A few weeks back, I tried a novel money-saving strategy that paid off-- quite literally: I spent $90 on a bunch of ingredients to create a huge mess of Korean soup-- three different types, in fact-- then I ladled the soups into single-serving Ziploc bags and froze them. I had enough to last me a little over three weeks, which was pretty damn cool, and since I was eating roughly two servings' worth of soup per meal (when I'm teaching, I eat once a day, and that one meal functions as two meals), my $90 came to about $1.80 per meal.
I'm about to try a similar stunt, but this time I'm going Western: I went to Costco and bought $62 worth of groceries-- mostly pasta, Italian sausage, a huge container of Kraft Parmesan, and some sweets to stretch over a several-week period. The biggest dilemma was the sauce: bottled sauces are more expensive (even the higher-end, Costco-sanctioned brands), but they're convenient, whereas starting with a tomato sauce or paste means work. All the same, I opted for work when I saw that a nearly gallon-sized can of Contadina tomato paste was under $3. None of the bottled sauces came close in value.
So last night and this afternoon, I set about creating my huge load of spaghetti sauce. Since it was a taste-as-you-go method, I don't have a recipe for you, and I doubt I could replicate this exact sauce ever again. But based on a tasting from a few minutes ago, the sauce came out quite well for a humble suburban version of the glorious Italian original.
My secret: Korean beef dashida. A good Italian tomato sauce normally starts with pork as its base, and you're supposed to build on that over the course of many hours, patiently allowing the simmering process to remove excess water and thicken the sauce naturally. Since I was starting with tomato paste and didn't have the budget for ideal ingredients, I was working with what I had in my pantry. For the sauce, there was no need to go through any thickening process: instead, I had to thin the paste out with water. I added the dashida, little by little to avoid making the sauce into a salty mess, added powdered garlic, powdered onion, some crushed red pepper, dried thyme, basil, Italian seasoning, marjoram, white pepper, black pepper, celery seed powder, and of course-- bay leaves. Four, in this case, because I was making a ton of sauce. I added a bit of sugar later in the process, and was delighted that the flavors all seemed to be marrying well. Having kept the herb and seasoning input understated, I allowed the flavors to combine without becoming overpowering (always a danger with dried herbs, which can become surprisingly bitter if cooked too long). I let the sauce rest for the night, and was delighted, this morning, to discover that it tasted even better than it had the previous night.
I reheated the sauce, added about a cup of grated Parmesan for more savor, then broke out a huge brace of Premio Hot Italian sausages (Costco sells them in packages of 24 for $14). These I skinned, plopped into the massive turkey-roasting pan I'd inherited, and cooked for a half-hour at 350 degrees-- far easier than doing this on a stove top. I then drained the meat of most of its fat (what's more disgusting than spaghetti sauce with grease blobs?), used meat scissors to cut the sausages into manageable chunks, and mixed the meat into the sauce. Right now, the sauce is undergoing the final steps in its preparation as the meaty pork flavor adds its own spin to the beefy dashida. At this point, I've probably got enough sauce to feed a party of fifteen to twenty-- two servings each. Along with my eight pounds of pasta, I'd say I'm ready to last out the month of February.
But what about vegetables? I hear you roar. That's a legitimate question. Well, since my shopping trip was a Costco run, and since I live out in the sticks, I'm not much of a fan of the local Costco's vegetables. At best, I'd buy potatoes in bulk from Costco, and that's about it. Costco's variety is fairly limited, anyway, and it makes little sense for a single guy to buy perishables in bulk. When I made my Korean soups, the cost was a bit over $90; this time around, I've managed to make never-ending spaghetti for two-thirds of that price, which leaves me with money to buy vegetables as needed from the local grocer.
