Handy city info for your address 2010

I was checking to confirm who my city supervisor is when I found this handy dandy service from the San Francisco government. Just type in your address (or a cross street) and you'll find out

• Your parcel information (block & lot, zoning, lot area)
• Elected officials with links to their home pages (Board of Supervisors, U.S. House of Representatives, State Senate, State Assembly, BART Board of Directors)
• Street information with – woo hoo! – street sweeping info for both sides of your block
• Nearest school and public library

Hooray for public information!

Recently enjoyed podcasts 2010

Since I no longer have a commute or do so much plane travel, I am not consuming podcasts at the same rate as I used to, but they are great while I do dishes or vacuum. I also use them to induce happy calm on bus rides with irritating fellow passengers.

Here's what's stuck out for me lately among my subscriptions.

Productivity:

"Goal Setting" from David Allen Company

Science:

"Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool" from the British Museum and BBC's brilliant 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' series. This stuff just gives me chills, even more so since I've actually stood at the lip of the gorge (on my 2005 trip to Africa). We all come from this heritage.

A bunch from 60 Second Science:
"Monkeys Hate Others' Bonuses, Too"
"Count On Steves to Defend Darwin"
"Earths Common as Dirt"
"Money Can Buy Happiness Sometimes"
"Waking in the Dark: Daylight Saving Time"
"Heart Keeps Pumping Out New Cells"
"Breathing Easy Thanks To Great Oxidation Event"
"Iron Will to Live for Antarctic Microbes"
"Monkey Drives Dinosaur Game Extinct"
"Elderly Who Forget Age Remember Better"
"Bad Mileage Driving Tips"
"Rain Zone Moving North"
"Profanity Bleeps Physical Pain"
"Cat Call Coerces Can Opening"
"What's Behind Birthers' Obama Belief"
"Hot Rocks Were Technology Revolution"
"Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys"
"Salty Origins for Early Earth Biomolecules"
"Teen Inventors Fight Tinnitus"
"Pill May Change Attraction"
"Wind Farmers Go to School on Fish"
"Black Hole Quasar Building Galaxy"
"Caffeine Merely Masks Alcohol's Effect"
"If Time Flew, You Had Fun"
"Lighter Drinks Avoid Heavy Head" (Or just try smaller, better drinks, mm?)
"Gunfight Tip: Faster to Draw Second"
"Ancient East Asian Found in Roman Empire"

Cocktails:

"Traveling Mixologists Rock Paris, episode II" from OhGo.sh

Happy listening!

Meetings Cost A Lot 2010

I'm pleased to see that others have had the meeting cost calculator idea and done something about it.

Toby Tripp, Lydia Tripp, and Roy Kolak's Meeting Ticker has now been joined by Bring Tim.

Every tech company I've ever worked with (except those run by Clemens Pfeiffer) has needed a device like this, but some need it more than others. Yes, you with the weekly hour-plus meeting attended by the CEO and three VPs, I'm looking at you.

(Thanks for linky goodness, Boing Boing!)

2008

Go check out more great cartoons by Nick at Nearing Zero.

(Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net. Used by permission.)

Back from Philadelphia, and time for more links 2008

Food & Drink
First a couple restaurant recommendations in Philadelpia: James and El Vez. Great food, great service, two totally different styles. Alas, did not make it to Southwark, so it'll have to wait for another trip.

Politics
I enjoyed this useful summation of the U.S. presidential candidates' views on science, particularly evolution: Evolutionary Politics: Why we should care what candidates think about biological evolution by Ronald Bailey. This includes a most entertaining (and pleasing) quote from Senator Mike Gravel.

Science
Here's a nice overview of the kind of information we're getting from National Geographic's Genographic Project, Dr. Spencer Wells in Vanity Fair's Africa issue with an article called Out of Africa. You can also click through from this linked page to a short video on four different people's results in the Genographic Project after having been found by Dr. Wells in Grand Central station.

Sure, the new MacBook Air is nice, but I'd much rather map my entire genetic information and then have a multi-hundred dollar start on a health savings account to use toward preventative care for anything problematic it reveals. Here's an article on that kind of mapping along with a Wired Science video interview with Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, co-founders of 23 And Me personal genome service. And here's a New York Times article on gene mapping by Amy Harmon, My Genome, Myself: Seeking clues in DNA.

