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July 29, 2005
Hot idea for chilli peppers
Just came across this story on a great agricultural innovation:
Key to elephant conservation is 'in the sauce'
Dr. Loki Osborn has been researching ways of preventing crop destruction by elephants and other animals in the Zambezi Valley. It turns out that chilli peppers are an excellent deterrent and they can be harvested for creating sauces and jellies. Thus, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust was born.
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2005
Baseball nibbler
The Internet is awash in baseball sites. Scores, statistics, analysis, blogs -- the list goes on and on. But one baseball site that just made Yahoo!'s pick of the week is a little different.
This Great Game is a web site that actually started out as a coffee table book about major league ball in the twentieth century. The content got so huge (and the estimated price for the book so high) that the authors, Eric Gouldsberry and Ed Attanasio, decided to transform it into a web site.
What I really like about this site is the esthetic feel of it. It kind of does fell like I'm flipping through a book, with a lot of attention paid to layout and design. All of the content is nicely grouped into a handful of sections. The best section, in my opinion, is The Yearly Reader. Each decade and every season is introduced with an interesting narrative -- a capsule of the decade or year that was. These are not exhaustive tomes, but concise and entertaining pieces that are perfect for a person like me who is more of a "nibbler" of information.
As I said, the seasons are grouped by decade. The 1910s are dubbed The Feds, The Fight, and The Fix; the 1960s: Welcome to My Strike Zone. As you delve into a season -- let's take last year's Four Score and Six Years Hence as an example -- you get links to the 2004 Standings, the Leaders & Numbers, and It Happened in 2004 (that last one always loads as really tiny, but point your cursor over it and click to enlarge).
There are other nice pieces, such as interviews and opinion essays (it's a new site, so there's only one essay at this point, about why the Rockies will never win a World Series). There's also a daily fix, called The Daily Comebacker, that highlights the hitter and pitcher of the day, among other stories, like the Derrek Lee Triple Crown Watch (go D. Lee!). And if you want some information fast, you can always do a quick look-up in the Index. Plus, it sounds like they're hoping to expand, putting up more features, photographs, and memorabilia.
Play ball!
Posted by rigd0003 at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
Shall we talk about the weather?
We've had some fairly good storms lately. (Not quite as dramatic as in this picture, which comes from an Australian outfit called ThunderBolt Tours.) I used to get frustrated trying to get weather information. Weather.com seems to be increasingly user un-friendly and hard to navigate to find what I want. In a spectacular "oh, duh!" moment, I realized I could get my information straight from the source -- the National Weather Service.
The NWS has great maps and radar, all integrated into the local forecast page and links to other information are easily identified in the left-hand column. It did take a bit of initial orientation, but I use it regularly now and I've no need to go anywhere else for weather information.
The home page has a map of watches and warnings for the entire nation. This is also where you can get current information on severe weather like hurricanes and tropical storms. To find your city, type it into the search engine at the left. This is the easiest way to find forecasts (local folks, here's Minneapolis and Saint Paul). The Forecasts--Local link (also on the left) has you clicking through several pages (and sometimes clicking on a particular county in a state map) to get you down to the city level, so it's not as convenient.
The radar images are fun. When you click on the Loop link, it loads a series of images (using Java) over the past hour and runs them in sequence so you can see how a storm is developing. The times shown are in Universal Time, Coordinated (UTC). It's basically the atomic clock equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is five hours ahead of Central Daylight Time.
As I've explored the NWS web site, I've realized they have an insane amount of information.
· Want to know which rivers are above flood stage?
· What about the air quality conditions today? (Click on "Go to State" in the upper-left of the map to change the region.)
· Is the West still experiencing a drought?
· Did you know that this past May-June was the 9th wettest for Minnesota?
· This past January, the Twin Cities and Southern Minnesota got less than 40% of the average monthly snowfall.
· Lots more climate and temperature facts can be found at the climate monitoring site!
Truely, the NWS is a great service to the public!
Political aside: Unfortunately, Senator Richard Santorum thinks the NWS's bang-up job takes away opportunities for private companies to make a buck, so he authored this bill. Fortunately, I think it was done to appease the private companies that are based in his state of Pennsylvania, without the intention that the bill would really go anywhere, since there's been no action since it was introduced. (By the way, if you've never been to the GovTrack web site, you should check it out. You can search for representatives and monitor the bills that they've sponsored. Very cool!)
