Last night I was reading an article that mentioned that three staple crops of the ancient Hohokam culture (the people of the southwest that lived in communities such as Casa Grande) were corn, mesquite, and pitaya. I hadn't heard of pitaya, so I looked it up, it is the fruit of the cactus Hylocereus undatus, known in English as Dragon Fruit. (Pitaya is used to describe the fruit of certain other cacti, that of the Organ Pipe Cactus is called Pitahaya Dulce.) I've had various cactus fruits but seen or heard of pitaya, even though I fancy myself an expert in exotic fruits and there are few I haven't heard of.

Today, following an unrelated link, I stumbled into a recent comic strip that featured the pitaya.

I recently saw Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. It's a challenging and dark, but brilliant film. If you haven't seen it, you should see it before reading this or anything about it.

Very clever films give you a lot to think about and analyze. If you think enough and watch many times you can get at clues to the hidden meanings and broader themes of the film.

Other films in the art genre are made nonsensical to prevent this analysis of finding meaning.

This film is unique from either in that it does has deep meaning, but the film has been intricately designed to prevent you from finding it, and should you eventually realize that, then you have unravelled the puzzle of the film.

Kaufman said to one interviewer, "The film is not about what I think it is about, it is about what you think it is about." An obvious analysis of that statement is that the film is open to interpretation and different people might read different things into it. However, Kaufman's statement is a trap. He wants you to think that is what he is saying, in order to mislead you. But actually he told you the truth, just in a misleading way. The film is about what you think it is about. It is about your process of trying to find out its meaning. The plot reflects this as well, the film itself represents the search for meaning, and the impossibility of finding meaning. You may not know what is real. You may not interpret things correctly. What is the purpose of your life? Even thinking we know, we can not ever really know. Peel away one level of the onion of meaning, and there is another within, just as intricate.

Despite the film's intentionally constructed imperviousness to analysis, its intricate design rewards rewatchings, which are necessary in order to understand things such as how calendar time is managed as a structural element.

Frogs and fish fall from the sky from time to time. Rare but it happens.

Latest event was a few days ago in Japan:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090610/tod-it-s-raining-tadpoles-in-japan-town-c359f57.html

I was standing next to a car pumping gas today. Suddenly, the gas started spilling out all over the place. In decades of using gas pumps, this was the first time I ran into a pump whose auto-cut off didn't work. A very dangerous and messy situation.

I went into the station to pay and told the proprietor that the auto-shut off was broken on the pump.

He said, "I turned that thing off."

"You disabled the auto-shut off? Why?"

"People need to be more responsible. Pay attention to what they are doing. I give them complete control. I turn on the pump, it is up to them to turn it off. People comment on this, they need to pay more attention, not be thinking some machine is going to coddle them. Every day, people come here and start the pump and go to the bathroom. They come out and there is 100, 200 gallons or more spilled on the ground. I tell them they need to be more careful, pay attention. Of course they have to pay for all the gas, so it's an expensive lesson, but next time they'll pay more attention to what they are doing. See, I am helping them out."

"But the auto-shut off is there for a reason, to prevent accidents. It's only a matter of time before an explosion."

"And whose fault is that then? The fool who could not be bothered to mind his gas, that's who! Not mine!"

Anyway I stunk like gas for the rest of the day and decided we should avoid that station in the future. For context, you should know that almost every patron of this station pumps while smoking, and then comes into the station smoking. The shop is always filled with cigarette smoke and when people are done they just toss their butts wherever they like.

When the goats are young kids, they are exuberant and energetic. They run to and fro, leap in the air, and frolic. They dive into milk bottle or follow a butterfly passionately, then run away distracted by the next thing that comes along. As they get older, this type of life vitality decreases gradually but continuously, and finally, a very old goat moves more slowly and deliberately and is not interested in running to and fro, except as necessary to escape a predator.

Obviously the same process is seen in other animals and in humans. In Chinese Medicine, the life energy chi can be very strong even when one is an old person. There is also the youthful energy yong, which decreases with age as part of the natural life cycle. It's not just in China though, every culture in the history of the world is aware that children are more wildly energetic, and easily distracted, than old people.

