polydipsia

No, but you'll still look like an idiot: Google testing heads-up display glasses in public, won't make you look like Robocop

2012-04-05T09:55:00.001-05:00

Note how they're worn by an attractive young lady and not a dweeb...

Google testing heads-up display glasses in public, won't make you look like Robocop:

The good news: Google has started testing those augmented reality glasses we heard about earlier in the year. The bad news: if the artsy shots of the test units are to be believed, they won't make you look like some '80s cinematic anti-hero. In fact, the things wouldn't look too out of place in a New York Times style story. The software giant let it be known that, while it hasn't quite got a sale date on the wearables, it's ready to test ProjectGlass amongst the non-augmented public. The company is also looking for feedback on the project, writing in a post today, "we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input." Want some idea of what ProjectGlass might offer the public? Sure, it's not quite as good as strapping a pair on your own eyes, but interested parties can check out a video of Google's vision after the break.

Continue reading Google testing heads-up display glasses in public, won't make you look like Robocop

Google testing heads-up display glasses in public, won't make you look like Robocop originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The New York Times | Project Glass | Email this | Comments

Noisy ASCO valves

2012-01-29T13:54:00.001-06:00

Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm a little concerned something may be wrong.

Thanks.

Online/cloud financial software with sync...

2012-01-17T08:40:00.001-06:00

In 2012 we ought to be able to do this:

iPhone/Android financial software + Cloud platform for entering transactions from desktop computers anywhere. Why can't we? Let's review the contenders:

Mint.com - I still cannot figure out how to enter transactions and get them to consistently reconcile correctly. Anybody know how to? Feel free to post below. Otherwise, it's a lovely platform to keep track of things.

Clearcheckbook.com - They have a great online interface, support import/export in a variety of formats, but their iPhone client is garbage - very crashy and unstable. Look at the app rating - two stars at the time of this writing. I've also used their Android app and it's a bit better. Overall, the whole platform is usable on Android, but unusable on iPhone.

iReconcile - This is what I'm currently using, but the online interface is SLOOOOOOOW. Lacks import/export features. No support for your memorized transactions on the iPhone via the web interface. Clunky (and again, SLOOOOOOOW interface).

Also (added later) - toshl.com - tracks expenses, but can't split things up into accounts (weird).

Loyal reader (singular) what are you using?

Sports: Saints figure out how to turn the ball over while on defense

2012-01-14T22:39:00.000-06:00

Exploiting a little-known NFL rule, they hope to increase future turnovers by focusing on all 3 phases of the game.

Quick review: Bazooka Screens and their ilk

2012-01-12T14:28:00.000-06:00

Recently purchased this. Short version is that it works, but it gets clogged when using it in the boiler. I have not tried it in the mash tun.

Long version is that for beers with highly-converted malts and low/no adjuncts and (probably leaf hops) it performs well. For adjuncts, less converted malts, and pellet hops, it has to constantly be scraped off with a spoon or paddle.

Previously, I just ran from a 1/2" NPT nipple to a 90 degree elbow in the pot and just used a stainless scrubber/sponge stuck on the nipple to strain. This is cheaper, but can still clog.

I remain unsure of the proper answer. I really don't want to spend the time and energy and (lotsa) money to setup some kind of whirlpool. However, when the kettle gets stuck and the wort is coming out of the counter-flow slowly life sucks.

Anybody have a cheap and easy setup that works?

Recipe review: Trappist Crappist

2012-01-02T15:09:00.002-06:00

I based this off of a reciped found here. With the exception of software screwups (I usually brew 10 gallon batches and wasn't paying attention to the volumes I was being handed...)

Tasting notes will follow.