Had I done the sauce my normal way, I'd have used fresh basil, added ground carrots and minced green peppers, tossed in a pile of chopped mushrooms of several types (portobellos, criminis, oysters, buttons), and would have started with something less processed than tomato paste-- probably a combination of sauce, paste, canned whole tomatoes, and skinned fresh tomatoes. Wine might have made an appearance as well, and real meat would have replaced the dashida. But we work with what we have, within the constraints of the budget that's available to us, and for all intents and purposes, I think I've come up with a pretty good sauce. My switch from East to West is going to work out just fine. That was Zen; this is Ciao!
Wish you were here.
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Sunday, January 29, 2012
from East to West
Seon Joon vs. Frank Miller
Dogs bark on the ridge's far side, the sea-facing edge of the city. I also want to whet my voice on the bone of night salt air.
--Seon Joon Young, Small Stone #29, Twitter
The wind rises, tearing dead leaves free. Frogs croak like a cartoon car alarm. Crickets pick up the chorus. A wolf howls. I know how he feels.
--Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
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Saturday, January 28, 2012
what's ahead for this weekend?
(NB: This is a scheduled post.)
Stuff to do this weekend once I'm home from work:
1. send off an email requesting information about another set of proofreading jobs
2. make spaghetti sauce-- enough to last two weeks (store in serving-sized bags)
3. pay my electric bill (this means dropping off the check in the payment slot of the town financial office)
4. do my taxes (I finally got both of my W-2s)
5. send pictures of my mother and aunt to my cousin, who's putting together a retrospective photo album for his mom
6. do laundry
7. make and attempt to sell some artwork
Regarding taxes: I've found that the best and easiest way to file is to use the H&R Block website, which I've relied on since 1999. Register, follow the easy, step-by-step instructions, and file your federal return for free. Your state return will probably cost you about $15 to file, unless the price has gone up.
None of this Turbo Tax bullshit for me. Why pay through the nose for a program that can be used only once? H&R Block's site is constantly updated, absurdly easy to use, very convenient, and provides quick service. Mail in your paper documents, and your refund checks (if you're expecting refunds, as I am) will arrive in just a couple weeks-- well before the April 15 deadline, in fact. I'm expecting mine to arrive before the end of February.
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Friday, January 27, 2012
to all you ESL/EFL teacher types out there
Problem: getting East Asian students who are at, roughly, the low-intermediate level in their English ability to move significantly beyond that proficiency level in a short amount of time (i.e., 3-5 months).
Solution: ???
I have three students at YB right now-- two South Korean, one Chinese-- who are showing subtle signs of improvement, but who are still at roughly the "3" level (using the 5-point TOEFL essay-rating scale) in terms of their writing ability. Their essays' overall content and organization isn't bad, and they don't normally engage in fallacious argumentation. The problem-- what keeps them from rising above the "3" level-- is, for the most part, their numerous and repeated errors when it comes to basic issues in sentence structure, diction, and style. I see these same errors over and over again, and they're familiar to anyone who's had to teach English to East Asian students. The litany, in no particular order:
poor tense control ("if" conditional grammar, participial confusion, etc.)
omission of third-person singular "s" for verbs
poor control of singular/plural inflection
poor understanding of mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, etc.)
misuse of definite and indefinite articles
incorrect or awkward diction (due to poor understanding of a word's semantic field)
basic spelling errors (guessing at the spelling of easy words, names, etc.)
At YB, we tutors all take both atomistic and holistic approaches to teaching these students. They're given drills that isolate certain problem areas (e.g., improving run-ons, identifying and correcting dangling/misplaced modifiers, eliminating wordiness, etc.), as well as essays to write (SAT-style, TOEFL-style, etc.). So it's not as though these students need to hear that they should just "try, try, try": they're already doing that. But the results are always the same: a score of 3 or 3.5 out of 5. It's time to find more effective methods.
The problem lies with output-- the two "productive" macroskills of speaking and writing. Even though I've tried to make these students aware of the kinds of errors they've been making, they keep falling into the same traps. Part of the problem may be cultural: Asian thinking involves a great deal of "field dependence," as Richard Nisbett (he of The Geography of Thought fame) would say. It could be that, when I tell my students about a particular error, they're unable to extrapolate from the specific context in which the error has occurred. To do so requires the ability to abstract the error, then reinsert it into a different discursive context. Field dependence may make them blind to the need to do this.