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:23 AM | Comments (1)
July 19, 2005
The joys of a tandem
The '05 Cannondale (we have an '03). Isn't it beautiful?
My husband and I were out for a long ride on Saturday. It had been awhile since we had been able to get out on our tandem, and I was looking forward to working off some nervous jitters before a big conference presentation I had on Sunday. It was super hot and even though we had water with us, it still feels like I drank a gallon and a half when we got back home.
After recovering, I was able to reflect on the joys of riding on a tandem:
· Conversing is easy -- the other person is only a few inches away.
· The more powerful rider never gets too far ahead; the less powerful one never falls too far behind.
· Wow appeal! I love people's positive reaction to the relatively rare sight of a tandem. And kids love us! (Minor adoration is still adoration...)
· Steady on up the hills. Hills are tough, but with two people cranking you get a pretty steady momentum up the hill. Even if one person momentarily falters, that steady momentum keeps you on track and helps you recover.
· Speed demon down the hills. Thanks to the laws of physics, our doubled mass on a single machine means increased velocity down those hills. We can really get flying!
Other things I've learned:
› You really have to communicate with your partner. Shifting your weight, coasting, getting out of the saddle - all those things you do on your solo bike without thinking need to be communicated so the other can prepare.
› You know someone is a tandem rider when they use the term solo bike. I'd never heard of this term until I became a tandem owner. Now I use it all the time.
› The person in front is called the captain; the person in back is called the stoker.
› I'm the stoker because I'm much less experienced than my husband. If I had a dollar for every time someone quipped to me, "So, do you sit back there and relax while he does all the work?", I'd be able to afford our dream tandem. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But my husband and I weigh about the same, so if I don't work, we don't go anywhere -- period.
› Tandems, like solo bikes, come in different styles for different uses. When we were first thinking about getting a tandem, we rented one at a state park we were visiting and took it for a spin. I think it was a Schwinn cruiser -- big tires, big saddles, upright position, and heavy frame. By the end of two hours I was beat and thinking a tandem wasn't a great idea. When we got home, we test-drove some light-weight road tandems -- huge difference!
› If you're interested in learning more, one of the best books we've found is The Tandem Book by Angel Rodriguez and Carla Black.
Happy trails!
Posted by rigd0003 at 12:24 PM | Comments (1)
Blogging and the workplace, revisited
Thanks to a comment on my earlier post, Naomi has pointed me to some good resources on blogging in the workplace and how to blog anonymously. First, the EFF story, How to Blog Safely has some good tips and talks about anonymizing technologies (never knew there were such things). There are links to more good stuff at the bottom of the story, including CNET's Guide to workplace blogging that is in Q&A format and includes reasons why you might want to use those anonymizing technologies.
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2005
Star Wars Fan Films
I'm a Star Wars fan, but I've just realized I'm not a fan. I'm so far out of the culture loop it took a foreign news site to educate me about fan films! I really enjoyed reading the recent BBC article on a new fan film, Star Wars:Revelations [note: direct link hasn't been connecting, perhaps their bandwidth has been overwhelmed?].
This 40-minute film was created and crewed by professionals volunteering their time and expertise. Shane Felix, a director, and his wife, a professional costume designer, put up the $20,000 to make the film and drafted other professionals for the 3-year project. More about the film and mirror sites for download can be found on a main Star Wars fan film site, theForce.net.
Another fun fan film site is atom films where they feature the 2005 Star Wars Fan Film Award Winners. I've got to check out the Trump show spoof, Sith Apprentice and movie spoof, Anakin Dynamite
Dynamite got mixed reviews, but this picture is hilarious enough to make me give it a go!
Posted by rigd0003 at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2005
Blogging and the job search -- incompatable?
UPDATE: See Naomi's comment for link to good information on anonymous blogging...
An interesting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Learning, thanks to Perry of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
The article, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," by Ivan Tribble (pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, U.S.A) describes the author's experience on his college's faculty hiring committee. The committee found out about the applicant's blogs through interviews, applications, and the help of Google. But after surveying the blogs of their applicants, they came away with a decidedly negative opinion. They found a range of things that concerned them, including one applicant who misrepresented his research and another whose real professional interests were far from that of the open position. Their conclusion:
Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.