Until now. In our culture, children being themselves is now a diagnosable disease called ADHD. That children are not as serious and focussed as adults is seen as a medical condition which is treated using powerful amphetamines, which are known to cause irreversible brain damage and permanent, negative, behavioral changes in everyone, especially children whose brains are still growing.

In China, no one would try to block the yong that is appropriate for youth because it is seen as in balance for that time in life. If you did block it, Chinese medicine, thousands of years old, predicts the results would be symptoms of premature aging. And what do we see in amphetamine users? Premature aging. We've all seen the booking photo sequences that show the progression that starts with an attractive young woman, and after 3 or 4 years of amphetamine abuse, she is a wrinkled, toothless, worn out old hag.

Apparently, that is what America wants for many of its children. A short, brain damaged life. A futile attempt to contain yong.

But why? Is the profit of the pharmaceutical industry so important that we must sacrifice our very children to it?

This animation of the economic collapse just came out:

http://vimeo.com/3261363

This is a well produced and slick piece. Also, all they say is true and can't be contested.

However, the piece is propaganda that misrepresents the situation.

How can this be if all they say is true?

Because they carefully selected what not to say.

Not pointed out in the video:

The failed subprime loans are a minute fraction of the bailout and of the loss of investments. The reason is that the mortgage assets were leveraged outrageously and used to invest in nonsensical investment instruments that were based on nothing. There is a quadrillion in loss right now, which is more than the value of all the assets of everything in the entire world. There are $200 billion in subprime defaults, and these represent actual property value of about $100 billion, so it's really only a $100 billion actual loss. None of the bailout has gone to this, but if it had, it could all be paid for with $100-$200 billion and the houses given away for free. It's the fraudulent pyramid scheme wall street had going that collapsed, the mortgage defaults aren't a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

In addition, they do not cover the reason for the defaults. Brokers passed investments on to funds and did not care that the mortgages would go bad. So they got dishonest appraisers and set up a system where you have average home values of $750,000 in a working class neighborhood with average salaries of $35,000. There were lots of adjustable rate mortgages where the first year is $1000 monthly payments on a million dollar shack, then the rate resets, and payments go to $4000. Obviously a family with $35,000 yearly pretax income can not make these payments and will default, that is a foregone conclusion that was known decisively by the mortgage broker. Why give the loan then? Because the brokers are not loaning their own money. The brokers knew for a fact that the people couldn't pay that and the mortgages were intentionally structured to make them fail because they WANTED them to fail, thinking they would then make even more money when they got to resell it in a year and wake a new commission. They also knew that the system can been set up to tweak all these investments that were guaranteed to fail to seem like AAA investments, so they could sell them to investment funds owned by school districts, small towns, and pension funds with no problem.

None of this is covered, instead the slick and expensively produced animation makes Wall Street out to be the victims and the mortgage holders to be the bad guys.

I find that to be pretty interesting in itself.

There are quite a few "studies" around that claim to show that electric dishwashers are green friendly and use less energy and water than handwashing. Although the studies have been done by various "researchers" worldwide, an interesting commonality is that all the studies were paid for by appliance manufacturers, and all of them compare the most efficient washers in the world under the most restricted circumstances against the most wasteful theoretical hand dishwashing practices that can be imagined. A typical result is to say that a dishwasher will use 4 gallons of water and handwashing uses 25-40 gallons.

Let's use some common sense here. 30 gallons is the capacity of your entire water heater, and is enough to fill a full sized bathtub. Have you ever run out of hot water while handwashing dishes? How many of you have even seen a house that had a sink that was the size of a bathtub? Do you believe that you use anywhere near 30 gallons while handwashing dishes? I didn't think so!

The studies will hide in their footnotes some assumptions and tricks. Let's look at some of them.

