Reading (For Dummies)

The Brawndo Experiment

The Brawndo time-lapse hasn't been going so well. I was using Gawker, but the program liked to suddenly stop capturing new frames in mid-day for some reason. It would get, say, two hours of time-lapse, and then the rest of the video that it created would be the frame at X time, where X was start time plus two hours. Very weird.

The plants so far...

I may end up buying a MiniDV cam or some such to run the experiment with better video coverage. A bit of money to shell out in the name of science, but sometimes scientific progress requires sacrifice. Besides, the experiment as it was being done was tying up my laptop computer all day, and my laptop is my primary development machine (and I am way behind on a group project already [sorry Pete]).

And for those who are wondering: Yes, the water did come from the toilet...

The Great Divide

Less than an hour drive...

The Palouse Divide is where Laura and I ended up skiing on Christmas Day, among fluff and white stuff. It's hard to believe that this place is only a 45 minute drive from Pullman -- a stark contrast from our hometown's drab farm-country, the Divide is a ridgeline that lives at a few hundred feet of elevation above the surrounding country (we live at 2500 feet...). That little bit of elevation is, apparently, enough that it gets a lot more snow in the winter. The base was about 2-3 feet in most of the divide, where our house is lucky to keep a few inches on the ground. If the rest of the Palouse was this densely populated with pines, I just might love the place.

We skied the "Long Loop" trail, though we turned around about 6 miles into the loop (der, we could have gone about 2 more miles and finished it, but there are no trail markers and we had no idea if we were actually heading in the right direction...better safe than sorry I guess). We ended up skiing roughly 12 miles in about 4.5 or 5 hours, which isn't too terribly bad. I definitely wasn't feeling good at the end, but then I've never skied quite so far, for so long, only to find myself fumbling around in the dark without a headlamp at the end. Lessons learned: bring light, bring map, bring compass, (or bring GPS). I'll be heading out for some more hot skiing action in the coming weeks, hopefully doing some of the tele slopes, and hopefully not dying on them.

Brawndo Update

Day one of the Brawndo experiment:

A higher quality feed of the video can be found here. I'll be feeding the videos onto youtube here.

Brawndo...What plants crave?

Like a lot of folks lately, I discovered that Brawndo actually exists! Brawndo, for those not in the know, was one of the plot points of Idiocracy, another of Mike Judge's cult hits (yes, that Mike Judge). The movie depicts a dystopian future in which the average IQ has gone to retarded levels due to the stars of COPS (and no, I'm not referring to the police officers here) breeding out intelligent people.

One of the major plot points of the film is that Brawndo (a until-now fictitious gatorade-like sports drink) was touted to be, "What plants crave™," so that the Brawndo corporation could sell more of its electrolytic beverage. Each serving of Brawndo has 200mg of sodium, so even non-viewers may guess how well that worked out for America's food supply...

A real science experiment...

Yes, I'm going to perform a science experiment. For the next three weeks (or until the tomato plants die, which might be soon, because I live at a very high latitude and we don't get much sunlight at this time of year) I will be feeding both tomato plants carefully measured amounts of water and Brawndo Thirst Mutilator beverage. I should note to the viewers at home that these are my girlfriend's tomato plants, that she is a Phd student in Molecular Plant Science, and that she has already expressed displeasure in this experiment (though, to be fair, she wanted to put both plants in the trash a week ago, I convinced her to keep them [mostly so I could perform this experiment (yes, honey, I still love you!)]).

I'm sure that there will be many of these types of experiments now that Brawndo is a reality. I like to think that I'm the first. I also have the most at stake. And look, I'm carefully measuring the amount of each liquid that I give to the plants with fancy science equipment (beakers!), so my experiment is certainly the most scientific. Also, I'm performing it as a double-blind study: neither plant is being told which form of liquid it is receiving. Stay tuned as we watch which tomato plant thrives, if any...

***UPDATE***

I'll be posting videos on Youtube (sans music, so they're boring at the moment), at this url.

Comments re-enabled

After a ginormously long hiatus, comments are coming back. My site does them in a way that will (hopefully) protect my generous overlord's server from harm. If any spam-type stuff happens in the next few days, comments will, no doubt, be disabled again. Comments require you to solve a Captcha, and then require moderation by me. Intolerance is not tolerated, for example, and will not be approved.

Reid out.

An Open Letter to Modern Architects

My open letter to the modern home architect could be summed up in a sentence: Stop Making Ugly.

I've finally settled on buying a house. I haven't chosen one yet, but I did see a mortgage broker for pre-approval, started checking the local MLS listings, and have been giving what I've seen the old 'walk-by'.

It seems that any house built within the last 20 years suffers from a common thought process. The architect checklist included a home design priority order of, "1: Big garage that is close to street. 2: Wide driveway. 3: living room that juts out toward the street somewhat to maximize space. 4: Add extra room on top of the garage to maximize space. 5: Oh, right, put a front door in there somewhere."

Pretty much every house has an enormous-looking garage, and the garage is the only portion of the house that can be seen from many angles. Front doors tend to be tucked away, either far to one side of a small front porch (often butted up against a jutting living room which cuts the porch off on one side), or else claustrophobically wedged in between a garage and a living room that juts out. Either way, it makes approaching a front door on foot incredibly uncomfortable and unwelcoming, at least to me.

Perhaps this is by design, reflecting an attitude of the residents that shuns outside social contact and visitors? Or perhaps I'm missing the boat entirely, and this "front door wedging" really represents some kind of vaginal fixation in modern home architecture? I'm not sure. What I do know is that I am far more attracted to (and thus far more likely to buy) a house with a large, wide porch/landing and with a door that does not feel so tightly wedged between portions of building. Even better if the garage is de-emphasized and moved further from the street -- car culture is kind of scary; I have been walking and biking to work more often than in San Diego, even, and I intend to keep it that way.

Perhaps I'll give up, buy a plot of land, and hire my brother for consultation on a dome.