Batch 1 of Trappist Crappist

Dates

Date Brewed:	1 Jan 2012	Date Racked:	1 Jan 2012
Date Packaged:	1 Jan 2012	Date Ready:	1 Jan 2012

Selected Style and BJCP Guidelines

18B-Belgian Strong Ale-Belgian Dubbel

Minimum OG:	1.062 SG	Maximum OG:	1.075 SG
Minimum FG:	1.008 SG	Maximum FG:	1.018 SG
Minimum IBU:	15 IBU	Maximum IBU:	25 IBU
Minimum Color:	10.0 SRM	Maximum Color:	17.0 SRM

Recipe Overview

Target Wort Volume Before Boil:	24.30 qts	Actual Wort Volume Before Boil:	24.30 qts
Target Wort Volume After Boil:	21.13 qts	Actual Wort Volume After Boil:	21.13 qts
Target Volume Transferred:	21.13 qts	Actual Volume Transferred:	21.13 qts
Target Volume At Pitching:	21.13 qts	Actual Volume At Pitching:	21.13 qts
Target Volume Of Finished Beer:	20.08 qts	Actual Volume Of Finished Beer:	20.08 qts
Target Pre-Boil Gravity:	1.064 SG	Actual Pre-Boil Gravity:	-No Record-
Target OG:	1.074 SG	Actual OG:	-No Record-
Target FG:	1.010 SG	Actual FG:	-No Record-
Target Apparent Attenuation::	85.5 %	Actual Apparent Attenuation:	0.0 %
Target ABV:	8.5 %	Actual ABV:	0.0 %
Target ABW:	6.7 %	Actual ABW:	0.0 %
Target IBU (using Tinseth):	19.0 IBU	Actual IBU:	33.9 IBU
Target Color (using Morey):	37.8 SRM	Actual Color:	37.8 SRM
Target Mash Efficiency:	65.0 %	Actual Mash Efficiency:	0.0 %
Target Fermentation Temp:	64 degF	Actual Fermentation Temp:	64 degF

Fermentables

Ingredient	Amount	%	MCU	When
US Pilsen Malt	12.00 lb	73.8 %	2.3	In Mash/Steeped
German CaraMunich I	2.00 lb	12.3 %	13.2	In Mash/Steeped
Sugar - Candi Sugar Dark	1.00 lb	6.2 %	52.1	In Mash/Steeped
Belgian Special B	1.00 lb	6.2 %	27.8	In Mash/Steeped
German Carafa I	0.25 lb	1.5 %	15.9	In Mash/Steeped

Hops

Variety	Alpha	Amount	IBU	Form	When
Slovenian Styrian Goldings	4.5 %	1.00 oz	12.9	Bagged Pellet Hops	60 Min From End
German Hallertauer Hersbrucker	3.5 %	1.00 oz	6.1	Bagged Pellet Hops	20 Min From End

Other Ingredients

Ingredient	Amount	When

Yeast

White Labs WLP550-Belgian Ale

Water Profile

Target Profile:	No Water Profile Chosen
Mash pH:	5.2
pH Adjusted with:	Unadjusted

Total Calcium (ppm):	0	Total Magnesium (ppm):	0
Total Sodium (ppm):	0	Total Sulfate (ppm):	0
Total Chloride(ppm):	0	Total Bicarbonate (ppm):	0

Mash Schedule

Mash Type:	Full Mash
Schedule Name:	CAP (50-66C/122-149F)

Step Type	Temperature	Duration
Rest at	122 degF	15
Raise by infusion to	151 degF	1
Rest at	151 degF	60

Mash Notes

Boil Notes

Fermentation Notes

Packaging Notes

Tasting Notes

Reviews: BeerAlchemy and BeerAlchemy Touch

2012-01-02T14:13:00.000-06:00

I recently switched back to an iPhone from Androids. Why did I switch? Crappy battery life. That's another story for another day. Around the same time, my Dell laptop (which was only a year old) crapped out, so I bought a Mac. I had previously had a Mac but sticker shock drove me away. Anyhoo - I had been using BeerSmith (which is great) but found myself wanting for some OSX brewing software love.

Beer Alchemy has been all the talk lately, so I gave it a whirl. It has the distinct advantage of having an iOS app that can sync with the desktop version (or work on its own). The price is a bit steep at $29.95. It has the usual feature set - nice builtin ingredients list, mash profiles, etc. One thing that BeerSmith has that Beer Alchemy lacks is builting equipment profiles (dead space, thermal mass, etc.).