One trick is instead of measuring how much water is actually used, estimate the amount of time it takes to wash dishes instead. Then, you can multiply that time by some large flow rate numbers and get outlandish water usage numbers. In other words, assume that the kitchen plumbing is capable to deliver a lot of water quickly and is run at that maximum flow rate during the entire dishwashing session. So they will say, well a really good plumbing system can deliver 5 gallons a minute (GPM) through the kitchen sink, and people run the water for 6 minutes, so that is 30 gallons. This is already wrong for almost everyone and not a reasonable assumption that any honest researcher would make, or would find by actually measuring data. Now, 5GPM isn't an unreasonable rate for an outside hose spigot connected to 1/2 pipe. But kitchen faucets aren't outdoor faucets. If you want to fill a bucket of water to wash your car, you know it will fill faster on an outside spigot, or using the bathtub than using the kitchen faucet. Almost all kitchen faucets in the US nowadays have a flow regulator that limits them to 2.2GPM flow. In addition, few people run them at the full rate while washing dishes. As a calibration, I run my sink at the moderate rate I use while rinsing and filled a gallon jug. It took exactly 2 minutes, so the flow rate was 0.5GPM.

Another assumption is that no pots pans or very dirty items will be washed. This is true for people who just reheat frozen food, but if you actually cook your meals, you'll have to wash pots and pans as well. This will almost always involve soaking the pans a bit, and often these pans can't even be washed in a dishwasher anyway so you have to do the sink batch anyway whether you do the dishes themselves by hand or in the washer. And if you are using the sink for pans, why not share the water and do the dishes there as well? This is never addressed, pots and pans are assumed not to exist in these studies.

Another assumption is that no one stops the sink while washing. They just run that faucet to wash and to rinse and the water flows right down the drain. I suppose there are people that do this. It might even make sense if washing a few items. But a typical washing session here fills the entire sink with dishes at least twice, and the sink is certainly stopped up for this.

Let's compare their theoretical numbers with some real ones. Here's how I do it, and I assert that this is a pretty common method.

I stop up the sink. Then I start to fill it with warm water at a moderate rate. I do scrubbing at this time, while the sink fills. I might do some rinsing as well. Eventually it is half full. Our sink is average sized, each basin is 16 by 14 by 6 inches. It holds 5.8 gallons while full, so half full is about 3 gallons.

Washing the dishes, they come out and go on the counter. Then I stop up the second sink and start a 1/2 GPM trickle to rinse. I start with the large items. By the time there is about 1 inch of water in the sink (1 gallon), I am done with the large items. The plates and utensils then I can rinse in that 1 inch of rinse water.

This way I do two sink loads. I might stretch it to a second load over the day. If I need the use of a sink during the day, I'll drain the filthy water, but retain the rinse. Then, the next wash starts with the clean rinse water from the previous wash. So the total water per wash tends to average out to about 2-3 gallons, and that includes all the pots and pans that can't be done in the dishwasher anyway. This water goes into the septic system and ends up watering the lawn via the leach lines, so the water is entirely reclaimed.

I also have used a two-bucket method that uses about 1.5-2 gallons altogether, but doesn't handle very large pots and pans. The advantage is the water can be poured on the garden in some cases, however if there is much oil in it or any meat residue I don't really recommend that as it will attract varmits to your garden.

The studies claim that the most efficient washing machines will use 4-5 gallons. That's true, but it's not any washing machine that you are likely to own in your home so it's irrelevant for most people. A typical washing machine uses 6-10 gallons for a normal cycle, or 8-15 gallons if it's 10 or more years old. Plus it uses electric heaters to dry the dishes, which uses a lot of energy, plus dishwashing detergents have to be more harsh in order to wash things without scrubbing, and often contain phosphates. Plus, most people find with the efficient machines they have to prerinse their dishes anyway in the sink if they want dishwasher to have a chance to get the dishes clean.

Even if you have generously sized 6 gallon capacity sinks and fill both of your wash and rinse basins to the very brim, that's 12 gallons. A more reasonable "full sink" usage would be 10 gallons, which is the same as the washing machine, but includes the complete washing of the pots and pans and any presoaking or such that is not accounted for with machine usage.

