Men's Health magazine has done a roundup of the worst -- that is, highest-calorie, highest-fat, highest-salt -- French fries in America. The champion is Chili's "Texas Cheese Fries with Jalapeno Ranch," clocking in at 1,920 calories, 147g of fat (of which 63g is saturated fat), and 3,580mg of sodium. The whole list is worth a read -- as hall of shames go, it's some pretty oily stuff. Our distant descendants will gaze in wonder on this as the 21st-century equivalent of Roman feasts that featured jellied slaves' fat topped with hammered gold and ocelot bile.
The only thing that comes close to redeeming this cheesy mound of lard and grease is the fact that it's ostensibly meant to be shared with a few friends. Even so, you'll collectively be taking in an entire day's worth of calories, three days' allotment of saturated fat, and a day and a half's allotment of sodium. What's even scarier, if you can imagine, is that even if you try to order more sensibly and ask for the "half" order of Texas Cheese Fries, you'll still receive a disastrous dish that packs in 1,400 calories. There's one French fries side dish at Chili's that's acceptable, although even in its much-reduced form, you'd be better off splitting it.
Thanks to Mark, David, Xeni, and Cory for the opportunity to place my posts on the world's best blog for the past two weeks. Having an online presence on such a lively and well-read space has been a thrill.
As Marlowe says, nothing says goodbye like a bullet, but it's been great to write for a while about things besides stuff that goes boom, whoosh, or splat. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. If you're interested in that sort of thing, come by my site www.AbsintheAndFlamethrowers.com or check out a copy of my book Absinthe and Flamethrowers.)
I've placed links to a few of my favorite posts below for those who may have missed them the first time.
Super Punch has rounded up a bunch of the best YouTube videos of Kim Jong Il's "traffic girls," who are dressed in snappy uniforms, which they wear as they perform an elaborate, robotic mime-show that directs North Korean traffic. They only turn counter-clockwise. Of course.
Loopla's "Gyro-bowl" is a kids' eating-bowl mounted on a gimbals so that it can swing freely as your kid picks it up and moves it around. It looks like it would be a lot of fun -- and easier for kids to carry without spilling.
I've just signed up for Tom Henderson's Math for Primates podcast on the strength of this interview he conducted with Technoccult about his theory of punk mathematics. My dad's a mathematician and I love math, but stopped taking it after first year university calculus and stats and feel like I'm losing it by the year. I like Henderson's approach to the subject! Bonus: Tom helped Jane McGonigal and pals make the awesome Superstruct game.
So, the concept I pitched to Nick was, "Let's talk about math from the platform of 'Math that humans are likely to want to know, because it's about other humans.'"
Social conflict. Sex. Beauty.
It gives us an excuse to talk extensively about game theory. And, game theory is a key place to teach humans mathematics, because we seem to have some optimized "cheat detection" in our brains.
Let me give you an example, it's something like, uh...
There are four face-down cards on a table. There is a rule: "If the number showing is even, then the back of the card MUST have a vowel."
Now, given an E, 3, 8, D, what is the smallest number of cards you need to flip over to verify that the rule is being followed?
Maybe I fucked up the puzzle. But, anyway, the answer as I've phrased it is NOT E and 3.
You need to make sure that 8 has a vowel on the back, and you need to make sure that D does NOT have an even number on the back.
Everyone gets this wrong, basically. Well, non-mathematicians always do, and I'm pretty sure I got it wrong because I get every answer wrong on the first try. Punk as fuck.
Now, if you ask the same people a logically equivalent question: "You see four people. Two are drinking beer and two are drinking coke. Whose IDs do you have to check?"
No one says you have to check the ID of the coke drinker. Because who cares how old they are? If it's the same puzzle, but phrased as a problem of possible social cheating, we nail it.
GlennF sez, "The Digital Economy Bill in the UK that Cory has written about has a new, horrible portion that could cause many (most?) public hotspots to shut down unless run by companies large enough to handle the recordkeeping requirements.
This ZDNet UK article cites legal experts who say that the penalties associated with failure to comply will make small businesses turn off hotspots. Universities and libraries may face huge liability as well."
Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses", and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.
"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.
"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."
The Digital Economy Bill is being sold to us on the grounds that copyright infringement harms the British economy because of the importance of our entertainment industry. But while the measures in the DEB won't stop copyright infringement (copying isn't going to slow down -- as computers and the technology they enable gets cheaper and more widely distributed, copying will continue to speed up, just as it has done since the dawn of the computer industry), they will harm British business and British families, by making the Internet generally less useful and more difficult and more expensive for honest people to use.
In other words, the Digital Economy Bill will do no good for the analogue economy industries, and will weaken the digital economy.
Camilo Salas K. from Disorder Magazine in Chile (a very cool publication about music and culture, in the same eclectic/irreverent vein as Boing Boing) writes to us from the capital city of Santiago:
The situation right now is very bad. We are getting news of the most bad places (the south center of Chile) and the news is no good. I am listening about buildings on the floor, hospitals with a lot of people and aftershocks. Every 5 or 10 minutes we feel shakes from the earth. Right now I am experiencing a VERY LONG ONE.
The news says there are over one hundred dead people and lot of injuries. I have electric light and internet, i can use my cellphone, with some difficulty, but it works.
In the most damaged areas there is no electricity or water, but you can buy food. The supermarkets are full of people, but they are working. The most difficult thing is that we dont have a lot of information about the most damaged places, but suddenly news appears about huge fires last night and people escaping from one of the prisons.