As I've argued before, increasing the emphasis on receptive macroskills won't necessarily lead to improvement in the productive skills: voracious reading doesn't guarantee good writing. At the same time, I could order my students to write essay after essay on the assumption that "writing improves writing," but that too would be useless. At this point, it's as if we're all banging our heads against a wall, and I'm as frustrated as my students are. So I'm writing this post in the hopes that some of my readers might have some creative suggestions for new and better approaches to this problem.
One possible idea, which I've already tried but haven't pursued: have students list the types of errors they've been making, then oblige them to use the list as a checklist while they're writing, i.e., on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and not only when they've finished writing. The point is to raise their consciousness about the need to be scrupulous from moment to moment. As things stand, I give my students an essay topic; they blunder heedlessly through the essay, then passively wait for me to mark their papers up in red ink. That method hasn't been working, obviously, so it's time to make the students shoulder more responsibility. Getting them into a more self-checking frame of mind could be the key.
I may also need to go more multimedia. This was a suggestion I received years ago, from one of my older Korean relatives who speaks fluent Japanese. For him, the path to success in Japanese lay in immersing himself in Japan's audiovisual culture: TV shows, movies, etc. All three of my students are fairly introverted and uninvolved in American culture; this definitely hampers their ability to learn much English while they're away from the tutoring center. Making involvement in the culture part of the learning process seems crucial at this stage. All of these students have been in the US for more than a year, but it's unclear how much they really understand about the country.* I'm thinking that (1) assigning my two TOEFL students some note-taking work from TED Talks and YouTube and (2) having my third student begin to maintain a journal based on reactions to one or more US TV shows would be a good move. They all need to break out of their cocoons.
In the meantime, I'd like to hear what's worked for you. I'm at wit's end, and I've got students who need to take the TOEFL in the late spring.
*As an aside, the same could be said about expats in Korea who spend years in an ignorant fog, the result of a combination of factors like a language barrier (often self-imposed) and unevolved social skills.
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placating you with Chuang Tzu
I've actually got some important stuff to do at the moment, so the promised religion post (re: panentheism) isn't up at the TEF blog. Instead, I've thrown a famous Chuang Tzu story up there for you. Take a look.
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look elsewhere
I'm too tired to write my promised reaction to the James Anderson piece tonight, and since Fridays are designated "religion days" at the TEF blog, I think that my piece will appear there instead of here. Just FYI.
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
coming soon
I feel a reaction to James Anderson's "Why I Am Not a Panentheist" burbling up in my brain. I don't think Anderson does this form of theology much justice in his post, which at times feels almost like a willful misreading or mis-extrapolation. Substantive replies to Anderson have already appeared in his comments section, and he's replied to them, but I think there's more to be said on the matter.
So a post may appear sometime later this evening. As an aside, I find it interesting that Michael Sudduth's conversion (Sudduth is a professor of religious studies) has generated so much squawking in the philosophy-of-religion corner of the blogosphere. Conservative religionists have expressed disappointment; some have even called Sudduth's conversion "apostasy"-- a word I didn't think was still in use among modern, civilized folk. (For years now, extreme religious language has been on the wane in mainstream Western Christianity, which is a reflection of the disappearance of extreme attitudes. Even Catholics today rarely speak of excommunication, this despite what John Kerry's gotten away with!)
For myself, I congratulate Sudduth on being "bold to go wherever dreaming goes," as Stephen R. Donaldson might say. I see no apostasy in what he has done, but at the same time, I admit I'm skeptical of most accounts of conversion experiences-- especially the vivid ones.
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France on its way to bringing a socialist back into the Elysée
At the TEF blog.
(Don't do it, France!)
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
PAID!!
I was starting to worry, but yes: I've been paid for my first proofreading gig. Money arrived today, and just in time, too. All praise to Cthulhu.
