Starbucks Frappuccino drinks are my stress beverage of choice. They’re also pretty expensive. To get around that, I did what I think anyone would do – checked the internet. I found several ways to make a frappuccino, and tried this one.

• 1/2 cup fresh espresso (chilled)
• 2 1/2 cups low fat milk (2%)
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon dry pectin *
• 3/4 tablespoon vanilla extract (flavor!)

To fake out the 1/2 cup espresso, I did

• 1/3 cup coffee
• 1 cup water
• re-brewed (brew once and put the coffee back into the water tank)

I’ve got almost everything figured out except how to get the pectin to integrate without clumping. I don’t know if it’s the pectin that I have or I’m missing the trick. I’ve ended up skimming chunks of pectin off the top to get it right, but that is time consuming. This will require more thinking.

Every once in a while, people on the internet just rock.

Wired had a great article on how failure and defeat occur in the scientific process. A money quote:

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

This was just weird to watch. It’s animation, flip-book style

parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

I stumbled on to this article about wealth creation from a buddy’s blog. He seemed more interested in the topics around corporate cubicle farms, but this quote was the more interesting portion to me:

Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can’t follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I’d be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is a good summary of how smart and small teams stay ahead of big corporations.

I’ve been a fan of nuclear power, but mostly the concept of nuclear power done correctly. This can be best summed up by “our current ways do not represent our best thinking”. This video explains why:

The Chicago courts have been throwing out speeding tickets from LIDAR guns. Something about the recorded speeds not being scientifically verifiable in the eyes of the court.

I saw this on a friend’s blog. A visual trip through special effects since the dawn of the movie era.

I had observed this phenomenon, but it still makes me sad…

From the old Procter & Gamble Satanism libel to tales of more recent vintage about President Obama’s faith and citizenship, Internet-fueled rumors seem to run rampant. And, frighteningly, Christians seem at the very least to be as susceptible as the population at large to the habit of spreading false stories.

So, why are Christians so willing to believe unsubstantiated rumors? And more troubling, why are Christians, who should hold the highest standards of truth-telling, so eager to spread such rumors — and even downright libels?

There was an awesome letter sent in to Click and Clack. It began with:

I am writing to offer profound thanks to you for resolving an important philosophical question that has been heatedly debated for the last twenty years. The rumination began on a construction site one summer in the early 1970’s, as my friend Jamie and I were working our way through college. The question we raised and have agonized over, lo these many years, is one that I’ve never read about in any philosophical treatise, and yet I have found it has applied to countless situations and conversations overheard in bars, repair shops, sporting events, political debates, etc. etc. etc.

Posit the question: Do two people who don’t know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about? (Pardon the un-PC masculine pronoun, but I have found this to be, most predominately, a male phenomenon.)

And it gets better…