Clearly, the sync feature is great. The iOS application is very full featured with lots of builtin calculators for refractometer calculations, ABV, etc. One thing that's maddening about the iOS version is that adjustments of recipe parameters (IBU, OG, SRM) are all done with slider bars in the software. This makes it very difficult to get it set to the exact number you want. Also, it lacks a builtin countdown timer which I think would be an awesome addition (and one that I believe some Android brewing software has).

Also - note to others - if you've not used brewing software recently, make sure that the volumes that it's feeding you for your recipe are accurate for your equipment.

I learned this the hard way yesterday when I (ahem) made 3 gallons of dubbel.

Fortunately, topping up with water still got me close to my intended OG.

Would I recommend the software? Yes. Major limitations I've hit are above and workable.

Pizza

2011-12-18T15:41:00.000-06:00

Location:New York

Idiots

2011-11-26T07:08:00.002-06:00

Nothing I appreciate more than the fact that any low-grade idiot with a keyboard can post whatever they want on the internet. My latest find comes from "Anne F" and the Mannsfield-Storrs Patch (of idiots, one would assume). The article covers brining turkeys. I was looking for a decent brine recipe for Thankspigging.

To wit:
"In an era of health consciousness, high blood pressure and many out of shape, it seems lunacy for someone to recommend, and a responsible news service to report, a recipe that soaks a healthful food (turkey) in pure salt. Why not just take a syringe with the brine water and mainline it into a vein? Nutso!"

Yes, "Anne F", yes! The overwhelming evidence that salt is so terrible for you (please note my sarcasm). Dietary sodium intake has much contradictory evidence as to whether it worsens blood pressure. I'm also unaware of any evidence linking sodium intake with "out of shape". Further, when brining not all of the salt is absorbed into the meat.

Let's also not forget about evidence that turkey isn't really a "healthful food", oh and what about this, too? Let's also remember that cooking meat is also bad for you.

So let's all just gnaw on some bark! Congrats "Anne F" you are my idiot of the month (and in front running for idiot of the year).

This year's Thankspigging wines

2011-11-23T17:55:00.001-06:00

Plus Hickory smoked stout and Denny's Rye IPA.

Thankspigging

2011-11-23T08:17:00.002-06:00

Behold a new American holiday - Thankspigging!

Russia Classifies Beer as Alcoholic

2011-08-10T16:29:00.000-05:00

Russia Classifies Beer as Alcoholic: "

BBC News:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a bill that
officially classifies beer as alcoholic.

Until now anything containing less than 10% alcohol in Russia has
been considered a foodstuff.

I'm aghast.

Renaming illegally named files in Windows

2011-07-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

I tried and tried and google'd the hell out of it. The only reasonable way seems to be to burn a live CD of Linux. Shame nobody makes such a utility.

In which it is revealed that too many blog posts start with "In which it is..."

2011-07-09T09:35:00.003-05:00

There. Now go write something more creative.

Re: Expert help on Lifehacker (or why not to volunteer to be an expert)

2011-05-27T22:28:00.000-05:00

Hey [name removed to protect the innocent] -

Sorry for taking a while to get back to you.

I'm afraid there's no correct answer. Particularly for men - men can wipe however they want without any consequences other than social ill will from smelling bad. It's alleged that women should wipe front-to-back to avoid urinary tract infection. This certainly seems reasonable as it makes sense that keeping feces away from the female urethra would keep the area sterile (urine itself is sterile, after all). Unfortunately, there are no randomized, placebo-controlled studies looking into this that I am aware of.

In researching your question, I did come across some interesting facts about the history of toilet paper (there's a Wikipedia entry). Also, I enjoyed the humorous website http://howtowipeyourbutt.com/ in researching this piece. It almost looks like something from http://theoatmeal.com/, but it's not.

Anyway, hope this helps. As a gastroenterologist, believe it or not, it's a question that no patient has ever, ever asked me.

