Foods have a property I call “reliciousness.” This is a food’s ability to retain (or in some cases improve) its appeal upon reheating or re-serving.

Here is the arbitrary range I’ve defined for documenting reliciousness:
0 - if a food is a zero, that means don’t get a doggie bag. reheating it will not result in food.
10 - reheating brings this food back to 100% of its original appeal and deliciousness.

Fries have a notoriously low reliciousness. They are unquestionably a 0. Those mutant fries you can get with batter on them (such as the ones you get at Burger King) *might* constitute a 1.

Lasagna is incredibly relicious. In some cases, letting the sauce and the noodles get acquainted in the fridge causes the leftovers to taste better than the original serving. Lasagna = 11.

Pizza is an obviously relicious food.

Toast is not relicious at all. Unless you like your toast burnt.

Perhaps fried beans are so relectable that they are only ever served as refried beans. har har.

One major synonym for relicious is relectable.

Yesterday China successfully tested its first anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) by blowing one of its own aged weather satellites (Feng Yun, or “wind and cloud,” according to the NYTimes) out of the sky (BBC, Aviation Week). The missile had no explosive warhead, and merely disabled its target by force of collision. This is disturbing in itself, of course, but equally disturbing are the implications for future escalation of space-borne weaponry by other militant nations with space technology (US, Russia, China, India). Especially disturbing was the mention of ground based anti-satellite lasers thought to be under development by the US Air Force. Such lasers supposedly achieve long-distance energy transmission by utilizing adaptive optics technology, pioneered by astrophysicists to improve our vision of celestial bodies by compensating for atmospheric distortion with rapidly moving flexible mirrors (work on these weapons is apparently underway at our own Lawrence Livermore National Labs). All this makes me terribly sad.

It also brings to mind two questions:

Continue reading ‘Death to Wind & Cloud: ASAT, Silent Sky, and the Lure of Uninvention’

During my trip to the Philippines, I was surprised to hear various locals voice opinions on world issues, particularly global warming. But the general tone of the Filipino people tended to be either cautious ignorance (”I don’t know, but I guess it’s bad”) or grave concern (”Our country is going to suffer if the world powers don’t do something”). I obviously didn’t get a full sense of the Filipino public, but to me it seemed that they were more level-headed about it, free of the misplaced angst of the American public. And, regretfully, it is the American public, with its carbon clown feet, that needs to do the most about the issue.

In the heat of our anger, are we Americans simply less energy efficient in how we approach our environmental risks? Would calming the rage and depoliticizing the issue help our race with the Doomsday Clock?

Continue reading ‘the heat of anger is an indicator of inefficiency’

Because “toast” is a sadly underutilized tag on this site.

This toaster is designed to engage the user, re-invigorating the social context of toasting by questioning everything about what we toast with today. I was also keen to make playful object to be proud of having on your breakfast table.

Via boingboing

Clive Thompson (author of the recent NYTimes Magazine article, “Open-Source Spying“) is writing an article for Wired about “radical transparency”, the idea that releasing more information about your efforts to achieve a goal will improve the quality of the result. Think abstract model of things like crowdsourcing, folksonomies, (successful) wikis, etc. But the upshot is, he’s soliciting input on the article as he is writing it (it’s about transparency, dur). His three premises are:

• secrecy is dead (hiding things is hard these days)
• tap the hivemind (big groups can do more than small groups)
• reputation is everything (Google == reputation assessment service)

So if you have an opinion / thought / input of any kind, you can leave him a comment.

His Jobsness announced the long-speculated iPhone at the MacWorld keynote this morning (Engadget had text coverage if the keynote is busy), and well, it looks awesome. Multi-touch interface similar to that of the much linked work of Jeff Han at NYU, phone, wifi, 2MP camera, movies, music, 8GB of storage, all running on OS X. Pretty much the ideal portable, even at $500-$600, on Cingular, and not appearing until June.

So, thoughts? How might this “change the game” for mobile computing, CMC, interface design, software engineering, the computer industry, and all the other things we care about? What does or could suck about this device (aside from signing up for Cingular)? Since it runs full-blown OS X and does email/www/IM and, with the help of a peripheral or two, could theoretically hook up to a keyboard/monitor/mouse setup, I could even see this thing replacing my laptop (assuming I bought a more robust desktop system for “serious” stuff).

UPDATE (1.11.07): My friend JD has summarized a few drawbacks of the iPhone, and has even done us the favor of linking to a refutation.

Inner City Youth, London is a photo essay by Simon Wheatley, depicting its namesake and discussing their lives and the day-to-day of London’s grime^? scene in 2005. I’m always surprised to see how American culture gets refracted, refactored, and reflected abroad. I was also kind of offended that Wheatley at once lauds hip-hop as a vital cultural force and one of the few positive things in the bleak lives of the grime community, and then turns around and blames American “cultural imperialism” for engendering false hope and celebrating gangsterism. It’s like video game alarmists who think Doom caused Columbine. If info consumers aren’t savvy enough to consume with a grain of salt, then it’s their communities that have failed them, not the media (IMO). Then again, I haven’t lived a life even remotely like that of the urban poor, so my words count for squat.

(In other hip-hop mutation news, Nerdcore Rising looks like another, better nerdcore documentary)

Via Digg, trailers via Penny Arcade

edge.org has posted their Annual Question for 2007: what are you optimistic about? As usual, many are predictable (celebrity athiest Daniel Dennett and nerd prince Cory Doctorow among them) or cloyingly meta (“The Optimism of Scientists”, “Optimism…”), but here are few trends or individual responses I thought were cool.

Secular humanist cheerleading. Plenty (too many to link) of articles touting the final triumph of rationality over willful ignorance and religion (no, seriously, you guys, this time. You guys). The Edge’s bullpen of bigheads is, of course, wildly skewed, but the fact that this message was so oft repeated within their sample still seems interesting.

Evidence. Ok, this is a subset of the secular humanist cheerleading, but I thought it was notable that both Craig Venter and Clay Shirky were both optimistic about the importance of evidence in our lives (also Bart Kosko and others). I don’t really agree, since I think evidence, even when it is good and available, will always take more effort to understand and interpret than entertainment. But time will tell.

Continue reading ‘What are you optimistic about?’