The results of my research? I claim both that it's pretty difficult to use 20 gallons or more to hand wash dishes (unless doing them in the bathtub for some reason), and that typical dishwasher usage is not really 5 gallons per load when you factor in actual machines in homes and the need to clean pots and pans. I also claim less energy usage due to no heat drying, and less soap usage due to leveraging the ability to scrub

All these other studies, yes all of them, done by guys with PhDs who have university positions, are a bunch of hogwash. For them to call themselves researchers or scientists is a bunch of bull as well. The typical university "scientist" is nothing more than a paid propaganda pundits for for-profit corporate interests. Alas, the brainwashing works well because the false claims are then uncritically regurgitated by naïve idealists who do not do a proper critical analysis. Because this second level of propaganda propagation consists of sincere, trusted regular people, the ideas spread like wildfire, gaining a thought momentum that makes their obviously false claims difficult to get people to challenge.

Sometimes in the winter I'll drink hot cocoa late at night, it's mainly for the micronutrients in the cocoa beans, which can clear up mood and thinking when stagnated.

2 cups milk
2 teaspoons dutched cocoa powder
4 teaspoons sugar

Put in a pan and heat at a bit below medium for under 10 minutes, stirring and pushing to break up the cocoa clumps. Makes a 16 oz pint or two 8 oz servings.

Nothing complex here and the recipe is probably printed on the side of the cocoa powder box.

I mention this all because it amazes me that few people do it this way. Instead they'll buy these boxes with single serving envelopes mixed with water that only make 6 ounces. There's 6 or 8 envelopes in the box that costs $3, so it's around 50 cents per 6 oz cup, or $1 per 12 oz mug to make the envelope version, which has low cocoa content, chemical anti-caking agents, uses powdered milk. It has no chi to it, no micronutrients and is sickly sweet, you just feel bloated after the envelope ones, not to mention there is residual aluminum from the envelope.

Making it from scratch, which is trivially easy, only costs the price of the milk. The sugar costs 1/20 cent or so, and the cocoa is $2 for a box that lasts about 3 years. And the result is it tastes like it should.

People who use the envelopes are just being foolish. It doesn't really save any time, costs a fortune, and produces a significantly substandard result.

1 (large) Cherokee purple or Black Krim tomatoes (size of a beefsteak)
4 (small) Golden Sunburst yellow tomatoes
1 hungarian wax pepper with all seeds
1/4 onion
1/2 lime
1 teaspoon sea salt

Dice up tomatoes, onion and pepper. Toss together with salt and juice from the lime.
In this case the hungarian pepper was ripened to red and that made it less hot than normal, so kids can eat this one.

Marzipan is a sweetened almond paste. It is very delicious.

Marzipan is now considered something like candy, but historically it was invented as a way to make almonds keep longer since sugar acts as a preservative. Marzipan is a great traveling food in the past since it has high protein and vitamins in the almonds, and energy in the sugar. Marzipan has a good energy to it and just a small amount can refresh you.

Most Americans have never had marzipan, even those who think they have. Occasionally a cake shop will make a cake with a marzipan topping, or a croissant stuffed with marzipan, but this too sugery stuff is not real marzipan any more than the drink that comes out of the machine at the gas station is real cappuccino.

When I was young, one of my mother's German business associates gave her a round pie shaped box with a half kilo piece of marzipan upon which was impressed a three dimensional bas relief of the German town where the client's business was based. This was the first time I had marzipan and it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I ate it slowly, only a pinch a month or even less frequently. It was so delicious that a single pinch could be savored for an hour. I managed to make that pie of solid marzipan last about 5 or 10 years.

Mom mentioned to another German friend that I liked Marzipan and he began a tradition of buying me a bar each year when he was in Germany. These semicylindrical bars were covered in thick semidark chocolate. Some had raisins in them. They also had rum. I felt the chocolate and raisins detracted from the marzipan and would remove the chocolate and eat it separately. The addition of the rum was not objectionable — I think marzipan can be plain or with rum. But covering it with chocolate is a bit too much.

I would make each of these bars last a year. I started looking for domestic marzipan but could not find any of adequate quality. The closest was that See's Candy shops had a marzipan covered with chocolate that was fairly good, but it did come covered with chocolate, which was an impediment to full enjoyment. You could select your own pound of chocolate there, so I would get these and candied ginger in a box every few years, it was an expensive treat.

