Richmond Day Trip

2013-06-17.

I had a job interview down in the Richmond area a few weeks ago, and Amy came along for the ride so we could make a small day trip of it. First stop, the opulent lobby of Highwoods One in Innsbrook, a sprawling business park in Glen Allen, VA. (Amy waited in a nearby library while I interviewed.) After the interview we drove down to the Innsbrook Shoppes for some Hanami Sushi.

And then down into Richmond to visit the VMFA and see Rembrandt’s Three Musicians and Stone Operation, as well as some cool Art Deco/Art Nouveau work, an early Gauguin still life, some medieval pieces, and lots of horses.

Outside, it rained on the Confederate Memorial Chapel and Robinson House.

We didn’t have time to do anything else in Richmond, but it’s just a 2 hour drive south of us, so this is by no means our last visit. Full photoset here.

(Sadly while the job interview went well, the opening itself did not pan out, and I am still on the hunt.)

Recent Reading

2013-06-11.

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek Leads the Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World — Businessweek on how Costco is doing right by its workers and reaping profit as a result.

How The Few Have Chosen Inequality For The Many — Despite lots of good economic news, the benefits are not trickling down to regular people, and this is by design.

Ideology is the Enemy: The Creeping Victory of “Consistent” over “Judicious” — On Doug Wilson’s defenses of slavery as “biblical” and other dangers of slavish devotion to theological and philosophical consistency.

How religions change their mind — A brief history of religious cultural adaptability.

Why Following Design Trends Can Turn Your Website Refresh into a Colossal Waste of Time and Money.

Usability for Senior Citizens — Simplicity, readability, and clearly-defined clickable links are good practices for audiences of any age.

Startup Advice — “Simple is good. Be suspicious of complexity.”

Welcome to Google Island — Mat Honan’s clever allegory.

Largest Oyster Restoration Project in the Chesapeake Bay — NOAA attempts to rebuild reefs of Crassostrea virginica, which both cleans the water and feeds local oyster enthusiasts such as myself.

The Gut-Wrenching Science Behind the World’s Hottest Peppers — Smithsonian Magazine on superhot Bhut Jolokia chilies.

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi — On Kenji Fujimoto, sushi chef to Kim-Jong-Il, a unique North Korea interest piece by Adam Johnson for GQ Magazine.

A Consumer’s Guide to Fake Meat — nice roundup of common meat substitute brands.

Blog-Tied: How a Hunger for Clicks Drives New York’s Brutally Fickle Food Scene

What happens when a 35 year old man retakes the SAT? He says avoid it.

Sriracha

2013-06-08.

BusinessWeek story on Sriracha and its creator, David Tran. I knew about Sriracha long before Oatmeal made it cool, and even from my youth, Huy Fong chili-garlic sauce (or Lee Kum Kee) was a staple condiment for any meal of broiled chicken. Tran’s route to spicy fame is a classic immigrant culinary success story, but this passage in particular jumped out at me:

Seated, Tran and Lam order pho, the traditional Vietnamese soup. Then they squeeze a small amount of sriracha onto a plate beside their bowls. When I squirt a much larger amount of Huy Fong’s sauce directly into my soup, Tran’s eyes open wide. “I’ve never seen it that way,” he says.

I grew up Asian and to me the condiment was always a dipping sauce, not an extra ingredient. On the other hand, these days the pho restaurants where we eat never give us little side sauce dishes, so straight into the soup the Sriracha goes.

Sriracha is actually a fairly mild chili sauce that I would rate as “entry-level,” coming in at about 2,200 Scoville Units. When I want some real heat I usually go with Thai nam pla prik, or siling labuyo at patis in Filipino.

That’s rated at 50,000-100,000 Scoville units, and I’m already getting numb to that. I think habaneros may be the next step.

PRISM

2013-06-06.

An intelligence leak has revealed PRISM, a massive US NSA data mining operation spying on people’s data shared through Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, and others. Outrageous, but ultimately not surprising, given that President Obama has, disappointingly, shown himself all too willing to continue his predecessor’s expansion of powers to invade privacy in the name of national security.

Additional reading:

Update: More from Guardian on the whistleblower: Edward Snowden.

Counterpoint from Kurt Eichenwald and David Simon (most famous for The Wire).

Caturday!

2013-06-01.

Who wants to see Martha the Kitten being a goof?

Recent Reading

2013-05-31.