The Arts
The lovely and talented Miss Varla Jean Merman will be performing her show Loves A Foreign Tongue at the soon-to-close Empire Plush Room here in San Francisco January 24-26th and Jan 31st-Feb 2nd.

What a wonderfully diverse day off I'm having! Thanks to friends for links & recommendations.

Holy crap, MORE links! 2008

The internets are full of neat things, I tell ya. Here, watch me.

First, tasty tasty science:
New York Times article on Greenland, ice melt, sea levels, coastline change and time. I am not buying waterfront property.

Murray Gell-Mann speaking delightfully on beauty and truth in physics.

Richard Wiseman's Quirkology is probably my favorite episode of the Point of Inquiry podcast so far. (I've been listening to them all, catching up with the several year old series).

60-Second Science's year-end episode Another Ellipse Around The Sun was quite pleasing.

How about a delicious cocktail or three after all that science?
Three in one with Chris McMillian of New Orleans' episode on the Brandy Alexander and its siblings.

And lastly a book to recommend:
Did I tell you how great Annalee Newitz's book Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters In American Pop Culture is? Well, I loved it. Good, solid academic writing; serious horror movie fan geek cred. Perfect balance on an unlikely razor edge.

A Kottkesque frenzy of links 2008

Oh so many things to link for you today!

Food!
I've only read a couple posts but already I know that I can highly recommend The French Laundry At Home. Carol cooks Keller - the entire book - at home and the results are great. Good photography and witty writing. Start here with Gazpacho with Balsamic Glaze. (PNord, you should be all over this one!)

Bento fans and parents will dig Lunch In A Box by Biggie.

Drink!
Lovely apple garnish here on the Angel Face Cocktail as made by Erik of the blog Underhill-Lounge.

Brilliant Cocktails is a nice video blog from bartender Chris Doig of Copenhagen. Must watch episodes: The Manhattan and The Old-Fashioned. Also recommended: The Cosmopolitan, The Margarita, The Sazerac, The Espresso Martini and The Cucumber Fizz/Collins. Unfortunately no new posts since last August, but a good body of work while it was active.

The friendly home host viewpoint is nicely provided by Steve & Paul of Cocktail Buzz. I like their low-key style and the way they do food pairings for each drink. Check out their episode The Vesper paired with Warmed Olives.

Though the delivery style of Alberta Straub of the video podcast Cocktails on the Fly and her chunky salad drinks can put me off, sometimes we agree and her episode on bitters is one of those times. I also confess to a desire to try her recipe for The White Russian which looks fantastic. Her Citrus Sugar and The Mary Ann With Ginger are also on my to-try list. (However, I will give my opposing viewpoint on two things: don't hit your shaker against the counter to loosen your glass, use the heel of your hand on the side of the metal shaker in the direction the mixing glass is already leaning (illustrated by Robert "Drinkboy" Hess in his bar tools & Caiparinha episode of The Cocktail Spirit), and don't sugar the rim of a glass on the inside edge).

Travel!
Buzz put up his guide to his favorites in New York City and mentioned in Twitter an addendum to the Cocktail Bars section: Employees Only.

All the video podcasts above can be subscribed to through iTunes except Robert Hess' The Cocktail Spirit.

End of year open browser tab closure link roundup 2007

Loved this very cool NPR piece on the 10th anniversary of the "web log". Travel back in time to the beginning of this blog, also dating back to the late 1990s. First mention of the word "blog" here? May 24, 1999 (the post titles were added later when I brought these pre-blogging software posts into Blogger & later Movable Type).

My friend Buzz found this great quote from Danah Boyd - my one-letter-different web geek conference badge sista - which nicely sums up what's wrong with social technologies. I spend time reading Buzz's Twitterings because he's worth my time.

Nice short little article from the SF Chronicle mentioning great San Francisco bartender William "Cocktail Bill" Boothby, whose 1907 book The World's Drinks & How To Mix Them you may recall my mentioning as the source of the Ruby Cocktail, our featured drink last New Year's Eve.

