly reducing or increasing the cooking temperature.  With electric stoves this is much less convenient — expecially if you want to go from high to low heat — and can easily lead to scalding.  You always have the option of changing the heating element you’re using, but then you get caught playing musical pots.  I suppose the 21 possible signatures could come in handy then.

I’m curious to see what Juicers think: do you prefer gas or electric stoves?  How do you feel about the UI on “The William”?

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Langara College on Vimeo.

Guess what?! You can change the default column width in OSX by holding option and dragging the little resize dude. Howaboutit?

Here’s the post in question: Editorial: Waiter, there’s a Nazi theme in my Android Market

The summary here is that Android has an open market (unlike Apple’s, of course) and that means any sort of app can show up there. Like pro-nazi apps! Oh no, doesn’t that just show how terrible open markets are? It isn’t really censorship cause an App Marketplace isn’t really the Internet (this seems to be his actual point he’s trying to make).

Ok, argument shredding time, after the jump.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a trash-talking anarchist pyromaniac?  Co-starring Natalie Portman and Rainn Wilson?

Two please.

Interview with director Spencer Susser:

Hesher | The Official Website

Hey guys, I just wanted to give you all a heads up. As far as I can tell, there was a price hike in our Time Warner cable bills for August 2010 here in Rochester. I don’t remember getting a warning about it, but I also don’t tend to read their letters that usually start with them stroking themselves off.

Here is my last bill the nazis sent me compared to my current bill. Sneaky how they changed it around a bit so the details are hidden and it almost seems like I am saving money! Again, I didn’t change anything on my plan at all.

Last Month
Basic Tier … 7.39
Standard Service … 43.58
Digital Programming … 5.06
Digital Set Top Terminal … 7.00
Remote Control … 0.30
DVR Service … 10.95
Road Runner … 31.08
Road Runner Turbo … 7.74
Digital HD Tier … 4.95

Subtotal: 118.05
After Tax: 122.67

This Month (August 2010)
Watch’n'Surf Package … 111.95
You’ve Saved $16.30 by subscribing to this package!
DVR Service … 10.95
Road Runner Turbo … 9.95
Digital HD Tier … 4.95

Subtotal: 137.80
After Tax: 142.98

Thanks for saving me money guys!

Anyways, dropping cable is long overdue. I will miss it probably once every 2 weeks when I have that moment where watching sports center would have been nice, but there is no way to justify this sort of expense on something that is used so infrequently. It really does suck that there are no other outlets to get, say, ESPN, but I have my podcasts and the internet and hulu and netflix. What else do I need? Certainly not worth it.

Drop cable boys!

One of the things that has frustrated me so much is the calls for President Obama to “show some emotion” in regards to the oil spill.  The problem with this is that it is decidedly non-Obama thing to do.  It’s just not his style, and if he attempted it, it would probably come out tone-deaf.  Kind of like Pauly Shore trying to play a serious role.

The thing is, though, this is very much a Joe Biden thing to do.  In fact, it’s pretty classic Biden.

More of this please.

I’ve been awake for the last 12 hours.

Seriously.

If you have a PS3 and you haven’t played this yet, you’re just silly.

Here’s more.

…Seriously.  And it doesn’t look it will be disappointing either, such as that other documentary based off some other internet video fad .

I TOTALLY FUCKED UP EDIT: It’s not entirely a double post, but this is pretty damned close.  Chad totally brought this up over a year ago, and I totally forgot about it, so sorry Chad.

Building on Phil’s excellent post on motivation, I wanted to share this NPR segment I heard this week, which, ironically, references the same experiment in India about bonus compensation and it’s correlation (or lackk thereof) to performance. The second experiment described I thought was very interesting too, which points more to the feeling of purpose, which the video Phil posted referenced as well.

While the focus of this research tends to be on business organizational health, I think it’s important to point out, in a more general sense, that this is another case where classical economics fails.  People are not perfectly rational entities. This bears repeating every time that any research concludes this, because so much of far-right and center-right economic thought depend entirely on this assumption: People, in the aggregate, are always rational.

The entire field of behavioral economics is like a breath of fresh air to me, because it frustrates me so much that people can believe that psychology, which among other things, studies how people make decisions, plays no role in economics, which is essentially the study of how people decide to spend money.  They are naturally linked.

I’m not going to really comment too much on the political or moral aspects of this, because I don’t really have much original to say.  For the record, my opinion lies somewhere between Jon Chait and Andrew Sullivan.

The thing I will say is that there seems to be a market for a non-lethal, non-destructive ship disabling weapon.  Now I’m not a naval weapons expert or anything, but it seems like this would be possible from an engineering perspective.  I’m thinking of some sort of guided, heavy, non-explosive torpedo to effectively “knock off” the propeller without actually sinking the ship.

It seems like such a weapon would have saved some lives in this situation.

There was a time when I used to think that the single biggest driver in great food was the person cooking it.  The fact of the matter is, without great ingredients, most chefs would have a hard time making great food.  Does this mean that chefs aren’t really all that good at what they do?  Absolutely not.  It merely speaks to the importance of using great ingredients in your cooking.

Without a good starting point, it’s very tough to make something taste delicious, and, thankfully the reverse is true.  Take the recipe below (Bucatini all’Amtraciana) from Lidia Bastianich’s Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen.  It has 7 ingredients, and takes about 30 minutes to make.  With good, quality ingredients, it’s delicious.  Without them, it’s meh.

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