Music Monday: Johnny Cash

I guess I'm still in an "end of Korea" funk. This song's been in my head all weekend:

101 in 1001

I finished one of my easier goals: I'm now caught up on The I.T. Crowd! (5 - 5) I also read a couple of books off the TIME Top 100 Novels list (3 -3): Martha Quest and Your Republic is Calling You.  Both of them were excellent; I really recommend them. I also watched a great 80s era Shaw Brothers flick, "Five Element Ninja." And I finished Stephen King's On Writing (9 - 2) as well as a few more Star Trek episodes (5 - 12).

I'm currently reading "Atonement," which is all right, but slow going.

Foodie Friday

I haven't been cooking so much lately, but here's a recipe I'm definitely going to try after I binge on cheese, veggie, and gochujang quesadillas:

Divorced and Homeless Ramen 

Submitted By: Ray Daniel
Submitted From: The Flophouse 

Ingredients:
Maruchan Chili-flavor (Spicy) Ramen (2 packets, because you’re hungry, very very hungry)
Creamy Peanut Butter (two big tablespoons worth)

Pour in some water (it doesn’t matter how much) into whatever size bowl you have is about 3/4 of the way full. Microwave this water until hot. It doesn’t have to boil necessarily, if you can’t wait long; just at least pretty hot. Take bowl out of microwave, place beside kitchen sink. Plop ramen into hot water bowl. Give it about 3 minutes. 

Then, using your college degree for once in the “real world”, tip the bowl over the kitchen sink, just so, to drain off excess water while achieving a 90%+ ramen retention level. Drain until water level is at least less than half the height of the ramen. Drain more if you like the finish product more pasty than soupy. 

At this moment, bust open the two hot chili-flavor packets onto the ramen. Then, using the fork, dig out a big wad of peanut butter (about two tablespoons but why measure) and use fork to stir peanut butter, chili-flavored-salt, remaining hot water, and ramen all together. Very soon the water/seasoning/peanut butter will have merged into a tasty, nutritious sauce, that’s darn good with those ramen noodles. Guaranteed to cheer you up for 10 minutes.

I got this from CampusSqueeze.com's Crazy Ramen Recipes. There's a whole bunch of other good ideas there I'll have to try. I just can't get enough ramen!

Music Monday: Pink Floyd

One my oldest Korea-friends left today for a year in Saudi Arabia. This is the only song for me right now:

101 in 1001 Update

Another update to keep me on task! Though I should have posted this a few days ago (and I missed a Music Monday). As Cathy would say, "ACK!" Things are busy at work now, though they should die down at the end of this week.

Since last time, I've finished a novel off the TIME Top 100 List (Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito). (3 - 3)

I've also posted my update (1 -3) and added a few more items to the list (daily calisthenics!). I've also been diligent about posting comments. (7 - 4)

I watched two more foreign movies: Der Untergang (German) and The Killer (Hong Kong). They're well worth watching. I know I'm late to the party on these, but better late than never! I would recommend adding them to your queue if you haven't already seen them.  Der Untergang also is on the IMDB Top 100 list, so that's two birds with one stone.

I also watched another Star Trek episode (5 - 12) and a few MST3K episodes (5 - 6).  I also finished the first Daleks story arc in the first season of Dr. Who. (5 - 13)

I also played a lot of FreeRice. (12 - 6) You should join me there!

Scientists as Writers

Great guest blog at SciAm about scientists as writers.

Again, echoing my earlier rant about the importance of philosophy to everyone (including scientists), this is another reason why we need to debunk the myth of "specialization = necessary," like, yesterday.

Here's a secret: I didn't start out my life as a math and science nerd. I mean, to some extent it was more or less inevitable, given my surroundings, but it took a while. I spent my school years dreading calculus and physics and taking as many classes with my favorite English teacher as I could (three, as it turned out). I chose my college (Hamilton) based on the fact that there were no core requirements: I wouldn't have to take any math classes at all to graduate! On the flip side of that coin, a calculus pre-requisite dissuaded me from pursuing higher-level computer science courses.

What I mean to say is: I came back to science (and math) "from the other side," so to speak. Working at a cave reminded me how much I loved rocks and chemistry and things from inside the earth; symbolic logic as part of my philosophy degree reintroduced me to the clean lines and satisfaction of solving math-like problems. Engaging science writing from people like Matt Ridley, Stephen Jay Gould, and Sam Keane reintroduced me to topics I hadn't studied since high school.

I appreciate that sometimes science is difficult. If you haven't spent years and years studying something, it's going to be hard to grasp no matter how good the writing is. But dressing up science articles in roundabout grammatical constructions and zombie nouns goes a long way to being more, and not less, difficult to understand. And when science writers can't even recognize the passive voice and "translate" it to an active sentence? How can they expect to communicate those ideas in a way that's readily accessible?

Science, of course, isn't the only field guilty of dressing up its interior communications in an impossible veil of needlessly academic language. Philosophy is just as bad. For an exercise in stark contrasts, read Kant's What is Enlightenment? and then read The Critique of Pure Reason.

Likewise, not everyone will be a great writer. It would be unreasonable to expect every scientist in the laboratory to be the next Carl Sagan. But I think it's equally unreasonable to continue to impose these byzantine language standards on official science writing in the name of "objectivity" or "clarity." They accomplish neither of these things; they only serve to keep the most interesting work of science in the domain of the elites instead of the public.

Bless You, Slashdot

It seems the vast majority of comments on this story get it:

Is sexual harassment part of hacker culture?

>...Third, I definitely agree that everyone at such an event should feel safe and it's heartening that you bring this up. However you kind of fall flat on your face in the next sentence. You think people should feel safe so that the 'most attractive females' will keep showing up? Excuse me? I thought Defcon was about hacking and computer skills, not so that you can eye hot girls. There is a whole internet full of naked, hot girls you can ogle to your heart's content and plenty of hot girls in Vegas you can go out and hit on and lots of hot prostitutes in the greater state of Nevada you can pay to sleep with if that's what you are interested in. Also note how your rationale is conspicuously missing any reference to making female computer hackers feel welcome or any indication that women can be something other than 'attractive young fangirl/cheerleaders'...

*slowclap*