Evolutionary Difficulties

I understand that the amorphophallus titanum in Switzerland is about to bloom. That is the gigantic flower that looks like a penis and smells like death, for the unaware.But here's what gets me: I understand that the flower, over time, has evolved to smell like death to attract flesh flies and carrion beetles which pollinate it. It's large spathe is a deep red color to resemble meat. And during blooming it keeps its temperature up to around mammalian...

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TAE's DIY Arduino Sous Vide Cooker - Part VI: Ambrosia

Just on a whim, earlier this week I bought a couple 8 oz. "ball tip" steaks at the meat market. I'm not familiar with the cut, but I had a feeling it was the cheapest crap on the cow because it was only $5/lb. I figured, if my Sous Vide cooker could save this cut of meat...imagine of what else it is capable. I took the steaks home and dussied them up with some Durkee 'Kansas City Style' (of course) dry rub. Then I vacuum sealed them in ziploc, following...

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Your Phone vs. Occam's Razor

I'm sure that Apple wants to destroy civilization. At least that is how most people see it.Oh no, the iPhone is tracking your location (and lo and behold Android phones too) all the time! They could have sent The Man to pick you up in a black van at any moment! They're in "cahoots" with Big Brother!I bet they're going to use this info to target you for more evil, more personalized ads and you'll be forced to buy things locally which might accidentally stimulate the local economy and help out your neighbors! NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!!!!!1!Back in...

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Because it's "4/20" - A quick word on drug legalization

Last week Conor Friedersdorf asked this question:Let's look at some numbers. 2,977 people were murdered on September 11, 2001. How many folks died from the Mexican Drug War in 2010?More than 12,000.That suggests another question. Would you rather legalize most drugs... or see the equivalent carnage of four 9/11s happen every year from fighting the black market? That isn't a hypothetical. It's a real choice.So I emailed him, and asked him my own question:Something like 35,000 people a year die in America from vehicular collisions. So I have a question...

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Quote for the Day

"Scientifically speaking, it’s only a matter of time before the drones become self-aware and kill us all." - Spencer Ackerm...

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Deep Thought

At my level, trying to dip my feet in American politics only gets me scalded. Every single tim...

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TAE's DIY Arduino Sous Vide Cooker - Part V: The Software

Here's a graph of my temperature curve and stability at 130 degrees over about 4 hours. If you look closely you can see that upon reaching 130, it actually only needed to kick on the heat for 30 seconds about once an hour. The average temperature over the whole 4 hour run was 130.7 degrees. That's pretty damn cool, if you ask me. Click on it for a larger version.Alright, without further ado, in the spirit of open source, here's my code. No PID control...

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TAE's DIY Arduino Sous Vide Cooker - Part IV: Images

So at long last, I have the sous vide cooker cleaned up to a point where I am willing to show it to the public. The first several runs, the wiring looked like a bird's nest so I wasn't exactly proud of it. Plus, I kept switching the relays so I figured I shouldn't photograph it until I get a finalized hardware setup. Here it is. As before, all these images can be clicked on for a much larger, clearer shot.This first image shows the cooker. Yes,...

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On Birtherism, Ctd

In case you didn't believe me, here's Mickey Kaus today, being deliriously racist: "Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history." And....don...

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Curbing College Costs by Ending University Athletics

You may have thought I was joking, earlier, when I suggested that Universities could reduce college costs by cutting their athletic programs...but I wasn't. The reasons for this are that Freddie's Five Ways to Cut College Costs are all perfect examples of athletic department waste or strategies to cut school costs via ending athletics.So here are TAE's Corollary to Freddie's Five Ways to Cut College Costs:1. The bureaucracies of athletic departments are absurd. For example, the athletic department of Ohio State lists 458 people. This includes:...

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On Birtherism

I have some cousins. Their parents (my aunt and uncle, obviously) were both opthalmologists in the Air Force..."flight surgeons" if you will. At various points in my life, they've lived in the Philippines, Texas, Boston, Arlington VA, DC, and Germany (I am probably missing one). They have taking regular trips as a family to at least 5 other countries that I am aware of.Yet, no one I can think of would ever accuse them of being foreign nationals. All three of them look about as anglo-saxon as can be; two are blondes, one a redhead, and all three...

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The Future Loses

The Right clearly is defending the rich, or business, or corporate America, or all of the above, with its budget proposals that include ludicrous tax cuts and even-more-ludicrous cuts to public welfare systems. The Left, on the other hand, is defending the poor and the middle class by proposing tax hikes to the rich. Both sides are defending the Defense budget, indomitable and untouchable. And yet where are the defenders of the environment? Where are the defenders of science research?Between Obama's budget, Simpson-Bowles, and The Ryan Plan all...

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A Better Way To Cut College Costs

End University athletics....