Where I live now there is no real marzipan available at all, and even the cake shop style marzipan isn't easy to find.

It occurred to me the other day that it had been over a decade since I last had marzipan, which is one of my favorite things of all time.

I read up on marzipan, got some almonds, and did some experiments. And now I am able to make real marzipan that is exactly the same as the best german marzipan. Perhaps you'd like to try as well.

The key is that you'll use an egg white to bind the almonds and sugar together. One egg white will correctly do about 6-8 ounces of almonds and an equal amount of powdered sugar. If you try to use less than 6 ounces of almonds, you'll end up with a sticky paste and not the firm solid malleable substance you really want.

Note that you will be using raw egg whites and there is no cooking involved, so if you don't have a safe source of raw eggs free from salmonella, you should probably just skip this whole project. There are other ways to bind the almonds and sugar together, but I think you should do it right or not at all, otherwise just get the fake stuff at the cake shop or candy store.

I bought a 12 ounce tray of unsalted almonds. I used half of them. I put them in the blender in two batches and blended them down as fine as I could go. The powder got stuck on the sides of the blender, so I kept stopping it, pushing the powder down off the sides with a chopstick, then putting the cover on and doing it again. I think it's best to only do 3 ounces at a time, otherwise you get too much powder in the blender.

You can then add the powdered sugar to the blender if it was clumpy, or mix it in a bowl with the almond paste if not. I did this step to taste, using my memory of the correct sweetness, which is not very sweet. Really fine marzipan should be half sugar and half almonds. Commercial Marzipan can go down to only 1/4 almonds and 3/4 sugar to save on costs since almonds are rather expensive, but that mixture is way too sweet. Don't use granulated sugar, use powdered.

Now with the sugar and almond powder in a bowl, I added about a 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Real vanilla, not fake. It's getting hard to find real vanilla due to civil upheaval problems in Madagascar. Most real vanilla comes from northeastern Madagascar. I read recently that the age of consent in Madagascar is 21, and that is the oldest age of consent in any country. That seems so strange. Madagascar has lots of adorable ring tailed lemurs and those weird Baobob trees. My best friend growing up is now a renowned expert in the Malagasy language that is spoken in Madagascar. He spends time there on occasion. I should ask him next time I talk to him about the vanilla situation. In any case, if you don't want to use real vanilla, stop right now! Just get the cheap marzipan at the cake store. We are making real marzipan here. Let's proceed.

Toss in a bit of lemon juice as well. Not too much, maybe a teaspoon or a half teaspoon. We don't want this too wet. Oh, and that egg white. Put that in now.

Stir and stir and stir. It should seem like you don't have enough liquid, but keep mixing. I do this by hand with a fork, not by any electro-mechanical device. You're going for a consistency kind of like bread dough. Once it gets to be pretty well mixed, you can fold and knead it, and dip back down to pick up that stray powder that didn't mix in yet. Kneading and folding helps the almond oils release into the sugar. Then roll it up into a ball. My marzipan ball was about 5 inches across or so. Now, stick this in a container in the refrigerator for a day or so, and then you can cut of slices pretty thin about 1/8 inch thick. Eat with strawberries and or serve with brandy or something. Not sure about the brandy, it seems a good idea but I don't have any brandy. Let me know if you try and it seems a good pairing. I tried it with beer since beer is also German and I found that beer isn't the right thing to have with marzipan, it clashes.

Very high end pastry shops in big cities might have marzipan sculptures in the display case. These will be little apples or oranges or such things that are sculpted out of marzipan which can be sort of like edible Play Doh to a baker. They paint the outsides with food colors and glaze them to make them shiney. These little treats are probably just like real marzipan, but I wouldn't know since I would never pay $55 for a half size marzipan apple.

In any case, this will introduce you to the delights of genuine marzipan. Don't eat a lot of it at once. Good marzipan is something you just eat a tiny bit of at a time.

There's a study that just came out that took a real detailed look at high school graduation rates across the entire US, and broke it down by Urban, Suburb, Country, Race and Gender. Here's a summary of the results:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080401/ts_alt_afp/useducationsociety_080401184532

The institute that put it together has more details about the study here:

http://www.americaspromise.org/APAPage.aspx?id=10354

And that page has a link to the pdf file of the actual report if you're interested.