While I'm referencing divinities, I should point out that Dr. V has linked to a post by James Anderson, friend of the recently-converted Michael Sudduth, titled "Why I Am Not a Panentheist." I haven't had the chance to read it through yet, but it appears to be yet another expression of disappointment in Sudduth's conversion.
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Michael Sudduth crosses over
Dr. Vallicella has blogged about the conversion of one Dr. Michael Sudduth, formerly a Protestant Christian in the Reformed tradition, who recently converted to Gaudiya Vaishnavism (devotion to Vishnu). Dr. V's posts are here:
Michael Sudduth Converts to Vaishnava Vedanta!
Belief Change
From Calvin to Krishna
The Sudduth Surge Continues
Dr. V has also linked to a very interesting post by Daniel Silliman on the topic of Sudduth's conversion. I felt strangely impelled to leave a comment, so I did. See here.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
at the TEF blog
It's math day, and that means MGRE Math Beast Challenge problems! Check out how right I was with last week's MGRE problem, and while you're at it, check out this week's problem (warning: my solution is already in the comments, so don't peek if you're aiming to solve the problem yourself). Have fun. This week's problem is one for which you have to provide the answer: there's no multiple choice. The new GRE has many such problems now; I'm glad to see MGRE providing practice in this area.
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Monday, January 23, 2012
Happy Lunar New Year!
It's the Year of the Dragon! May it be a happy and prosperous one for you.
The rope dragon you see above isn't Korean, but it has special importance for me as the last gift my mother ever gave me. May it be a herald for a better year.
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quick reminder
I do have a comments policy, and it appears above your comment window every time you press the comments link. Please take the time to read the policy before commenting.
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Pinker and PoMo
I can't see how people on the postmodernist left could possibly like Dr. Steven Pinker. PoMo thought is dismissive of the notion of universals; the idea that something called "human nature" might exist is anathema to the postmodernist. Instead, according to PoMo theory, what we have-- all we have, in fact-- is a web of social constructions.
Along comes Pinker with his 2002 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, a book that critiques this attitude and submits that humans do indeed have a knowable, hard-wired nature. Pinker actually takes postmodernists on directly at several points throughout his book.
But as much as postmodernists hate the idea that human beings might have a discrete nature, they despise even more the notion of "totalizing metanarratives," i.e., large, overarching explanatory paradigms that purport to render major aspects of both human experience and the surrounding cosmos intelligible. Rationality (or the rationalist metanarrative), say the PoMo-ers, is an oppressive construct that has done little to promote social justice or reduce alienation. It is a tool of the powerful to be used against the powerless. From this perspective, a human endeavor like science is all about privilege: as Michel Foucault, one of the deities of PoMo thought, would argue, scientists form a hermetic "priesthood" that distinguishes itself from the rest of society by, among other ways, how scientists dress (easily identifiable lab coats) and how they talk (impenetrable, esoteric jargon*). Rationality has also led to the development of increasingly effective killing technology; the twentieth century is evidence of the ironic price we've paid for being rational.
And yet... there stands Pinker yet again, providing a new metanarrative in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: viewed from a global historical perspective (precisely the perspective that postmodernists believe is either impossible or unethical to adopt), violence everywhere in the world appears to be on the wane thanks to the evolutionary forces of ever-modernizing culture. Pinker's stance has gotten him in trouble with hawkish people on the right, who see his position as support for the utopian leftist notion of the perfectibility of human society, but how can he be any less of a problem for the PoMo crowd? Taken as a group, postmodernists, while firmly in the leftist camp, aren't evangelists for progressivism: they view the notion of progress as just another totalizing metanarrative to be jettisoned. Pinker, meanwhile, has spent years presenting evidence of the salubrious effects of human progress.
I sometimes wonder whether Pinker's entire life project has been the slow, methodical, rational deconstruction of the postmodernist project. I'm sure he'd never say that that's what motivates him, but the effect has been the same nonetheless: with every book he publishes, Pinker erodes the plausibility of PoMo thought. This is a good thing.
