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.