Best,

commander flatus

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 6:49 PM, [removed] <[removed]@lifehacker.com> wrote:

Hi [commander flatus],

Thanks for emailing in to volunteer your expertise. We're starting up a section next week called "Am I Doing This Right" (title not yet finalized), that takes basic stuff that you and I and everyone else does on a daily basis, and asks an expert if we are, in fact, doing it correctly.

Here's the question/activity I'm concentrating on first: wiping your butt. Silly topic, but one that's pretty interesting. How many people are doing it the "wrong" way? We'll find out.

So my question to you, as a medical professional, what is the "correct" way of wiping? Front to back, or back to front? And what are the medical reasons why and why not?

Feel free to write as much as you like, giving opinions, examples or even previous cases where you've encountered this. (No names necessary.)

Thanks for helping out Lifehacker! Don't forget to include any websites or links or info you'd like us to credit you under.

--
[removed contact info]

Abbott's HUMIRA® (Adalimumab) Meets Primary Endpoints In Phase III Ulcerative Colitis Study

2011-05-21T15:53:00.003-05:00

Abbott's HUMIRA® (Adalimumab) Meets Primary Endpoints In Phase III Ulcerative Colitis Study

There are a couple of things that strike me about this study:

Their placebo response rate is really, really low compared to other UC (and IBD) studies.
Their aggregate response rate of 16-17% is really pathetic, even compared to other studies of anti-TNF drugs.
I ain't writing adalimumab for UC based on this data.

Disclosure: I'm on their speaker's bureau and have given promotional talks for them. It's a good drug for Crohn's disease, but these data (which I suspect will lead to an FDA approved indication for ulcerative colitis) are very underwhelming. If I were the FDA, I would request another Phase III study.

Why I quit Wordpress

2011-05-21T15:46:00.000-05:00

I used to run my blog on Wordpress and hosted my site at Dreamhost (I would recommend Dreamhost without reservation, BTW). But I found I was spending lots of time doing updates and I really don't have time for that. I also frequently noticed that my posts would get spam inserted into them to manipulate search engines via SQL injection hacks. Annoying.

So I closed up my Wordpress install over there and came to Blogger (who I can bitch about, but they're free). I've also used Google Webmaster Tools (also free) and I have used the webmaster tools since back in the Wordpress days. I liked Wordpress, it was fun. Learned some CSS skills. I liked Gallery for sharing images too (but now I use Picasa).

Anyway, upon setting up my blog on blogger, I noticed that my traffic logs had some strange guests (Ukraine and Russia? see below - click to zoom):

Weird, right? So doing some digging I checked the webmaster tools site for evidence of stupidity and there it was under my crawl errors (again, click to zoom):

Some script kiddie website had figured out a way to insert their serialz in my Gallery. WTF?

I love free software, I've licensed stuff under the GPL that I've written. The problems are: difficulty of necessary upgrades being performed regularly by casual users and the lack of commercial impetus to make a proper product.

I'm sticking with big names and commercial software for the foreseeable future.

commander flatus' laws of internal medicine

2011-05-19T14:07:00.001-05:00

commander flatus' laws of internal medicine:

beer (and sometimes steroids) makes everything better
when faced with a consultation that you don't know what to do about, blame another organ/subspecialty with which you're not involved/responsible for
nausea and vomiting is (almost) never a good reason to call a gastroenterologist
some people just can't handle a tummy ache
(dr.) commander flatus' sign: a patient who presents with magic marker drawing on their body parts to illustrate where their pain is may need a psychiatry consultation in addition to a workup for their pain
when commander flatus leaves town, his patients will simultaneously crump. the likelihood of this occuring increases logarithmically as the purpose of the trip increases from cme to vacation.

(and now google's adsense will populate my blog with ads for medical malpractice attorneys)

The false economies of web reviews

2011-05-16T21:50:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder why you never really read a negative review of a product on websites? I used to. In fact, I fell victim to purchasing a few less-than-spectacular products based on reviews posted on websites I trusted.

