This article is right up my alley: how does the brain perceive the passage of time?
Interestingly enough, we’ve been told that the Phoenix shroud isn’t going to be sticking around for long. The first wave of cards launching today and for the near future will be using the shroud, but once AMD’s vendors begin using their own designs, AMD doesn’t expect most of the vendors to stick...
I only met Brad a couple of times three times — here’s one of those times. I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him better.
Sometime in the mid 80s I gave my father a subscription to Gourmet magazine. Looking back I think that's just about one of the most brilliant, inspired things I've ever done. Not only did it launch dad into what has become a life long passion for him, but we, his family, have been the ongoing beneficiaries of his recipe research and experiments. There is always something good cooking at my parent's house. These chicken wings are no exception. Dad found the recipe in a 1987 issue of Gourmet, for "deviled chicken wings". They are easy to make, relatively inexpensive (wings are cheap!), and insanely good. Great for appetizers for watching the playoffs, or as a main course with a side of Spanish rice.
Continue reading "Spicy Breaded Chicken Wings" »
This op-ed about American decline by the Times’s token conservative, Ross Douthat, bothers me — particularly this part:
[I]nstead of seeking a new post-Reagan consensus, the Obama Democrats are returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.
These policies may help smooth over the inequalities that have opened in our national life since the 1970s. But they threaten to cost America its position in the world along the way.
Social democracy has its benefits, but global competitiveness isn’t one of them.
Is he seriously arguing that America’s “position in the world,” its “global competitiveness,” is more important than the well-being of our citizens? Pundits are always saying that it’s deathly important that we not let other countries get ahead of us, without explaining why we should care. Is it really so crucial that we be Number One in the world? What’s wrong with just being happy?
Why do these people have to make everything a competition?
I seriously wonder whether I’m missing something, because I just don’t get it.
I don’t know whether I’m more susceptible to sadness than other people or whether I just don’t deal with sadness well when it happens. Either way, I always find this to be one of the saddest times of the year. It’s not just that I’m back at work after taking off the week of Christmas and New Year’s. It’s that the entire holiday season has ended. Most of November and December is filled with with Christmas lights, and holiday music, and holiday parties, and then suddenly… it’s January and it all disappears. I’ve always wondered why people have to take down their Christmas lights and decorations right when we’re entering the depths and darkness of winter. It makes it so much worse.
What made yesterday even harder was that I was tired all day. On Saturday night I had a little gathering to belatedly celebrate my birthday, which was nice and cozy — a small group of us sitting at a banquette in a bar. But for some reason I slept horribly when we got home. I tossed and turned all night. So yesterday I was not only depressed but also exhausted. We didn’t do much in the afternoon, and then I took a nap around 4:00, and when I woke up it was dark out. And it was about 19 degrees outside. I felt like I had wasted the last day of my vacation.
I salvaged the evening a bit. I took a shower and got dressed and went out for a quick walk up Broadway to try and shake off the melancholy and torpor, stopping briefly in a small bookstore and then picking up a few groceries on the way home. Then Matt and I ordered in dinner and watched some Sunday night TV together; Fox’s Sunday night animation lineup is always good for some laughs.
I’m still very sleepy today, which is bringing me down. But I’m trying to remember to focus on the present instead of mourning the past or worrying about the future, and to feel gratitude for good experiences. For instance, the five days we spent with Matt’s family in the Chattanooga exurbs last week were really lovely and relaxing, especially the day we visited Lookout Mountain and Signal Mountain and the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel. I know that the future, too, contains good experiences that I can’t foresee, and I will try to appreciate them when they happen, and to be thankful for them.
When I was 18, my family visited Israel. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, it’s customary to write a prayer on a piece of paper and stick it in the cracks of the wall. Before we went to the wall, I ripped a page out of my diary — which was my own special and sacred book — and wrote a short note to God. Instead of asking for something specific, I just asked for happiness. What I have always wanted more than anything in the world is just to be happy.
