Category: Uncategorized

Our neighbor Lisa has two pugs. I’m not much of a dog person but I have to admit that pugs are kind of charming. They’re compact, good-natured, and so goofy-looking that it’s hard not to like them.

A couple of days ago, in a moment of weakness and insanity, Lisa agreed to board two other pugs–pugs belonging to friends of hers who were about to leave town on vacation and found out at the 11th hour that their kennel couldn’t take their pugs. So we now have four pugs of varying ages and dimensions next door. read more

There’s a neat video here of a touch-sensitive computer screen (“screen” in a loose sense) that can respond to multiple points of contact. This has been done before, but I’ve never seen it done so fluidly, and apparently the hardware is not terribly expensive. The guy makes some good points (briefly) about user interfaces; it is interesting to consider that the mouse/keyboard system we’re all used to really hasn’t changed in the ~25 years since it was invented by Xerox, and the QWERTY keyboard itself is much older. [Found via musicthing.] read more

I need to start compiling a list of all of dietary additives which (within my relatively brief lifetime) were touted as being good to eat but turned out to be bad to eat. The latest is soy, which besides being the obvious base of things like soy milk and veggie burgers, is in 60% of all processed food sold in Britain, a statistic which is presumably about the same in the US. It turns out that the stuff is loaded with plant estrogens, which means that if you (for example) feed soy milk to your baby, you’re giving him/her the equivalent of a whopping big dose of birth-control pills. The article is here. It’s yet another good reason to not eat processed foods, just in case you don’t have enough already. read more

I’m tentatively turning the commenting mechanism back on for this site. I’m trying a security plug-in that theoretically makes it much more difficult for comment spammers to exploit the site. If it turns out to not work, I’ll turn comments off again. We’ll all see how it goes, I suppose.

Another entry for my hypothetical list of Things That Couldn’t Exist Without the Web: a site of photos of cats that look like Hitler. Who would have guessed? Appropriately enough, its URL is http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/. [Found via Lisa Randall’s blog. Thanks, Lisa!]

Paper Jade now carries several kinds of fine stationery made from Japanese paper. It’s nice stuff; I’m particularly fond of the Two-Tone packages.

I’ve been waiting for something like this. It grabs random images from Flickr and fuses them together into a sort of endless, plotless movie. Lovely.

If you’ve been thinking that it’s been unusually hot recently, you’re right, according to the people who keep track of such things. It’s also been dry, unless you happen to live on or near the west coast. Now my utility bills are higher in the summer than in the winter, thanks to having to run the air conditioning basically all the time. The heat doesn’t bother me too much, but Tracie basically becomes immobile in temperatures above the mid 70s.

I found a toad in the front flower garden this morning. It’s the second one I’ve found in front of the house recently. I don’t know whether they’re coming from the creek behind the house, the lakes across the street, or somewhere else. I transported the first one to the creek, figuring that he(? she?) would be happier near some water. I left the second one alone, figuring that maybe he wanted to be there, or at least he could find his way to some place that he preferred. As Tracie said, he had a reason for being there. That led me to ask (rhetorically) whether toads have reasons for their actions. In any case, he was pretty cute. read more

To say that it’s been hot and dry around here recently is something of an understatement. Yesterday the temperature peaked at just under 100 degress Farenheit and the humidity dropped to 5%. There is a nifty website here that provides weather data from sensors a couple of miles from our house. (It is more accurate than the NWS data because there is a small ridge between us and the nearest NWS station.) The following graph is from yesterday:

Judging from how the humidity graph flattens out, I suspect the sensor’s lower limit is 5% and the humidity actually fell below that. read more