*I'd say this is a problem for PoMo academics themselves. Refer to my recent post on bad writing for a reminder.
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Sunday, January 22, 2012
stuff I won't live to see
A whimsical meditation.
I'm sad that I won't live to see:
1. Korean taco trucks roaming the surface of the moon, selling their spicy fare along with bottles of oxygen.
2. Regen porno: regeneration technology will reach a point where we'll be able to sever each other's limbs for fun and not think twice about it. Come to think of it, such severing may become an alternative path to the fountain of youth: newly-regrown limbs ought to be much more vigorous than their decrepit counterparts... and since the skin is itself an organ ripe for removal and regrowth, I can imagine wrinkle removal becoming synonymous with skin removal. And why stop there? We could replace bones, muscles, internal organs-- you name it. A person could rebuild him- or herself every few years, and if even the brain can be regenerated, there's nothing to stop us from 100% rebuilds. This will initially be the province of the rich and privileged, of course, but will eventually trickle down to most of the rest of society. "I feel like a new man" will take on new meaning.
3. Shuttles to Jupiter's moons. And news of the first-ever politician to die in the oceans of Europa.
4. Solar system comm methods that use quantum entanglement to send instant messages from Earth to Pluto. Imagine how that will change our remote navigation of probes.
5. The evolution of cutting-edge molecular gastronomy. If this field could somehow be merged with biotech efforts so that we could produce pets that shit out our meals in clean, edible sausage casings, I'd buy several such pets. "Fifi the poodle-- handle the salad! Rover, you're on mashed potato detail! And Rico the chihuahua... you're making the Porterhouse steaks."
6. Asteroid homes for the very, very rich. Which brings up a thought: let's say you get two groups of people who see potential in asteroids. One group is the settlers who build biospheres on the larger asteroids; another group is the miners. This immediately brings up the question of debris management, because in both cases you'd be excavating the asteroids and flinging out a lot of rocks. What sort of shielding would we need to contain the flying debris? And since there's probably already free-floating debris out there now, what sort of shielding would homes and mines need? What kind of culinary culture would develop among Belters (Larry Niven's term, if I'm not mistaken)? I imagine a lot of mushroom-based food.
There's also the question of architecture: an asteroid home would be a hollowed-out asteroid, but since such rocks are irregularly shaped, you'd need to impart spin to produce a simulation of gravity. A given asteroid's irregularities would make such spinning problematic unless it were possible to add "ballast" to the asteroid to keep the spin on an unwavering axis. This ballast could be an aesthetic addition to the asteroid. Another, more complex, architectural possibility would be to affix thrusters to the asteroid so that one could have a maneuverable home (mail delivery might be a pain in the ass for the mailmen), and the hollowed-out interior could feature a huge, revolving chamber (again, to simulate gravity) into which the features of a home could be installed.
7. True AI. I doubt I'll see this in my lifetime, but because I'm something of a Kurzweilian functionalist, I think "strong AI" is possible. This won't mean machines that play chess well or are super-strong: it'll mean machines that handle new situations-- social, environmental-- with the same skill and aplomb that humans do: machines that speculate and wonder, that draw their own conclusions and have the initiative to act on them.
8. Detailed time-flow maps of our galaxy. Einstein's theories tell us that absolute simultaneity doesn't exist in the universe: time is woven into space as one integrated continuum; just as space and matter can be dense or thin, fast or slow, time flows differently in different regions of space. We may start plotting the flow of time and discover that time has "weather patterns."
9. Overcrowding on Mars. I expect a great deal of terraforming there, and with the thin atmosphere, plenty of genetic mutation. Mars might end up even more diversely peopled with life than Earth... unless we discover that it really is a planet whose resources have been spent.
10. First contact. Up to now, I think we can safely say that aliens have never visited our planet, and there's a real possibility that we truly are alone in the universe. But as we continue to discover just how numerous "Earth-like" worlds are (the amount of data we've collected in a single decade is insane), the chance that some of them may have evolved spacefaring intelligences would seem to go up. I suspect it's only a matter of time. Just not my time.
