Things I tripped over on my way to the internet

This reminded me of these awesome pretzel-like things Stacy made the other day. I love when she send me pictures of the stuff she makes (despite taking care of two kids!) while I’m at work!

Here’s the recipe she used. (You can change the language in the left sidebar.) She made some with ham and cheese and some with cinnamon and raisins.

Real-Life R.O.U.S. Found)in an extinct volcano crater in Papua New Guinea.

BBC’s video player goes up to 11.

It would take many meals to convince me that the best barbecue and way to eat it is not pulled pork over rice with some butter and extra Lexington-style sauce.

In both reading and writing, I’ve been neglecting blogs and RSS in favor of Twitter and, to a much lesser degree, Facebook. I’ll try to find the right balance but you folks that don’t post anything anywhere, change that.

There are friends of yours that want to connect with you, that are interested in what you’re interested in, and these tools are an unprecedented means of, not just personal broadcasting/publishing, but connecting and communicating and fellowship.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest.

This swine flu thing really isn’t that big of a deal(1) but governments and health organizations are treating it as if it is in order to practice for the inevitable pandemic that is a big deal.

1: “But at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, … Angus Nicoll, head of the agency’s influenza program, said he was seeing ‘something that looks more like an ordinary influenza, with a lot of people infected, but very few people being sick enough to end up in hospital or die.’ Mexico, he noted, has reclassified some deaths attributed to swine flu as due to other causes.” [source]

crazynutjob:

First, from the CDC:

Can people catch swine flu from eating pork?

No. Swine influenza viruses are not transmitted by food. You can not get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork and pork products is safe. Cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160°F kills the swine flu virus as it does other bacteria and viruses.

That is a completely contradictory sentence. If the virus is not transmitted by food then the only way to get it from undercooked food is if the virus is on the surface. In that case you only need to cook the surface to a temperature of 160°F—which happens in seconds on a hot pan— and the internal temperature is irrelevant. Mixed message indeed.

I’ve been pondering this post for a few days but now it’s official. Now that Martha Stewart has joined Twitter, if you haven’t secured your username yet, you better hurry up and grab it. It’s going to spread and even if you don’t want to use it now there will come a time that you do want to and if you haven’t gotten your name already it will be gone. There’s been a dramatic increase in the buzz and adoption of Twitter just in the last few weeks (based on my own anecdotal observations).

It’s already been happening with Facebook and I think the same thing is going to happen with Google but that’s a little farther out (but when it happens it will happen fast so you should go ahead and grab a Gmail account too—those are already hard to find a good name for but put some time into picking one you can live with—I’m not kidding—for the rest of your life).

marco:

As conducted with a sample size of one over a scientifically significant 4-day trial:

New Sudafed (phenylephrine)

• Pros: No side effects.
• Cons: Doesn’t work.

Meth Sudafed (pseudoephedrine)

• Pros: Works great. Can breathe through both nostrils for most of the day.
• Cons: Dizzy, dazed, can’t do much else except lie on the couch while breathing clearly through both nostrils.

Tylenol

• Pros: Works moderately. Generally mutes some of the unpleasant effects of having a cold, such as minor aches and a slight fever.
• Cons: Limited in scope. Doesn’t completely fix anything.

Natural stuff (vitamin C, zinc, herbal “remedies”, etc.)

• Pros: No side effects.
• Cons: No effects.

Coffee

• Pros: Actually works as a mild decongestant and a general feel-a-bit-better drug in small doses.
• Cons: Effects are short-lived.

Letting your body do its job for a few days

• Pros: No side effects. Actually works.
• Cons: No drug companies or natural-remedy slingers make any money off of you.

I have a much better understanding of the over-the-counter pharmaceutical industry now.

Some good info here. Also this:The case against all-in-one cold medicines.

What the heck are “likes” doing on the Facebook News Feed?

Why do G-rated movies have to be so scary?

How to help your child learn to read.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

—Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) Lettres provinciales.

I’ve been looking for the source of this quote for a long time and now, via esquareda, this page provides what looks like a pretty thorough collection of the variations and original sources. Here are some of the others:

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” —Henry David Thoreau

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” —Marcus T. Cicero

“You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.” —Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.” —Mark Twain

Sorry for the flurry of quotes here. I’ve had a stack of bookmarks that I haven’t had a chance to post lately and I wanted to push that awesome video off the front page where it annoyingly insists on auto-playing. (Seriously, though, you should go watch it again. It’s awesome.)

via hilker & davereed:

Please, save the life of a tree, and find a dealer of live Christmas trees in your area. The tree comes in a planter, can keep in the house up to a week before Christmas. You can decorate it like normal, then, on December 26, simply move it to the back porch. The tree will survive in the planter for several years, so you can bring it back indoors for the next two Christmases, and then you simply plant it in your yard where it will live out its days.

I don’t understand this at all. We went to an area called Apple Hill last weekend—along with hundreds of other people—and brought back a Christmas tree that we cut down ourselves at a Christmas tree farm. This is one of the best parts of the holidays and one of the best days of the year.

Many hundreds of people have been going to this same area for many dozens of years and doing the same thing, year after year. And yet there is no shortage of Christmas trees anywhere in the State of California. It’s almost as if they are some kind of renewable resource.

This argument is like saying you should raise your own cows and chickens so you can enjoy many years of them as pets before you enjoy them as food. And somehow this would save the life of something that would not have existed if it was not raised for the express purpose of being used. Or something.