Saturday, 12/09/06
The NYT is running a long current story about disastrous contracting in overhauling the Coast Guard fleet.
In September 2004, more serious flaws in the boat conversion program became obvious after the first one, the Matagorda, was launched. As it traveled in relatively heavy seas from Key West to Miami, large cracks appeared in the hull and deck.
Giant steel straps that looked like Band-Aids were affixed to the side of the boats, and the vessels were barred from venturing out in rough water. But cracks and bulges continued to scar the Matagorda and other converted ships, followed by a series of mechanical problems.
[Bollinger Shipyards], it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. "The computer broke for some reason," said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. "Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?" The cursory oversight by the Coast Guard meant the mistake was not caught in time.
Yes, I hate it when those power surges come along and subtly alter the variables in my spreadsheets. Fortunately, it's no one's fault, and no one ever has to get fired. 12:18PM «
Saturday, 12/02/06
4. Nintendo is betting the farm that just like megapixels don't matter as much nowadays when buying digital cameras as lens quality, camera features, etc., the number of polygons your console's processor spits out at what resolution matters less than how fun the games are. As someone who's nonplussed by fancy graphics in video games, I'll take that bet.
He later copped to having knowingly misused "nonplussed" in the American style to provoke a response, but kept quiet about the real syntactic genius of that last sentence. By similarly inverting the original, negative meaning of "I'll take that bet", he composed a double negative out of mangled American idioms. 03:24PM «
At the holiday, mom recommended the pumpkin pie recipe from the 1965 Pepperidge Farm Cookbook that came into my possession a while back. It's an odd title, sprinkled with "antique" recipes of historical interest, the eldest from "the world's first printed cookbook, De Honesta Voluptate by Bartholomaeus de Platina, written in medieval Latin and printed in Venice in 1475." The first recorded pumpkin pie recipe follows.
Shred well-cleaned pumpkins and, as with cheese, let them cook a little either in heavy juice or in milk. When partially cooked, pass it through a sieve into a pan, as, I said first, for cheese.
Mix together a half-pound of sow's belly or rich fat boiled and beaten with a knife, or in place of these, if you wish, the same amount of butter or liquamen; a half-pound of sugar, some cinnamon, six eggs and two cups of milk with a little saffron.
This dessert will be rich with a good crust only if cooked above or below a slow fire.
There are those who add pieces of leaves in place of the upper crust and call the dish lagana. When cooked and put in a dish, sprinkle on it sugar and rosewater.
Cassius, who was bothered by colic and stones, did not eat this. It is difficult to digest and nourishes badly.
I don't know what Bartholomaeus means by the last part; it's all I've had to eat so far today. 12:20PM «
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