My New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to try to be happier, even in moments of sadness.
From the recipe archive, originally published Jan 2007. Happy New Year! ~Elise
It seems as if there as many ways to prepare chili as there are cooks who make chili. Ground beef versus chunks, pork versus beef, pinto versus kidney beans, beans versus no beans, red chili or green chili - the combinations, as the preferences for them, are endless. (The Wikipedia has a great write-up on chili con carne if you are interested in exploring its origins and varieties.) A few notes on this recipe. We use chuck roast because it holds up the best to long stewing. The meat and onions are cooked in bacon fat which contributes to the flavor. We include kidney beans because we like kidney beans, but you can substitute other beans or leave them out entirely. A little sugar is used to balance out the acidity of the tomatoes and lime juice. The "secret sauce" so to speak of this recipe is the addition of chipotle chile powder, made from smoke-dried jalapeño peppers. Chipotle adds a smokey dimension to the chili, enhancing all of the other flavors. If you can't find chipotle powder, Tabasco makes a chipotle pepper sauce that can be used to add some smokey flavor to the stew.
Everyone has their favorite chili recipe. This one is mine, what's yours?
Continue reading "Chili Con Carne" »
Happy 2010!
I don’t have much to say today. I just wanted to make a blog post with today’s date on it.
I’m not sure whether I’m going to call 2010 “twenty-ten” or “two thousand ten.” I prefer the former, but I have to get used to it. Of course, some people have their opinions.
And even if it doesn’t take hold next year, I think it will in the next couple of years. And I wonder: once people get used to saying “twenty-thirteen” and “twenty-twenty-one” and so on, will they start referring to the years of the decade just ended in the same way? Will they start referring to 2001 as “twenty-oh-one,” and so on? And when they watch news reports of people referring to it as “two thousand one,” will that sound quaint?
By the way, are we in the teens now? Or the tens? Or the tweens? I think we’re in the “twenty-tens” (2010s) but also in the teens.
See, everyone was so focused on the first decade of the millennium that they forgot to think about the second decade.
Anyway — happy 2010.
So today is the last day of the decade. Today is December 31, 2009.
I was looking at my old diaries this morning. I’ve kept a diary on and off since I was 13, and I wrote diary entries at the end of the last two decades:
And now I’m ending this decade with a blog entry.
It’s weird to think that this is the tenth anniversary of the turn of the millennium. We’re already ten years into the new century. An entire decade of kids has grown up without that lifelong anticipation of the millennium that we all felt when we were growing up. They have always lived in the 21st century. It’s nothing special to them. We are really living in the future now.
Think back ten years ago today. December 31, 1999. Wasn’t that the creepiest date ever? Growing up, December 31, 1999 was always the date in science fiction movies when the world ended, when scary prophecies came true. On December 31, 1999, the sky was supposed to turn red and the oceans were supposed to boil and the giant bird-monsters from hell were supposed to come and take us away.
What happened instead? It was just another day. The sun rose like it always did, and the laws of physics did not crumble. I woke up in the apartment where I was living in Princeton, New Jersey, and watched TV much of the morning and afternoon. The news was reporting Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation, putting Vladimir Putin in charge of Russia. Peter Jennings, R.I.P., was hosting the millennium festivities on ABC in a 23-hour marathon. I didn’t have many friends at the time — I had just moved back to the NY/NJ area from Virginia a few months before — so in the evening I drove to my parents’ house, where my parents threw a New Year’s Eve dinner party. At midnight we all stood around the TV and watched the ecstatic mayhem in Times Square. I couldn’t believe it: It’s the year 2000. We are living in the year 2000.
Ten years have gone by since that night. And they have flown by way too quickly for me.
I was too young to appreciate the end of the 1970s. As for the 1980s, they were the decade I grew up — from kindergarten through high school. The 1990s: they were high school, college, law school, the beginnings of adult life — but mostly the University of Virginia.
What have the 2000s been?