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just seen on Twitter
Paul Carver retweets this little Korean joke (which sounds suspiciously American) tweeted by Tom Seungmin Lee:
대박. 남자가 집에 왔는데 아내가 요리 프로그램을 보고 있자, "당신 요리 프로그램 뭐하러 보는거야? 요리 할 줄 몰라?" 그랬더니 아내 답변 "뭐, 당신은 포르노 보잖아!"
Rough translation: A man came home and saw his wife watching a cooking show on TV. "What's the point of watching a cooking show?" he asked. "You don't know how to cook?" The wife shot back, "But you watch porn!"
The first word in the tweet is daebak, which means "jackpot," but which in this case might more naturally be translated "bingo." It didn't fit in with the joke, so I assume it was the tweeter's own commentary on whatever human truth he thought the joke was illustrating. Since I don't know the structure of Korean jokes that well, I have no idea whether daebak is usually the natural thing to say at the beginning of a joke. It feels almost like the corny expression "Zing!" that some people use at the end of a joke in English, especially if the joke's punchline is a sharp, one-line rejoinder.
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Saturday, January 21, 2012
space daggits
If you haven't seen Volkswagen's hilarious new "The Bark Side" commercial, ready to air for the Super Bowl, here's your chance. Full-screen viewing recommended. Granted, the commercial does nothing to convince me to buy a VW, but that doesn't make it any less funny.
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Friday, January 20, 2012
still for sale
I'm still trying to sell off the remaining few dozen copies of Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms. I had been attempting to do this on eBay, but eBay charges you monthly if you use the fixed-price display option when listing items. I've moved my ad to Etsy.com, a site for creative folks to sell their wares. There's no bidding to worry about, and all I had to do was pay a one-time fee to get my books hosted.
Etsy's home page is here.
My shop is here.
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Monday, I'm off
I've worked the past two Mondays at YB because a coworker had gone on vacation (to Hawaii, the lucky bastard). This coming week, I'll be back to my usual schedule, which goes from Tuesday to Thursday, then jumps to Saturday. I've already told my supervisor that, if it turns out I'm able to score as many proofing gigs as I've secured for February (I've been guaranteed three manuscripts comparable in size to the one I just proofed), I'll very likely cut one more day from my YB work week-- probably Saturday.
Working on weekends has long been against my religion, and working Saturdays at YB truly sticks in my craw. I do it because I need the money, and although I enjoy the kids I work with on that day, as well as my coworkers, it's the fact that it's a Saturday that detracts from my enjoyment. I have to be at YB tomorrow, in fact.
Right now, though, I'm not in a position to change my schedule-- not until I know more about whether I'll be guaranteed a certain steady amount of work from Seoul. We'll see how that goes, but I'm hopeful that the Powers That Be will like my proofreading work enough to start relying heavily on me-- a good symbiosis. Korea saves me yet again.
But the real reason why I'm writing about this coming Monday is that it also happens to be the Korean lunar new year-- we're moving into the Year of the Dragon. So I'll be kicking back and celebrating that quietly (unless my international-transfer payment from Seoul comes in that day, in which case I might celebrate it loudly). At the very least, I'll slap a dragon image up on the blog on Monday.
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one man who can't help but be Maudlin
A link is going around to an article in Atlantic Magazine about the philosophy of cosmology. The article is an interview with Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of physics. Give it a read. In the meantime, here's an excerpt:
What occurred to Newton was that there was a force of gravity, which of course everybody knew about, it's not like he actually discovered gravity-- everybody knew there was such a thing as gravity. But if you go back into antiquity, the way that the celestial objects, the moon, the sun, and the planets, were treated by astronomy had nothing to do with the way things on earth were treated. These were entirely different realms, and what Newton realized was that there had to be a force holding the moon in orbit around the earth. This is not something that Aristotle or his predecessors thought, because they were treating the planets and the moon as though they just naturally went around in circles. Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force.