There's high praise for Boothby in a 1934 piece in The Recorder, quoted here (scroll down to "The Immortal Masterpiece of Mixology").

Bill was placed behind the famous bar of the Palace Hotel by the discriminating Colonel Kirkpatrick. They were all aces behind that mahogany, and Bill was the ace of aces. To see him rotating three cocktail glass between the fingers of his left hand while measuring a jigger of gin or vermouth with the right was to witness a masterpiece of art in the making. Alas! Prohibition came, and Maxfield Parrish's "Pied Piper" looked down upon no more cocktail and highball devotees.

Sadly, I'm not sure the current staff behind the bar know the glorious history. Elixer's counter-example isn't enough to convince me that the presence of televisions in a bar indicates lesser skill on the part of the bartenders.

Boothby fans stay tuned; how does Dinah spend an afternoon off? At the library in the historical collection, photographing every page of that 1907/1908 edition of The World's Drinks! This & other public domain treasures coming soon to a Flickrstream near you...

How did I not know of the the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society? What a totally cool use of all the new techniques for studying genetic information! I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my kit.

Next up: uncluttering the fridge with Serious Eats advice.

Interesting link roundup 2007

Lots of goodies for you today, most of them found via the amazing kottke.org, the only non-Achewood website I read almost every single day.

First some horror, the Bush administration's approach to executive privilege: an executive order cannot limit a president, the president can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise , and the Department of Justice is bound by the president's legal determination. By those rules, Watergate wouldn't have justly brought down an administration acting against America's best interests. Scary, scary stuff indeed.

You can wash the bad taste out of your mouth with some science by reading this cool piece by Bernard Foing on what Earth would be like if we didn't have a moon and how having a moon has influenced life on this planet.

The first four minutes of The Kingdom are a fascinating whirlwind tour of the history of American-Saudi Arabian relations.

I also liked this smart thinking found by Jason Kottke on Henry Abbott's TrueHoop: tell me what you know; tell me what you don't know; tell me what you think; and always keep those three separated. Very good advice indeed.

And your moment of zen (thanks to Jessamyn!): a running buffalo.

p.s. One more great video link courtesy of Beau: A truly great little video by wonderingmind42 talking about how to approach major scientific/social questions like the fear of catastrophic climate destabilization (a.k.a. "global warming"). (Good work, sports racer! It's great to see how Ze Frank's The Show has helped this kind of project bloom).

A small assortment of links 2007

Great diagram in this article showing the difference between the farm subsidies pyramid and the nutritional guidelines pyramid. Definitely time for some reform, methinks.

Deeply scary and underhanded stuff happening with the current administration's tinkering with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

At least one thing that makes you cry has a chance of relief: Onion Action Goggles!

Some enjoyable podcast episodes to check out 2007

Evolution 101 is a nice orderly laying out of the basics. The first episode, What Is Evolution?, and the fifth, Random or Nonrandom, have been my favorites so far of the six I've heard.

Nova ScienceNow podcast had a cool piece with Sheldon Glashow called Big Physics, all about the Large Hadron Collider and what it may tell us.

This episode of Science & The City with Alyce Santoro is super fun; I would have liked the baseline idea of a Dorkbot presentation getting picked up for national distribution in and of itself, but her project - sound fabrics - is really cool.

Blogging through the fog 2007

In headcold hell today, but am starting to go stir crazy to do *something* despite my thickheadedness. Thus for your enjoyment here are some links without the big insightful posts I'd intended to write (for weeks now, alas).

Economic news to make you gnash your teeth: Bush tax cuts make balancing budget impossible in 2007 through 2010. The trend beyond 2010 is even more scary, particularly when you look at the comparison between that lost revenue and benefits through Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. I am still rather unclear on what exactly these "conservatives" are supposed to be conserving; smells like bad fiscal management to me.

More pleasing economic historical analysis from Nicholas Wade, "In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence" which anyone interested in the transition from traditional economies to industrial ones will find thought-provoking.