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Curbing College Costs

I'm pretty much on the same page as Freddie in regards to his ideas for curbing college costs, except for one thing. Freddie writes: Penalize taking longer than four years; incentivize taking less. Student debt figures are inflated by the fact that so many students take more than four years to finish college. Since there clearly isn't much in the way of social expectations pushing students to finish in the traditional four years, it may be time for schools who have to start to enact penalties for students taking longer than four years.It took...

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TAE's DIY Arduino Sous Vide Cooker - An Update

I have come to the conclusion that the Crydom D1D12 relay is unsuitable (I believe it is actually rated for 100VDC, not AC), burnt out, or both. Upon connection to AC wall power, it immediately tries to power the heating element. Upon putting 5 volts to the DC side of the relay, it pulls so much amperage through the element that the water actually visibly swirls from the convection, and the lights in my garage dim. I have wisely disconnected it. I believe I will be replacing it with a Sharp S108T01, which is rated at 120 VAC, 8 Amps.When I run...

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In which I have to disagree with Jonah Lehrer, yet again...

Lehrer suggests that high Wonderlic scores are slightly negatively correlated to quarterback performance:Consider a recent study by economists David Berri and Rob Simmons. While they found that Wonderlic scores play a large role in determining when QBs are selected in the draft -- the only equally important variables are height and the 40-yard dash -- the metric proved all but useless in predicting performance. The only correlation the researchers could find suggested that higher Wonderlic scores actually led to slightly worse QB performance,...

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The Giving Tree/Charlie Bucket's Grandpa

I've always found the movie Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory nearly unwatchable. I realize it is a cult classic and yes, Gene Wilder is brilliant and amazing. The score and set are genius. But then there's Charlie's Grandpa. The old man is apparently bed-ridden at the beginning of the tale. But, as most people know, once Charlie discovers the "Golden Ticket" and wants to take his grandpa (not his hardworking mother, of course) to the Wonka Factory, Grandpa miraculously climbs out of bed and in the space of about 1 minute, is singing and dancing...

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TAE's DIY Arduino Sous Vide Cooker - Part III: The Schematic

Alright, there's not really an easy way for me to do this because my skills at drawing schematics are incredibly terrible, so in this case I am just going to hand draw it on a piece of paper and then scan that into here as a pdf or jpeg. Forgive my inability to schematize.You can see previous entries leading up to this one here and her...

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Vanity

My sitemeter has just informed me that I am now up to a daily average of 45 unique visitors. To the 45 of you, thank...

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Emo Moment of the Day

Now the years are rolling by me, they are rocking evenlyAnd I am older than I once was, and younger than I'll beThat's not unusual. No it isn't strange;After changes upon changes we are more or less the same.After changes, we are more or less the sam...

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Matt Yglesias

Matt Yglesias describes the most irritating thing about himself in one sentence: I got the worst grade of my whole college career in Theda Skocpol’s class on American social policy, and that’s never stopped me from writing about American social policy.That's his advice for college students? Keep doing what you're terrible at and eventually you'll get paid to keep doing it as a profession?...

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Gas Tax, Ctd

Here's the biggest problem with gas taxes: it causes the government to incentivize driving in order to increase gas tax revenue. The point of a gas tax would be to reduce net miles driven by taxpayers. Yet that would cause a decrease in net gas tax revenue, which would be caustic to government coffers. Therefore, the government would have a fiscal interest in tax payers continuing to drive.With a gas tax in place, a city would be very smart to scatter its tourist attractions willy nilly around the perimeter of the city, and then not connect them...

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Holy Cow What A Pinhead: Gas Tax Edition

Logan Penza:A gas tax increase doesn’t kidney punch consumers as much as in previous years.  When gas was $1.75 a gallon, a gas tax increase looked pretty nasty, as it would proportionally add a great deal to the cost of transportation.  But now that fuel-efficient cars are far more common and gas prices are already higher, even a large increase in the gas tax would not proportionally raise transportation costs all that much.So if the government put a $0.50 tax on top of every gallon...somehow that's different to my checkbook when...

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The Fallacy of Oil Prices Spurring Mass Transit

Many liberals, especially Matt Yglesias, have this hard-core, no-holds-barred belief that raising the price of gas, either by natural economic forces or by artificial ones like increased gas taxes, will cause people to agglomerate in the cities and/or use mass transit more.Ideas like this are almost always forwarded by people living in cities with at least some semblance of existing mass transit. And worse yet, they do not produce any sort of solution for:1. Short-term personal economic shock due to rapidly rising gas prices2. Methods to quickly...

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TAE's DIY Steampunk Goggles

Long ago, I promised that my next DIY project I'd put on here would be steampunk goggles...aka the thing you are morally required to make first for a steampunk costume. However, that was 6 odd months ago and because I'm embarassed it took so long, I thought I'd give you all a DOUBLE SHOCK and post TWO pairs of steampunk goggles......well, actually 1.5 pairs of steampunk goggles. But stay with me, the second pair is going to be epic.(By the way, you...

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The Ethics of (not) Voting, Ctd

Ilya Somin suggests individual voting is like individual reduction of air pollution:There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny...

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