Chewing The Cud

Who hasn’t been in this situation: Eating with a group of friends, the conversation on fire, everyone’s finished and yet no one is moving? You know you have things to do and places to be, but still you sit. At last, someone makes the move, and the whole table springs up as if the chairs were pinching their occupants.

I feel like this scenario is applicable to the world’s dependancy on oil and the reluctance to move away from the black gold to greener alternatives. All that is needed is for a nation to make the move, convert 100% to green energy, and then poof, other nations take notice. The Guardian has an article highlighting a few of the countries that are trying to be that impetus. Now it is up to the rest of the world to take notice and do the same.

BBC has an interesting article today on the incandescent light bulb and its wastefulness.

From the article:

It has been estimated that if every household in the US replaced just three of its incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving designs and used them for five hours per day, it would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 23 million tonnes, reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 11 coal-fired power stations and save $1.8bn.
Given that investing $450m could save $1.8bn, it is hard to understand why anyone would still choose incandescent bulbs.

It seems like the big drawback to going green is that it requires us to modify our way of life. Hopefully we will begin to see that there are easy ways, such as replacing our traditional light bulbs with energy-saving ones, to reduce our energy consumption without affecting our lifestyles. So go ahead, make the change. Your wallet and your world will thank you in the long run…

A real, official advertisement for Microsoft Front Page, the much lamented HTML editor that is an abomination, trying to show that their program doesn’t suck.

Notice anything hilarious? Okay n00b, look at line 28. Brings a tear of laughter and a tear of sadness to my eyes at the same time.

Not the song dude…actual brown sugar. I was making a sweet steak marinade today in preparation for the Super Bowl and found that the brown sugar I had was hard as a rock. Rather than trashing it and buying some more, I went to the trusty Internets and poked around. Here’s the remedy for hard brown sugar - microwave until it is soft and before it begins to melt. The estimates were in the vicinity of 30 seconds for a cup of sugar. To prevent the hardness occurring, apparently one should keep the brown sugar in the freezer. I am testing this theory and will approve or debunk it at a later date.

Perhaps a case can be made for the existence of artistic talent in me…read on for why writing code is awesome!

An utterly uninteresting and yet perplexing discussion occured the other day with a friend. She asked me what the plural of “cul-de-sac” is, to which I responded with the knee-jerk obvious “cul-de-sacs”. Immediately realizing the odd nature of the question, and its origin from the proverbial left field, I began to rack my head for another possibility. Quick as lightning, spoiling my attempt at uncovering her trick, she responded, “Nope, its ‘culs-de-sac’”. Damn French…

Upon further investigation the source of this woman’s information turned out to be the highly reputable (said highly sarcastically) WB crud ‘Gilmore Girls’. Not satisfied to let this kind of shoddy trivial fact finding rest, I employed the power of the Internets (all of them) and came to this conclusion: Damn, she was right! And although I found a site or two that backed my original answer, I feel as though this is a battle I can concede.
Interesting side story: today, dy had a research day as well, where I learned that an ear of corn is a fruit, while cornmeal is a grain, and corn itself is a grass. Let’s see if the bio major knows that!