Wondering what happened to those old J. Peterman catalog writers? 2006

They're apparently working at Woot now:

Product Info

Paper Tiger

An hour out of Grenoble, Maigny wheeled the Citroën to a halt at a checkpoint high in the Alps. A groggy soldier in a tan garrison cap slouched toward the car, exhaling clouds into the frigid, fading light of early evening. Behind him stretched the darkening peaks of the Italian Alps. This was the moment, Maigny thought, his racing mind suddenly stilled by urgency. He had to get into Italy, to let Le Moineau know his cover had been blown. The entire Resistance could very well depend on it. And these papers had to get him across the border.

“Your papers, please,” the drunken Italian soldier muttered through the open car window. He was just a boy, Maigny could see now. Couldn’t be older than 16. If Mussolini was forced to draft raw, rustic youths like this, then his poisoned dream of a new Roman Empire must be tottering over history’s grave.

“Here you are,” Maigny airily replied, with the casual composure of a Vichy businessman. “I think you’ll find that everything’s in order.” He presented five packages of HP Premium Plus 4×6 Photo Paper to the confused Fascist teenager. That’s right, thought Maigny; look it over, take your time, allow yourself to be seduced by the luxurious glossy finish. Imagine the rich, intense color possible with this premium paper. You’ve never seen anything like this back on the sheep farm in Abruzzi.

“Che cosa è questo?,” the soldier finally said. “I need to see your papers. Identification papers. Immediately.” One hand moved to his revolver. Maigny gulped.

“Certainly, certainly. I just thought that perhaps a man like you deserved a small gift, in appreciation of all your hard work defending the Duce. Please, accept this HP Premium Plus 4×6 Photo Paper as a token of my thanks.”

At last, a light went on in the Italian youth’s head, reaching him through the two-ply haze of liquor and boredom. His eyebrows rose and he quickly slid the paper into his knapsack. After a furtive glance around for any superior officers that might be watching, the soldier unhitched the metal gate across the road. With a sleepy wave, he welcomed Maigny to Italy.

Warranty: 90 days

Features:

• High gloss
• 4×6 with perforated tab
• 11.5 mil
• 280 g/m2
• 75lb
• 45 sheets (times 5)

(Thanks to Joe for the linky goodness!)

Vidal 2006

Note to you: read this interview with Gore Vidal.

Note to self: read more Gore Vidal books.

Microloaning on Memorial Day 2006

What to do on a relaxing day off? Catch up on various paperwork and email inbox items, get my fiscal ducks in a row, listen to the new music I got when I sold old CDs at Green Apple, and enjoy the view from my picture window.

One of the fun things I finally got around to doing was making a microloan through Kiva. I'm helping George Bomboko in Banda-Kireka, Uganda, set up a groundnut business at which his brother will work to help support their family. He's still looking for an additional $300, so if you have $25 sitting gathering dust in your PayPal account, why not give George or one of the other small businesspeople on Kiva's site a hand?

Here's a neat set of photos of a recent group of folks receiving their loan funds after having their business plans approved by their peers.

*********

Woot! It's Tuesday midday and George only needs $50 more to launch his new business. Yay, microlenders!

Pure water for all 2005

My fundraiser to get $1000 donated to Women in Livestock Development is off to a good start, so I'm feeling much more confident about my ability to also do something during 2006 to provide better sanitation around the world.

I'd been planning to look into helping fund a village or regional pump (and I might still do that), but I was very excited to hear an interview with Don Gould of Pure Water 4 All on IT Conversations. The filters that they've created can be locally produced by traditional craftspeople using sustainable local materials. Nice. But do they really help? Yes. Within a matter of two or three weeks after they go into use there is a significant reduction in the number of children dying. That's a hell of a short term return on investment, but there are also long-term positive implications.

"When we bring down the level of despair in parts of the world we don't think about day-to-day, we bring up the possibilities for global peace, global economic growth, all of those issues, in a very concrete way."

Pure Water 4 All sounds like exactly the kind of project that I was hoping to find.

(By the way, if you haven't encountered the term before and are puzzled when you hear it, NGO stands for Non-Governmental Organization).

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A general tip: IT Conversations are really great to listen to when you do housework. (Try their Globeshakers series for especially inspiring topics). They're generally fascinating shows and keep your mind happily engaged while you, for instance, scrub the bathroom floor. Woo! Clean bathroom floor!