Linkdump of space-related articles that have recently caught my interest:

ARKYD Space Telescope Kickstarter. I didn’t think Planetary Resources, being funded by millionaires, would need to resort to crowdfunding, but really it seems more a public relations project than a plea for cash. And participatory fundraising can be an effective publicity and education tool — I myself pledged $39 to get a “Space Selfie.” Red shirts may be involved.

The Martian Chroniclers: A New Era in Planetary Exploration. History and overview of latest steps in robotic Martian exploration in the context of the Curiosity team’s recent successes, by Burkhard Bilger for The New Yorker.

Stratolaunch and Orbital — The Height of Air Launch. Stratolaunch ran into a few bumps shortly after announcing their plans, when SpaceX decided not to produce a rocket for their air launch platform, but they seem to have found a willing partner in Orbital Sciences, who have experience with aircraft-mounted rockets like Pegasus.

The Future of the Spacesuit. Jetpacks were already a thing with the MMU and SAFER, but future spacesuits may also include gyroscopes to compensate for torque from tools used for EVA engineering tasks.

Memories of Baikonur — Dutch space advocate Remco Timmermans writes a guest post for aspiring astronaut Abby Harrison about visiting Baikonur Cosmodrome for a Soyuz launch.

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life. On modeling and recreating the Saturn V’s engines to gain engineering insight for NASA’s new SLS rocket.

Mars One Mission Could Go Horribly Wrong — If It Ever Gets Off the Ground. Turns out building a Martian colonization program through an internet-registered reality show is probably not the best route.

Unpack a Meal of Astronaut Space Food — brief history of astronaut food from Smithsonian Magazine.

Yahoo Buys Tumblr

2013-05-28.

So Yahoo acquired Tumblr. This might not bode well, considering what happened to Geocities, or it might bode at least kind of well, considering that Yahoo might have saved Flickr from itself. For what it’s worth, Marissa Mayer has promised “not to screw it up.”

I moved my “tangential hilarity” weblog to Tumblr from Livejournal in 2007, early in an exodus that caught up thousands of teens and fandom communities fleeing LJ’s gradual descent into stagnation following the SUP acquisition. Tumblr offered a fresh new way to publish in “tumblelog” format via a clean and usable interface that made it quick and easy to post, discover, reblog, and host original and found content. The ability to start a blog in minutes, slap a template onto it, and effortlessly populate and share the stream by just pasting links, image and video URLs, quotes, and chat logs — each with its own specialized format — not only removed friction from the blogging process, but further bolstered the web’s naturally postmodern environment as an authorless*, curated remix culture, for better or for worse*.

That whole dialectic of ownership and curation is Yahoo’s to deal with now — along with large volumes of pornography, teenage angst, Homestuck, and poor revenue.

Tumblr’s first employee, Marco Arment (also famous for Instapaper and The Magazine) has reflections on David Karp and the past and future of Tumblr.

Do Tumblr’s Audience Analytics Support its $1.1B Valuation? — by Carson Smith, a coworker when I was at US News & World Report.

* I refer to Barthes’ work on authorial intent in a postmodern context, but remind all bloggers to always be conscientious of attribution.

Recent Reading

2013-05-15.

Philippine political dynasties.

Al Gore.

The Great Gatsby.

Millenials.

Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy and the BRCA1 mutation.

Bird watchers.

Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.

God and psychotherapy.

Paul Miller’s year without the internet.

The Smithsonian Castle’s red stone.

DC immigration activism

Introversion.

Neanderthal and and Denisovan ancestry.

Animal consciousness.

Los Angeles cars and transit.

Scope creep.

Biosphere II.

Mental health crisis.

Car chase suicide.

Changes in how youth consume journalism.

Cartography, geopolitics, and Game of Thrones.

Vietnamese food.

The Battle of Hoth.

Caturday!

2013-05-11.

Amelia continues to do daily battle with the plush shark that previously drove her to Cute Overload fame. We originally got the shark at Manila Ocean Park, and it was a great travel pillow, but a much better cat toy.

(For some reason Martha doesn’t care as much for the shark, or for any large toys, for that matter. She prefers little rattle-mice.)

Seen at Costco

2013-05-07.

Frivolous and surreal products in giant bulk containers at Costco: triumph of capitalism or indicator of materialistic empire in decline? I don’t know. I just want to eat hemp hearts with mandarin orange segments and follow it up with some probiotic and fiber gummies before driving off in a minivan with a fuzzy pink steering wheel cover, wacky foam on my neck for sun protection.

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

We close with the Make-A-Wish bear greeting shoppers.

(THE PROBIOTIC THAT SURVIVES)

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