I was sleeping at 3:30 in the morning with my girlfriend. I live in the 10th floor of a 10 floor building and i woke up with a little shake. Then it was growing in intensity, and growing and growing. I get to the door and stay there. I have a lot of confidence in the strength of the building I live in, because nothing happend in 1985, the year we experienced another bad earthquake, and my building was built in the 70s. Chile has a really good earthquake standard for buildings.
A todos los amigos chilenos de Boing Boing, y toda la gente de latinoamerica que tienen familiares y amigos allá, les saludamos y esperamos por lo mejor para ustedes y sus familias.
An 8.8 earthquake struck Chile last night, killing at least 150 people, leaving some half a million people homeless, and setting off tsunami activity that now threaten islands in the Pacific, and coastlines from South America to Canada. Related quake activity has claimed lives and caused structure collapse in Argentina.
Chile sits along the seismologically volatile "Ring of Fire," and has a long history of strong earthquakes. While the force of this quake was some 800 to 1,000 times stronger than the quake that recently struck Haiti, the destruction and loss of life, by early estimates, seems lower—in part, say some, because the country has more wealth, better infrastructure and architectural standards, and is generally well-prepared.
As I publish this blog post, the National Weather Service reports that the waves hitting the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia were smaller than forecast, causing some to believe that the coming impact on Hawaii may be less than initially feared.
A few early resources here, please feel free to share others in the comments:
"Why, they must spit two or three gallons a day! They ain't died fast enough, these old men!"--Mrs. T.E. Bagley, Whitney, Texas, 1949
John Ptak comments on a story from a 1949 issue of LIFE. The photos are fantastic.
It isn't, I guess, so much a story about their sitting as it is a story about their not sitting, about how it came to be that their lumber was removed and the men forced to find another place to take in the sights and construct their great edifices of commentary and asides.
The story appears in LIFE Magazine of 15 August 1949, and lays the whole drama out in two splash pages, with bare editorializing and some great photos.
The story goes like this: "In 1922 D. (Doctor Dee) Scarborough, the druggist in Whitney, Texas, put up a bench outside his store, and immediately it became a loafing headquarters for the gaffers of the Brazos River Valley. 'Year after year they sat there looking like a jury of irritable terrapins, whittling, spitting and passing judgment on everything that passed. But finally reform caught up with them." It caught up to them, even if everyone was wearing a collared shirt.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
My friend Gareth Branwyn, chief blogster at Makezine.com, had a picture of himself drawn as a robot that I thought was pretty cool. Investigating that idea led me to the befunky.com website. Tons of interesting ways to rendering your portrait without having to know or have Photoshop. The interface is easy too. Impessive!
Chris sez, "The residents of Little Green Street are fighting against developers who trying to use one
of London's very few remaining original Georgian streets as a lorry
run to a site they're trying to develop just north of Kentish Town.
The battle has been going on for years now with the local council,
Camden, refusing permissions at every step but losing appeals.
"Now it looks like the developers may be going ahead with their plan,
which will include running ten-tonne trucks up a cobbled street (which
won't stay authentic Georgian for very long, then). This is a street
which is so narrow even taxi drivers refuse to drive up it.
Anyway, the residents (led by my good friend Nick Goodall) have launched
a new category of architectural award, the MORONS (Many Obvious
Reasons Overcome Nothing) to celebrate their own and others' planning
stupidities.
"The whole site is well worth a read, with stupidity piled on idiocy
heaped on lunacy; for example it turns out the developers don't
actually own part of the site where they're planning to build; the
Council themselves refused permission for the building trucks to pass
through their estate at the rear of the development because it would
be 'too dangerous' but the same trucks can pass up a narrower (much
narrower) street lined with listed buildings; and so on."
ABC After-School Specials hit their zenith (or nadir) with The Day My Kid Went Punk, a punksploitation show to rival the CHiPS "Rip and Destroy" episode (and yes, that's Bernie Kopell, the doctor from the Love Boat, as the outraged dad).
The only thing that comes close to redeeming this cheesy mound of lard and grease is the fact that it's ostensibly meant to be shared with a few friends. Even so, you'll collectively be taking in an entire day's worth of calories, three days' allotment of saturated fat, and a day and a half's allotment of sodium. What's even scarier, if you can imagine, is that even if you try to order more sensibly and ask for the "half" order of Texas Cheese Fries, you'll still receive a disastrous dish that packs in 1,400 calories. There's one French fries side dish at Chili's that's acceptable, although even in its much-reduced form, you'd be better off splitting it.
Thanks to Mark, David, Xeni, and Cory for the opportunity to place my posts on the world's best blog for the past two weeks. Having an online presence on such a lively and well-read space has been a thrill.
Loopla's "Gyro-bowl" is a kids' eating-bowl mounted on a gimbals so that it can swing freely as your kid picks it up and moves it around. It looks like it would be a lot of fun -- and easier for kids to carry without spilling.
So, the concept I pitched to Nick was, "Let's talk about math from the platform of 'Math that humans are likely to want to know, because it's about other humans.'"
Social conflict. Sex. Beauty.
The situation right now is very bad. We are getting news of the most bad places (the south center of Chile) and the news is no good. I am listening about buildings on the floor, hospitals with a lot of people and aftershocks. Every 5 or 10 minutes we feel shakes from the earth. Right now I am experiencing a VERY LONG ONE.
The news says there are over one hundred dead people and lot of injuries. I have electric light and internet, i can use my cellphone, with some difficulty, but it works.
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
Chris sez, "The residents of 