Category: stardate

Generic “this is what I did today” posts. Could also be comedic/dramatic bits or reviews of something.

Oh, Moamar!

stardate

JEFF: Moamar Gadaffi apparently had a HUGE crush on Condi, to the point of being stalking
JEFF: he sent her lots of expensive gifts of watches, wines, and autographed pictures of himself
JEFF: and he talked about her in terms like, “She is a proud and wild lioness, a true daughter of Africa”
MATT: Oh, Moamar.
MATT: I think that should be a sitcom, by the way. He’d do something silly, and then somebody would go, “Oh, Moamar!”
MATT: And then he’d look at the camera and shrug, and there would be a music cue.
MATT: Something Benny Hill-ish.
BRAIN: “this sitcom is about a wacky north african dictator and his love for a straight-laced fascistic american political aide”
MATT: I think we have a mid-season replacement, at least.

Spock’s Milkshake

stardate

PICTURE OF SPOCK

My dairy-based frozen confection creates a focal point to which young males of the species are drawn. You are correct: it is far superior to yours. I could attempt to educate you on the finer points of this subject, but it would require monetary recompense on your part.

OJ: they could’ve done better
OJ: dairy-based frozen could be ice cream, froyo, or sorbet
BRAIN: not specific enough you think?
OJ: yah! it’s spock, it should be specific
BRAIN: totally
BRAIN: we must aim for Maximum Buzzkill!
OJ: also, the focal point is not mentioned to be in the neighborhood of a local domicile
OJ: but not within the domicile
BRAIN: you made me choke on my after-lunch sugar-alternative
OJ: accomplishment of mission objectives has been achieved.
BRAIN: indeed

Samantha Brick

stardate

BRAIN: I know exactly how she feels.

Samantha Brick on the downsides to looking pretty: ‘Why women hate me for being beautiful’

RICHELE: It’s why I hate you, fo sho.
MALLIKA: Brian – I hate you because you’re beautiful.
KIRBY: Is there an emoticon for a squinty-eyed “I’m judging you” look?

The article has the marks of a master troll… many people are pretty annoyed with her article. Was she just trollin’ ?!?

…However she had an actual point which is more legitimate and therefore less outrageous/funny. I think her delivery is just real bad… on the other hand if she wasn’t such a doofus I would never have heard of her article.

It’s like “Wag The Dog” over here. Memes are complicated!

Remember the three-faced frog

stardate

RAYTRACE: fearsome
BRAIN: grotesque
RAYTRACE: i wonder which brain controls which leg
RAYTRACE: does it eat through all htree heads?
RAYTRACE: it’d make neurophysiology so much easier
RAYTRACE: three brains in one animal!
DY: it is kind of cute in a star trek way
BRAIN: yuck!
BRAIN: does it have 3 brains? makes you thinkg
BRAIN: “let’s go get coffee”
BRAIN: “ok”
BRAIN: “no”
BRAIN: “dammit we never can agree on anything!”
BRAIN: Tom insists it’s an elaborate hoax
DY: i think it is cute
BRAIN: like a real-life pokemon
BRAIN: TriFrog! I choose you!
BRAIN: Trifrog is a water-type pokemon

Fruits of Brazil

stardate

I found this note which I never transcribed – it’s a bunch of notes about fruit I was tasting in Brazil.

Fruit notes

Green things- bitter, never got “Ripe”- very sour! Soft flesh and skin like a plum

yellow things- very sour, vaguely apple flavored, soft flesh, harder skin that is not edible

sapote? not jenipapo! – potato–like mottled brown papery skin- inside looks like a overripe plum (brown and yellow), with a consistency of a firm plum. Tastes slightly figgy.

Mangosteen – a hard dark purple rind, similar on the outside to a pomagranite. Very thick rind- almost like a thing particle board. On the inside, a white segemented fruit, slimy like the inside of a loquat. Most segments have no seeds, but some have a single seed which fills >50% of the segment. Very sweet and slightly tart.

Net melon – tastes like a milder honeydew. Extremely juicy.

Passion fruit “maracujua” – larger than little purple passionfruit, hard yellow outside, like a huge old lemon- inside, past a lemony white pith, is a gelatinous mass of seeds with pulp. Very sour!

jenipapo – grey. smells like a pu-erh- earthy. pulp is the hard consistency of a walnut fruit, or a soft leather. Inedible.

cuja “cashew apple” – astringent.

I dreamt of Martin Scorsese

stardate

I had a funny dream last night –

I dreamt that my wife discovered she was distantly related to Martin Scorsese – so some of her younger cousins and I got invited to “Cousin Marty’s” place.

Scorsese in person was fun but sort of a control freak… he met us at his place but then put us on a bus he had rented with a driver, just three of us on a full-sized bus.

The bus took us to a place up the coast where there was sort of an abandoned water temple… the washed-out trail was full of backpacking hippies making some kind of pilgrimage

So we get there, and the place is a ruin. I realize I’ve seen it in a clip from one of “Marty’s” more famous movies, which I’m embarrassed to not have seen.

When we return he shows us a list of house rules. One of them is essentially not to use text messages from inside the house without him reading the messages. When I am back with my family I work out an elaborate cipher to use when I’m back at his place. I teach my mom to use web-based WWI-era codes.