For me the 2000s have been about New York, and about Matt. Matt and I met in late 2003 and have been together ever since. In 2000 I moved to Jersey City and began developing my Manhattan social life, and in the middle of the decade I finally moved here. In the future, when I think about a typical moment of my life back in the aughts, I will probably picture me and Matt, perhaps on a night in 2005, eating dinner together in front of the TV, back in our old apartment on West 8th Street. Perhaps we’re watching “Lost.” An image of domestic coziness.
In the 2000s I’ve had my blog. (So have a lot of us.)
In the 2000s I’ve worked for a family friend, then had a one-year law clerkship, then worked as a lawyer for the state of New Jersey for several years, then gone to work in my current job.
I have spent the 2000s paying off my student loan. My first payment was due in December 1999, and I am getting close to paying it off completely.
My last three living grandparents died in the last decade. (My dad’s parents both lived into their 90s, which gives me hope for my genes.) My family has also seen a new generation born: I became an uncle last month, and my niece could live to see the turn of the next century.
A decade ago I wrote the following:
A new decade lies ahead — the 00’s — and what will my life be like on December 31, 2009? What will I go through, learn, achieve, who will I meet, where will I go by the time I’m 36? I’ll see. I hope it doesn’t come too soon. It’s 3653 days away.
I haven’t achieved as much as I thought. In fact, I don’t feel like I’ve achieved much of anything at all. I haven’t written any books, I don’t seem to be moving along any sort of trajectory or career path. I do read a lot, but I don’t do anything with what I read. In many ways I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years, and that scares me, because what if another decade goes by and I’m saying the same thing?
On the other hand, I’m in a loving relationship — it’s not perfect, but we have a lot of love — and I’m financially more secure than I was ten years ago. I’m not rich and we don’t own property, but ten years ago I had that daunting student loan ahead of me and I was working two jobs despite having finished law school.
So on balance I’m better off than I was.
And so another decade is over, its memories calcified as The Past. Events fixed, unchangeable, only to be thought about, talked about, read about, perhaps one day virtually experienced on a holodeck. The 2000s are History.
I wonder what the world will be like on December 31, 2019?
I guess we’ll find out in ten years.
And so we keep going.
Now that it’s almost 2010, we can look back on a decade’s worth of New Year’s Eve eyeglasses. Two decades, really: they started in the 1990s. Alas, some people want to keep the trend alive. Seems like it would be hard to do unless you’re a cyclops.
Well, as it turns out, something did happen. After she was dancing, hugging, and getting kissed on the cheek by a woman I think ...
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anandtech : ASUS CES 2010 Press Conference [+0] - tinmanic : The Brain and Time [+0]
- anandtech : XFX’s Radeon HD 5770, A Look At The 5770 Revision 2 Cooler [+0]
- tinmanic : R.I.P. Brad Graham [+0]
- anandtech : CES 2010 – Netbooks, Netbooks, Everywhere! [+0]
- simply_recipes : Spicy Breaded Chicken Wings [+0]
- anandtech : DFI P55 MI-T36: Little Cutie [+0]
- tinmanic : Global Competitiveness? [+0]
- tinmanic : Sadness [+0]
- anandtech : The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530 [+0]
- anandtech : Intel Arrandale: 32nm for Notebooks, Core i5 540M Reviewed [+0]
- simply_recipes : Chili Con Carne [+0]
- tinmanic : Happy New Year [+0]
- anandtech : AMD Athlon 2650e & X2 3250e - Better than Atom for SFF Desktops [+0]
- anandtech : OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested [+0]
- tinmanic : End of the Decade [+0]
- tinmanic : 2010 Glasses [+0]
- savagelove : Features: Savage Love:December 30, 2009 [+55]
- anandtech : XBMC & Broadcom Bring 1080p Decode Upgrade to ill-equipped netbooks, nettops, Apple TVs [+0]
- _miss_manners : Miss Manners: Bow ties required for black-tie events [+0]