So here is the big summary. Rural areas have better graduation rates than Urban. Well that's not surprising, I think? And Suburban does best of all, but is close to Rural.

But the rates are much lower than I would have guessed if you asked. Lacking data, I would have guessed 90% of students graduate high school. But it turns out that nationally, only 69.9 of students graduate, but 74.9 percent in the suburbs and 73.2 percent in rural areas do.

Looking at the numbers where it is broken down by race, you can see that the whole rural/urban/suburban thing has nothing to do with location, but is really just a projection of racial distribution. Minorities are more concentrated in urban areas and not so much in rural and suburban. It turns out that only 50% of American Indians and African Americans who start high school ever graduate, 57% of Hispanics, 76% of whites, and 80% of Asians. So if you just look at the racial distribution of a school, you can account for the urban vs rural rates without even knowing it is rural or urban.

This is interesting since Tennessee has this bill up where they want to ban people from getting a drivers license until age 21 if they don't have a diploma. What that bill is basically saying is that 50% of the African Americans and American Indians, like Cherokees, in our state will be banned from having a driver's license. Clearly this will make it impossible for them to get a job, and will drag them even further down into the cycle of poverty. I have to wonder if that is the real goal of the bill since there's no doubt that the legislators are aware of the racial component to graduation rates.

People reading this might start to get some ideas in their heads about racial intelligence, but I'll tell you that graduation rates have little to do with how smart someone is. People who get expelled are more likely to drop out. In many schools, minorities are more likely to be expelled, and are punished more harshly for the same things that white kids do. Minority students are also more likely to have to drop out of school to support their families who are more likely to be poor. A high achieving minority youth is far less likely to be hired for a job than a similar white one. I know many brilliant and creative people who are black and hispanic and indian, and I know plenty of white folks that can't convert a fraction to a percentage.

Here is my controversial angle on this. Most everyone assumes that high drop out rates are a bad thing, and society must do anything it can to get graduation rates up — by force if necessary. For example, the bill I mentioned. Come down hard, like the Gestapo. Either you graduate, or we will destroy your life. But wait — what if a good portion of the 30.1% who didn't graduate are the lucky ones? What if they are the ones who escaped destruction?

Could this be? I happen to have professional experience tutoring and teaching college students from well regarded school districts, so I know how things really are. Folks, regardless of what the line is the school systems are feeding you, you need to know that most high school graduates are not qualified to do much. Basic, rudimentary literacy can be assumed, yes, but many graduates do not have enough functional literacy in either math or reading to be able to properly participate in a system of representative government, which requires an educated and thoughtful populace. If our freedoms are going to be kept, they have to be understood and defended. For the most part, that is not happening right now. Our educational system is not to blame here, but rather should be accredited: for this is not an accidental plan, but rather one conceived by the power brokers in society who can only thrive with their wicked schemes as long as the population remains ignorant of the foundations of democracy. When people place a higher value to spend their evenings watching sitcoms instead of reading, when people pop a prozac and press the close button rather than show up at a school board meeting and demand accountability when a 12 year old girl is strip searched by school officials looking for a government unauthorized ibuprofen tablet, oh horrors.

You see, perhaps the real issue here is that the smart people are the ones who drop out of high school and move on with their lives and their education. Education is something you earn for yourself, not something someone programs you with, and the sooner you escape the system, the sooner you can get on with a real education. One involving working for yourself, thinking for yourself, and putting together a fine library of those classics that are no longer taught. The foundations and values of civilization have been set aside to make way for sex education, nuclear education, commercialized holiday education, brand name education, and field trips to the movie theatre.

In addition to the free minds issue, High Schools in this country are not exactly known for being a wholesome educational environment.

I've got kids, and at this time, all things considered, I don't think it would be in their best interests to attend any of our local high schools. This has nothing to do with the teachers or administration though! It has to do with the system and the values that schools have taken on nationally for whatever reason.