That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.
[...]
If ... it turns out there aren't these many worlds, that physics is unable to generate them, then it's not that the only option is that there was some intelligent designer. It would be a terrible mistake to think that those are the only two ways things could go. You would have to again think hard about what you mean by probability, and about what sorts of explanations there might be. Part of the problem is that right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number, and as you reduce it, the problem of fine tuning tends to go away. But, again, this is just stuff we don't understand well enough yet.
Go give the article a read.
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fat doors and other things
Over the past few years, I've seen so many news reports about morbidly obese people who need to be cut out of their own homes to receive hospital care (see here, for instance) that I think the time has come to propose some solutions.
1. Fat doors. Morbidly obese people, especially those who spend their time trapped and festering on above-ground floors, should pay to have something akin to an airplane escape procedure: a triple-wide door that opens in case of emergency, paired with a slide system that will allow rescue workers to roll/slide/bowl the patient out of the domicile both quickly and efficiently. We can call the doors "Jabba hatches." No more cutting through walls!
2. Amputation nanotech for convenient disassembly and reassembly. I'm stealing this idea from Stephen R. Donaldson and his Gap Cycle. One horrific scene involves a futuristic stripper who does more than strip: she cuts off her own breasts for the amusement of the club's patrons. How does she survive the experience? Easy: she's got nanoclamps on all of her major blood vessels, so when she saws away at herself, the clamps activate and prevent her from bleeding out before she can receive medical attention (such strippers do this more than once, after all). It's a nauseating moment in the series, but it occurs to me that such tech would solve the whole "can't get Fattie into the MRI" problem. Instead of wasting money constructing ever-larger MRI machines, just prep the patient with the nanoclamps and chop him into pieces for easy scanning-- not to mention easy removal from that second-floor bed.
3. In-house ICU. Since most of us are going to end up in an ICU at any rate, I'd say that this solution is applicable to more that just the fattest among us. But since the truly obese will find themselves in ICUs much sooner, on average, than the rest of the populace, I'd suggest bringing the hospital to them.
Just a few modest proposals.
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Thursday, January 19, 2012
note to the self-deluded
If you think our country has done away with racism and everything's all hunky-dory now, you might want to click on this link. Have a barf bag ready.
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my second job
A friend and former colleague in Korea contacted me a while back and asked whether I'd be interested in doing some proofing work for the company she works for. I said yes, and this past Wednesday morning, I finished a marathon proofing session. The gig will pay $450 (some money lost in international transfer; my bank will take $10-$15), and I've got three more gigs, of comparable size and pay, lined up for February. Which rocks. I hope this becomes a trend.
On a practical level, the extra work means I can breathe again. Up to now, I've had almost no extra money to do anything large-scale. One of my old debts, Sallie Mae, reactivates in February after a year in forbearance, which means another $320/month to pay, so I need enough income to cover that. I've also got to purchase a year's worth of contact lenses (my 6-month supply runs out next month), and that's going to set me back about $100-$150. Then there are my car tires, all of which need replacing-- another $280. On top of that are the debts I still owe friends and family, totaling almost $2000...
Yeah. Extra income from a second job is a good thing.
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Ave, Neuroskeptic!
Neuroskeptic offers, in this post, two fascinating videos about the brain's occasional unwillingness to see things as they are. First, the hollow face effect; and second, the magic dragon (not the one from the folk song).
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Kevin (re)learns geometry
Yesterday, while helping a student with geometry, I got reacquainted with a nifty triangle property described by the Triangle Midsegment Theorem. Read all about it here. This will be a useful piece of knowledge should I take the GRE again in the next few months.
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Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Scalzi on "Troopers"
John Scalzi writes in defense of 1997's "Starship Troopers," a movie that was very loosely based on Robert Heinlein's fantastic adventure/manifesto of a novel. Scalzi's post is uproarious at times, but I was disturbed to see that he glossed over a point picked up immediately by my buddy Dr. Steve all those years ago: our young heroes all seem to be close cousins of the Nazis-- good-looking Aryan types who dress like the SS when they're not loaded for bear. (True: the troops, taken as a whole, evince some racial diversity, but all the non-white characters are minor, and "Troopers" is no exception to the "Black Guy Dies" rule of science fiction in film.)