I also quiz the younger cousins to make sure they aren’t going to be a pain on the trip back; I’m unconvinced and refuse to bring them back.

That is about all I can remember!

SAMIR: sounds like easy rider
BRAIN: I HAVE seen Easy Rider real recently

Tide thefts and consensus reality

stardate

BRAIN: Tide thefts
BRAIN: what I love about this is how non-drug trade people have no idea
what the deal is… we can only speculate!
STEPHEN: I could be mistaken, but I don’t think the site with the Tide
article is being entirely truthful.
STEPHEN: (as in, I think it’s a little more The Onion than The BBC)
BRAIN: Thieves rolling Tide detergent out of US stores
STEPHEN: !
BRAIN: tide thefts – Google Search
BRAIN: truth is stranger than fiction
BRAIN: snopes hasn’t determined if it’s a widespread hoax or not
STEPHEN: It’s not unheard of for mainstream media to mistakenly pick up humour/hoaxes … but it does sound like maybe I was mistaken and, as you say … truth is stranger than fiction,
STEPHEN: You cannot make this shit up. Or, if someone did … damn, they’re good.
BRAIN: the Orbo guys are still around I think
STEPHEN: The bit where it said “… where Tide is known as “liquid gold” among officers.” was where I really started to think “Onion!”
BRAIN: I had a similar reaction to the passion gap thing
CLU: man, this explains those dirty looks I would get when I went to get detergent before I switched to All….

ACH: Police say reports of nationwide spike in Tide thefts doesn’t wash (Fox News)
ACH: How many anectdotes does it take to make data?

PIRATEQUEEN: I found several news articles that are months old that support the Tide story
MATT: Maybe this is some sort of weird viral ad campaign for Tide.
BRAIN: genius

Albert Nobbs as a revenge movie

stardate

BRAIN: did you see the trailers etc for the new glenn close movie
SAMIR: which one?
BRAIN: the one where she’s a man
SAMIR: albert nobbs
SAMIR: i actually saw the movie!
BRAIN: gasp!
BRAIN: was it good?
SAMIR: it was interesting
BRAIN: uh oh

SAMIR: the character is… really broken
SAMIR: i actually think you’d like it more than I think you think you would
SAMIR: she assumes a male identity after being gang raped years ago
SAMIR: a pervasive theme of the movie is how rotten ireland was to live in if you were poor
BRAIN: broken characters that are not homicidal are not very interesting to me
SAMIR: fair enough
SAMIR: anyway, she has just lost the ability to understand basic life
SAMIR: her view of relationships seems just… insane. like she thinks she can marry a woman and then she’ll just be fine with the fact that she’s a woman too

BRAIN: The Brave One is great!
SAMIR: that was an interesting movie
SAMIR: i liked it a lot
BRAIN: me too
SAMIR: way better than the normal revenge flicks
SAMIR: i actually hate death wish
BRAIN: I like the idea that Terry Gross can be redeemed
SAMIR: hahahahaha

SAMIR: i wish you could tell that to terry
BRAIN: maybe someday!
SAMIR: no, I mean like on her death bed!
SAMIR: “You know Terry, I feel like you wasted your life. It was a petty, stupid thing. But I saw a movie about what you might have been. But you never did it!”
BRAIN: “Terry, maybe there’s nothing wrong with you a horrible trauma couldn’t cure”

Espresso drill-down

stardate

These guys caused quite a splash raising a boatload of money for their expresso maker. Pretty cool.

The media has been calling it an “open source” espresso maker… yet only the software is open source, and that is the PID control software for the temperature. From what I can tell they didn’t write it either. Sort of related: check out the $85 osPID which is just a general-purpose PID unit which could be attached to anything, like say your existing coffee maker.

But this got me thinking about open source hardware – how does the pressure part of an espresso machine work?

ShaColby helped me through the anatomy:

  • grind coffee with burrs
    • the time of grind would determine the amount of beans ground, since it’s a hopper above.
    • there may be a secondary hopper for the ground coffee – this determines the amount used in the brew
    • one school of thought has it that ground coffee can sit without ill effects – obviously this is not the policy of e.g. Blue Bottle – they require something like “under 5 minutes sitting”
  • grounds moved into the press
  • grounds are tamped – this presses the grounds into a “puck”.  The higher pressure the tamp, the greater the density the grounds.
    • less density = faster water flow = weak coffee, not enough flavor from oils.
    • greater density = slower water flow = stronger, bitter, acidic coffee.
      • too dense – it will just be mud, and water won’t get through
    • Note: Aeropress was designed about this
    • ideally you want a finer grind (more surface area) with a less pressure tamp ?
  • water enters the head – it is pressurized.
    • It filters through… how long does it take?

Some links on anatomy and “mods”:

From Make Magazine and other mods we can see that a desirable thing to control with a micro controller is the water temperature. What else could we determine?

  • grounds size – burrs are settable.  You’d set the spacing – No sensors needed?
  • bean quantity used per cup
  • tamping pressure (as in Make v.12)
    • …which determines ground density.  Measure both for more accuracy.
  • water volume
  • water pressure – up to 14 bar?!
  • water temperature (as in Make v.04)
  • measure: time at pressure.
    • estimation before brew
    • Display what did happen
Other features
  • instrumented diagnostics based on coffee qualities
  • an easy way to knock non-puck grounds out of the head