Like almost all american high schools, the high schools here expose kids to drugs and violence. You learn more about conforming to fit into a clique than you do about learning to think for yourself or be your own person. There are also the issues of zero tolerance punishment, over the top expulsions for being tardy too many times, for using a cell phone or an aspirin. It's not that kids should be allowed to run wild, but these are minor things that in the past either would not have been issues, or would have resulted in suspensions. There is also general culture of trying to instill an ethic of unquestioning obedience to all authority.

I find all these things contrary to the educational ideals that Thomas Jefferson promoted.

I would prefer to have children educated to always question orders to see if they are the right thing, to ask if they are just, to see if they promote freedom. To contemplate themselves what is right and moral, and not to merely conform to systems of rules and facts that have to be memorized. I would prefer for them to learn to be free people, to be able to think for themselves, to be the captain of their own destiny rather than cogs in the machine that are just following orders. To me, the individual free in both actions and words is the highest expression of the ideals held by Jefferson.

We have a family friend, Glen, who was an important NASA scientist on the Apollo project. As a mathematician, he invented the idea of using a Fourier Transform to filter data on a digital computer. This was used to filter out signals coming back from in-flight rocket sensors and reduced the data processing time and increased the volume of usable data substantially. Reducing data processing time meant more flights could be scheduled and more adjustments could be done per flight and more things learned from each flight. Processing turnaround was the main bottleneck in the moon program at the time and solving it was the key element in not only winning the race to the moon, but doing it far more safely than would otherwise have been possible.

Glen built his own computer from TTL logic chips back in the early 70s. You programmed it initially by flipping nice thick metal toggle switches. He toggled in an assembler to bootstrap it, and eventually worked his way up to a keyboard and CRT for it. While visiting him one summer, I played an adventure game on it.

Today I read about a teacher in Portland who built a computer not out of TTL logic chips, but out of physical relay switches. He teaches computer architecture and if you want to understand that topic, watch his 1 hr video.

Then visit the web ring of homemade CPUs, linked from the bottom of that page. What fun!

Among the links is this web page:

http://www.magic-1.org/

Yes, that web page is being served to you by a webserver running in Minix, a small Unix, on a computer designed and built by hand using discrete logic units wirewrapped together.

Details of that computer and a photo:

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

My favorite punctuation mark right now is the two-em dash. There is very little information about this mark on the web, and all of it is incorrect, claiming that the two-em dash is only used to indicate letters that have been left out of a word. I am here to set the record straight.

First, recall how the ellipsis is often misused;— and mis-kerned;— nowadays. A typical misuse is to indicate a pause in voiced or unvoiced conversation:

“I am not sure . . . let me think about it.”

This is unequivocally an complete violation of the proper use of an ellipsis. The ellipsis is correctly used to indicate when part of a quoted text has been left out. Using it for this other purpose leaves us wondering “Is he pausing in speech or is there something he said that the author is not revealing for some reason?” We often can't tell.

Some sort of dash should have been used in the above example instead. One possibility is the two-em dash:

“I am not sure —— let me think about it,” he said reluctantly.

If the person’s pause was not quite so long, the standard em-dash would have been sufficient:

“I am not sure — let me think about it,” he said sincerely.

The two-em dash is for long pauses that exceed the length of a standard em-dash pause. It is also used when you are hiding a person's identity by abbreviating their name, such as,— “During our expedition to Kathmandu, we encountered a Mr. Q——, a former barrister of London, tending mountain goats in a remote valley of the Himalayas.”

Here are some things I've been reading lately:

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Naturalis Historia by Caius Plinius Secundus
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

I looked in our cookbooks for a gravy recipe, but they all involved drippings from meat. What if you don't have any of that around? I made up the following recipe and it turned out real nice.

1/3 lb turkey sausage (1/3 of a frozen roll)
3 tbsp oil
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1 1/2 cup milk
6 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tsp salt

1. Defrost turkey and chop into small fragments
2. Fry in pan in oil with cumin and fennel seeds until cooked.
3. Shake milk, flour, salt, pepper in large jar to dissolve flour, get rid of lumps.
4. Add to turkey in the pan.
5. Cook, stirring, until of right consistency.