Take, for example (because this is really easy), any of the books by Timothy Ferriss. In particular, the book "The 4-Hour Body" is notable given the large amount of online hype it generated, particularly on high-traffic websites like gizmodo, and lifehacker.com (where it got a full week of excerpts and glowing reviews). Unfortunately, most serious book critics - like the NYT - considered the book to be nothing more than a laughable bad joke. Why, then, the disparity?

First of all, we should acknowledge that in addition to being a confirmed narcissist (based on his own writing), and a likely sociopath, Timothy Ferriss has been called the greatest self-promoter in the world by Wired Magazine in 2008. The guy clearly has a forcible personality which, coupled with nearly delusional lifehacking writings can sell lotsa books.

The bigger issue here is how advertising on the web is structured, particularly as it relates to product reviews. See that link to Amazon to purchase "The 4-Hour Body" (please don't click it). If you were foolish enough to actually buy this book, I would get a cut of the sale. Big websites like gizmodo and lifehacker make gobs of money this way, so tend to put out positive reviews of products so that people reading will click the linky-link and buy the product.

This is why I wanted to review this book here briefly: don't buy it, it's shit. And also to point out that you can't trust online reviews, even from great sources - they're all tainted by the almighty dollar.

Review: Yeast by Zainasheff and White

2011-05-16T12:05:00.002-05:00

I bought this book because I wanted to (maybe) start doing some yeast ranching over at my place. See, I really love this Wyeast/Rogue Pacman yeast, but it's got very limited availability (special edition/once a year/blahblahblah). So I was hoping that this book would be a good one for the homebrewer that wants to get into yeast ranching to read.
Unfortunately, it's not. That's not to say it's not a great book (it is). Jamil Zainasheff has risen to the height of homebrewing royalty and is clearly a really smart guy. Chris White is the founder of White Labs, provider of pure liquid yeast cultures for homebrewers and commercial brewers. These guys are both experts in beer and brewing and the book is full of great information for beer geeks who really want a better understanding of yeast and fermentation. I would recommend it for the advanced homebrewer or commercial brewer. However, if you want resources on simple, reproducible yeast ranching, I would recommend the following (free) links instead and save your money for some other book or yeast ranching equipment.

Here you go:

The free information in those articles is much more practical and usable than the book. You will need a pressure canner like the one of the left here. I looked around at Wal-Mart and they don't really have anything suitable. I usually like to buy this kind of stuff at wally world because it's so ridiculously cheap.

The book is available here (Amazon).

The Great Blogger Outage of 2011

2011-05-14T08:37:00.003-05:00

Seems to have eaten two of my greatest posts ever. I am nagging them about getting me back up.

Eye-Fi Connect x2 Card

2011-05-06T11:01:00.003-05:00

I recently purchased a second one of these - they're relatively inexpensive now. I really liked the one I got for a point-and-shoot camera, and wanted to try on in my Nikon D80.

Setup is pretty easy, though I thought setting up the direct mode access with the new Android and iPhone/iPad apps was a little confusing. The software is OK, could be a bit better - the EyeFi helper app keeps crashing on me. My D80 also seems to be unable to complete and upload of a large batch of photos (about 100 JPG high resolution). I've even set the power settings as their support pages suggest. Sometimes, you just have to plug the card into a computer.

The are where it really shines, though, is the ability to instantly put pics on Picasa or other sites to share with other family members.

Find it here at Amazon, about $40 as of this writing. Size is pretty unimportant since the card has a feature that deletes pics off the card after uploading once you've hit a user-specified capacity. That's pretty cool.

Overall I'd give it a reserved recommendation. The software needs some improvement.

Hard cider

2011-04-29T10:25:00.001-05:00

It's about the easiest homebrewed beverage in the world to make:

5 gal unpasteurized cider from Whole Foods
2 quarts organic sour cherry juice
1 packet Lalvin V1116 yeast

This is a 6 gallon Better Bottle carboy.

Should be ready for Christmas.

Our logo...

2011-04-26T20:12:00.002-05:00

is back. It's an alchemy sign for alcohol. Happy to find it again sitting 'round the computer.

Flanders red ale

2011-04-17T12:28:00.001-05:00

This was my 100th batch. Getting a nice funky pedicle.