DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Environmental Working Group released a report entitled Rocket Fuel Contamination in California Milk.

Milk from cows raised in some parts of California may expose infants and children to more of a toxic rocket fuel chemical than is considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)…
In the first study to look for perchlorate in California supermarket milk, EWG found perchlorate in almost every sample tested — 31 out of 32 samples purchased from grocery stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

So in addition to cookies and peanut butter sandwiches, milk now also goes great with lettuce.

Check out Greg Gaylord’s “snare gallery” of 33 different handmade snare drums. Half of the pages contain source info on the wood, tuning characteristics, and a player’s report on resonance, sensitivity, and frequency response.

Excerpts from the report on the Platymiscum Yucatanum (Granadillo) snare:

Plenty of high crack, supported with strong mid and low frequencies. Has a full, rich, warm presence. A drier sounding drum with a more defined fundamental in the sweetspot (center) of the drum… The Granadillo went to a really low head tension, just above “no tension,” and went as tight as Maple before choking… Has a more “forgiving,” consistent cross stick sound with a half-inch movement in stick location… “The Maple sounds like a snare drum, the Granadillo sounds like an instrument.”

OK, so where do I sign?

While you’re at it, put me down for a Cherry drum too. (“Rim shots are loud and cutting with a ‘bite your head off’ attitude about them.” Who wouldn’t want that?)

Bim forwarded a great story about the legal battle stemming from the so-called Energy Crisis of 2000-2001: Small-time officials take lead in Enron fight (mirror)

Enron has been accused of manipulating or “gaming” the energy market, by withholding supply in order to increase demand and raise prices. The fallout was enormous: western states signed energy contracts providing ridiculously inflated prices; rolling blackouts killed power across California with little warning; Gray Davis was replaced as governor by an action-movie actor whose name escapes me.

Today’s story, in brief, is that a small utility company in Washington acquired and transcribed hundreds of hours of audio tape featuring Enron employees bragging about manipulating the market. It’s precisely the sort of evidence that Enron officials must have prayed would never come to light.

The transcriptions were explosive. Enron traders joked about lying in their negotiations with Snohomish and others. They joked about stealing money from “Grandma Millie” in California, and they joked that President Bush would not stop them by imposing price caps because of his close relationship with Enron chief executive Ken Lay.
”This is more than a smoking gun,” says Russ Campbell, another Nevada Power lawyer. “It’s an audiotape of the gun being fired, the bullet hitting the victim, and the murderer standing over the victim laughing.”

According to the Chronicle’s wine writer,

The tongue only has four taste zones — the tip is sensitive to sweetness, the back portion responds to bitterness, the forward edges detect saltiness and the back edges react to sourness.

And so bad science is propagated yet again. Here’s the truth about the taste map.

The article contains this related and interesting bit about the impact of the shape of a wineglass on the drinker’s perception of flavor and aroma:

At a tasting that Riedel conducted, he actually proved that the thick oakiness of a Chardonnay tasted leaner in a Montrachet glass and a Zinfandel lost much of its sweet cherried fruitiness in a goblet meant for Bordeaux.

I used to see those Riedel glasses at wineries all the time. I always wondered if they were for real, or just a marketing scam aimed at people with more money than sense. I guess it’s time to start buying Riedel stemware now.

The second day of my Jaguar upgrade attempt ended much as day one — with an inaccessible mirrored RAID volume.

The driver is supposed to time out when a mirror isn’t available, and mount the one available partition. The bug is that this “waiting” condition never times out.

At the request of the software vendor, I booted the system after disconnecting one of the two RAID drives. I hate to muck with disk drives… but this seemed to be the only solution. I’ll summarize an afternoon’s work and a dozen email exchanges with the vendor, and simply say that although I was at one point able to mount one of the mirrors and copy off all my data, I was never able to correct the core problem. Throw in the usual mix of inexplicable SCSI weirdness (“Erm, it’s run that way for 4 years; why won’t it boot?”) and you’ll have a decent picture of the process.

So the good news is that my system is fully functional — I’ve installed most of the apps I need, configured the UI to my personal taste, and begun the tedious process of becoming accustomed to a new email client.

Monday I’ll revisit the RAID issue. Wish me luck.