Perry brings up some interesting points on this in her post, so I won't re-hash that here, except for a few quick points:
· I'd bet that none of the hiring committee had a blog and that none had read a blog before this experience
· Anyone who rants on his or her blog -- especially about coworkers -- better have an anonymous blog (and the UThink blogs here at the U of M are not anonymous)
· The most worrisome part of this article was the statement that:
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself [emphasis added]. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.
In essence, guilt by association. As if I don't have enough job search anxiety as it is...
Posted by rigd0003 at 06:29 PM | Comments (2)
July 08, 2005
TerraPass: clean up after your car...
I came across a short news item in this month's Wired magazine about a way to offset the carbon dioxide your car emits by funding projects that reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions.
The project is called TerraPass. They create a way for individuals to help finance projects that reduce carbon dioxide by having members pay for the greenhouse gases they are producing by driving around in their car. In essence, TerraPass is allowing individuals to get in on the carbon emissions free market trading that was part of the Kyoto Protocol.
On their web site there is a calculator for estimating the amount of carbon dioxide generated per year for a given make and model of car and the average annual mileage. Our manual transmission Honda Civic emits about 5800 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. TerraPass estimates it can fund programs that prevent the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from being emitted for about $30 a year.
They have four classes of memberships based on fuel efficiency: Hybrid, Efficient, Standard, and Performance (SUV). The Performance pass is the most expensive $80 a year and is off-setting about 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. Members receive a bumper sticker and a window decal, presumably alerting the crazed person that is about to key your SUV (or bash it with a baseball bat) that "Yes, I am emitting greenhouse gases, but I'm paying for them!" (Of course, there's still the carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and nitrogen compounds to worry about, among other things, that all petroleum-fueled cars emit...) All cynicism aside, I think it's a cool idea. And since my family still relies on the car quite a bit, I'm considering becoming a member.
TerraPass has made some interesting investments. They're divided into three categories:
· Clean energy -- including a wind farm in Dodge Center, Minnesota
· Industrial efficiency -- trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange
· Greenhouse gas -- bacterial digestion of manure on a California dairy farm to prevent methane emissions
Or they could just start paying bicycle commuters directly!
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)
July 06, 2005
Reference eBooks through University library
Here's a nice reference option I stumbled upon at the U of Minnesota's libraries that I thought I'd share.
I'm doing a little preliminary data analysis now. Well, mostly cleaning up the database and seeing what's there. I decided to use MS Access for these simple database management tasks. It's been a long while since I've used Access and I forgot some of the basic language the program uses for running queries. I wasn't up for trying to navigate the program's "help" so I did a little search on the University library's web page. I thought I might dash over to the library and look a few things up. It turns out I didn't have to leave my chair...
The library has a subscription to netLibrary.com, an eBook web site with a built-in reader and note-taker. I could just "check out" an Access reference book and do a search for the query language I was looking for right on my laptop. So cool! But there are some drawbacks. Here are some pointers:
· You need to have a University account (except for the public titles--see below).
· In addition, you need to create a separate netLibrary account to read the eBooks -- see this FAQ for instructions.
· Mostly, the library's eBooks are reference and how-to books, although netLibrary has 3400 books that are publicly accessible to everyone.
· The search function at netLibrary is good, but the browsing function is a bit limited. You can browse titles under broad categories like Agriculture, Arts, Chemistry, etc., but it doesn't seem like all 7411 available books (including the public ones) fit under these categories.
· Once you find a title you're interested in, you can add it to your list for easy reference or check it out immediately (under the "eContent Details" tab). Only one person can read a certain title at a time, so netLibrary manages this by allowing you access to it for 4-hour intervals.
· The reading interface is less than ideal. Your browser screen is split into two panes -- a tool pane on the left and the book content pane on the right. While you can slide the divider to make the book content pane larger, it still doesn't seem like enough room for large books like computer program manuals.
· Some of the features: the ability to add notes (limited to a title and 500 word content); a content search function; and an integrated dictionary, encyclopedia, web, and eContnet search functions by highlighting a word and right-clicking.
Happy reading!
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:49 AM | Comments (2)