I don't think Scalzi is unaware of this uncomfortable dimension of the movie; he's aware of Paul Verhoeven's experiences in World War II, experiences that would have led the Dutchman to a cynical interpretation of Heinlein's material (Verhoeven allegedly made the movie without reading the novel, but I doubt a reading would have made much difference). Verhoeven's agenda was subversive; for him, the protags weren't heroes so much as "heroes." Putting them in Nazi drag was a statement, a way to throw our own militaristic enthusiasm into confusion. This is why Scalzi's silence on the Nazi issue is troubling: he seems to be ignoring a major layer of subtext. His commenters, however, have picked up on it.
I loved "Starship Troopers" when it came out, although I wasn't nearly as aware of the movie's subtext as was Dr. Steve-- then a graduate student whose bread and butter was the semiotics of pop culture. The special effects were amazing for the time, and there was enough nudigore* to keep a guy like me happy. Scalzi points out that the movie falls flat on several fronts: (1) it's not a faithful adaptation of its source; (2) it makes little sense militarily (on that note: I've linked to this article on "Starship Troopers" before); (3) it makes little sense biologically. But Scalzi sees "Troopers" as a fable, and feels that the film's value lies in what it has to say about the hellish nature of war. I can see that, but I'd prefer to see a remake that's more faithful to the original, even at the risk of losing business because of Heinlein's manifestly un-PC agenda.
In 1997, the state of the art in special effects hadn't reached the point where it would be easy to create CGI battle armor such as what Heinlein describes in his novel. The suits in the novel aren't mere football pads: they're fully automated robotic suits that weigh a literal ton, which can become a dangerous liability if the suit's power plant is somehow shut down. A single soldier can lay waste to an entire city in such a suit, and troopers almost never fight shoulder-to-shoulder. In 2012, I think we've got the effects technology to create fully-realized battle suits that look the way Heinlein intended: Robert Downey's Iron Man movies show that this is possible. I'd love to see the novel done justice-- with great special effects and a stellar script-- but as Scalzi says, this isn't going to happen.
Go read his article.
*I just came up with this portmanteau, and as I usually do after coining a neologism, I Googled it to see whether anyone else had come up with it before I had. Unfortunately, the answer this time is yes, dammit.
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a birthday on January 17
Happy Birthday to Benjamin Franklin and Muhammad Ali. Ali was born on January 17, 1942. He's 70 years old today. Mr. Franklin is doubtless hunting turkeys in heaven.
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at the TEF blog
1. I got last week's MGRE math problem right.
2. Here's this week's problem, with my solution posted in the comments.
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Monday, January 16, 2012
comment glitches
Although I personally haven't run into trouble, I've had reports from readers that they've been unable to write comments or even to read them. These complaints have come in at around the same time that Blogger has re-tweaked some commenting features. I've noticed, for example, two tiny "reply" and "delete" links that now appear beneath comments. These features were already in place before, but they were known, respectively, as "post a comment" and the trash can icon. The real difference may that, if Blogger has changed "post a comment" to "reply" (or has added "reply" to the list of features), it may be configuring the comments feature so that comments can now be threaded. Threaded comments have been commonplace on other blogging platforms for years. As always, Blogger is a bit behind the times, and as my buddy Charles once groused, Blogger's template coding is "a mess," none of which helps when the central office decides to make "improvements" to the blogging experience.
So if you've been trying unsuccessfully to comment, I think that's the reason for your frustration. Once enough user complaints pile up, the good folks at Blogger will blearily lift their faces out of their mounds of cocaine, pick up their M-16/M-203s, and blast their way to a solution. Expect smooth functioning in a few ways to a few weeks.
In the meantime, feel free to email me.
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