Category: ranting

The Consumerist [consumerist.com] has a short article on the Pentagon’s recipe for brownies — no not the happy-fun kind of brownies, the military stopped testing that in the ’70s. We’re talking K-Ration, nuclear-war proof, post-apocalyptic edible, made from shit cockroaches won’t eat, cardboard brownies.

The article on the consumerist [consumerist.com] is basically the following two quotes, but they are so perfect, I’m going to reproduce them here:

Shortening shall be a refined, hydrogenated vegetable oil or combination of refined vegetable oils which are in common use by the baking industry. Coconut and palm kernel oils may be used only in the coating. The shortening shall have a stability of not less than 100 hours as determined by the Active Oxygen Method (AOM) in Method Cd 12-57 of the Commercial Fats and Oils chapter in the Official and Tentative Methods of the American Oil Chemists Society. The shortening may contain alpha monoglycerides and an antioxidant or combination of antioxidants, as permitted by the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and regulations promulgated thereunder.

I like it! A well written, clear and concise, technical requirement… Of course there is one tiny little problem with this requirement:

[NPR] asked Penny Karas, the founder of Hello Cupcake bakery in Washington, D.C., to whip up us a batch. And to be honest, they weren’t too good: dry, crumbly and dense. But they did taste as if they might last quite a while if boxed up and shipped to a war zone.

Yep. This situation is a familiar problem to me as a Solution Architect… Well defined technical requirements that produce technically correct products that, due to the business requirements of the various stakeholders, no one wants to use…

I can’t tell you how many projects I have been on that I have had to fight some MBA holding sales|product|operations (delete as appropriate) weenie over their insistence on the inclusion of some brilliant business requirement like “It has to be good after a NUCLEAR FUCKING WAR!” Don’t get me wrong that might be a valid business requirement for military rations. It might even be a lofty goal for a mobile phone network. It is not, however, a useful or necessary requirement for a value added service in the mobile industry. No one cares if their phone can download music after the first strike! Well… Ok, maybe the guy who launched the bomb wants to download “We will rock you”.

Anyway, thanks to S****** for the link, head over the original article on The Consumerist [consumerist.com] with links to the actual recipe and the NPR article.

I’m a little behind on my Economist reading due to my prolonged exposure to Americanism over the past 3 weeks… but I just ran across this gem [economist.com] in the print edition.

What is the most efficient shape for randomly packing things into a container? Physicists at New York University and Virginia Tech have carried out a series of experiments and, among all the shapes they have tested so far, the tetrahedron (a pyramid with four triangular sides) [is the best]

Two things:

First, someone at VT is playing way too much D&D…

Second, the Japanese figured out long ago that the best shape for packing things was cubical… that’s why Fiji water bottles are square and why the sell square watermelons in the land of the rising sun.

I have to wonder if it would not be a better use of NSF funds to send these slackers on an oriental campaign to the local Asian food store to find the mythical icosahedral tofu!

I missed this short TED talk, because it was not pushed via the feed to subscribers, so I give credit to S****** for pointing a link to it out on Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic [andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com].

Andrew adds a great quote:

Why would social ills decline as porn becomes more widely available? No one knows. But the one thing porn really causes is masturbation. Internet porn keeps men at home one-handing it. As a result, they’re not out in the world acting irresponsibly – or criminally.

Michael Castleman, in Does Pornography Cause Social Harm? [psychologytoday.com]

I’m off to Boston in a few hours. Not looking forward to 22+ hours in a plane plus stopovers and travel to and from the airports… Not fun. Cattle class. Not fun.

I am excited to be starting a new job. Looking forward to the people and the challenges. Time to stretch the brain and do something new and exciting.

But… As I put my daughter to bed tonight it really hit me that I won’t see her for 3 weeks. I think it will be hard on us both, and on my wife. I have cultivated a singularly bad habit in my girl: She falls asleep in daddy’s lap every night. I will miss this. It’s one of the best things in life. Even when I struggle with her, trying to get her to sit still and settle down so she can go to sleep. Even then it’s the highlight of the day. The interactions as she settles down — smiles, laughs, when she points something out to me. The warmth and love when she does finally curl up and drift off to sleep. How beautiful she is when she falls asleep. Even how cute she is when she snores.

It’s going to be a long three weeks. I think I will miss this bedtime ritual more than I’ve missed anything else in my life on the many times I’ve flown off. It’s different from the feeling of missing your significant other. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just different, a different part of you that aches.

I found a bug in my iPhone. Doesn’t bother me but drives my 20 month old daughter crazy…

I’ve seen this a couple of times, it seems to duplicate the ‘cover’ image for one video onto other videos. I haven’t seen a pattern in it yet. Doesn’t seem to matter if the video with the incorrect cover image has a cover image associated with it or not. Sometimes the cover images from TV shows or Podcasts are in the wrong place too. Most annoying for my daughter when she wants to watch WALL·E but clicks on The Last Lecture. She gets a bit upset after the third or fourth try.