A Classic, Updated

Rice Krispy Treats have always been a classic Beatty family comfort food. I have even learned to try to avoid crushing Krispies while stirring in melted marshmallows, a feat nearly as challenging as avoiding crushing grass while mowing. This morning I saw this article in the SFChronicle's terrific food section that provided two new Rice Krispy Treat recipes inspired by the reporter's discovery of a Japanese variety of the classic. One is a "Matcha-Brown Butter" version (a kind of green tea), and the other seems like a great match for an oyster stout: Bacon Crispy Rice Treats.

Canine Physics

Courtesy of Wired Magazine, I saw this video that appealed to the dog lover engineer in me. From the corresponding article in Fluid Dynamics magazine:

The drying of wet fur is a critical to mammalian heat regulation. In this fluid dynamics video, we show a sequence of films demonstrating how hirsute animals to rapidly oscillate their bodies to shed water droplets, nature's analogy to the spin cycle of a washing machine. High-speed videography and fur-particle tracking is employed to determine the angular position of the animal's shoulder skin as a function of time. X-ray cinematography is used to track the motion of the skeleton. We determine conditions for drop ejection by considering the balance of surface tension and centripetal forces on drops adhering to the animal. Particular attention is paid to rationalizing the relationship between animal size and oscillation frequency required to self-dry.

Just keep back when a wet dog comes in the house!

La Nina, Baby

Not looking good for Sierra snow.

California and the Southwest: warmer and drier than average. This will likely exacerbate drought conditions in these areas.

Mostly boring for you mid-Atlantic-ers (which you could use after last year). Whistler might be a good bet.

Vicarious Space Flight

Amazing what kinds of things you can do for a science project these days.

Clown Posse Revealed

Keith mentioned that he named his fantasy football team Clown Posse after a band he saw on Dan's iPod. So, courtesy of one of my favorite blogs, I thought he might be interested in this profile of them. They're certainly, er interesting, but oh so revolting, at so many levels. I wonder if Dan knows that they've recently revealed that in spite of their incredibly violent lyrics, like:

I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.

they've been evangelical Christians all along. In their newly confessed evangelical zeal, they seem to find the most mundane things to be miraculous, and science not to be trusted. Saturday Night Live did a parody of them that makes them out to be the Sarah Palin of rappers.

Garrett has some interesting things on his iPod, but I guess he's wary enough to keep tight control over what his parents get to see. Speaking of the Beatles from a few posts ago, Garrett once told us he had discovered a great song by the Beatles, Norwegian Wood!

Facelift at Age 6

For the blog's sixth birthday, I decided to give it a facelift. No more dreary white-on-black lettering. Maybe it will inspire some of us to blog more often :-)

The 40 Year Old Rumor

Did you hear? There is a rumor that Paul McCartney is actually dead, and he was replaced by an impostor running around all these years. Apparently there are all these hints -- like him being bearfoot on an album cover, and wearing a badge that meant "killed in action" in England. Thus was the newest online rumor passed on from Garrett to us, like a weird echo. Really, it seems to have been recycled for the new generation, but with the power of the Internet to push it along. Witness this YouTube video. It goes on for five installments, if you can bear it. It's more fun than Lindsay Lohan rumors, because those all seem to be true.

iPad - Natural Enemy of the Blog

I like my iPad, but it definitely drags me away from the computer at home. It's great for browsing content online and for reading things, but it is just inadequate for writing more than the most terse notes. It also is a truly sucky tool for blogging. The usual Blogger editing page doesn't work properly in Safari on the iPad, and it's basically impossible to post pictures. So, in iPad style, I bought an app that makes it almost bearable, but really doesn't remotely approach the functionality I have on Blogger right now in a browser. One thing that has kept me blogging over time is the phenomenon of reading things online and then blogging about them at the time. This is just plain hard to do on the iPad, so I keep seeing things and saying I need to blog about them. But then it never happens. I'm going to try to do better.