Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Having gotten back into making popovers has lead to remembering there is a variant that even easier; where you make them in a cast iron frying pan or dutch oven. It’s also pretty amazing as it comes out of the oven. Same recipe as popovers. We always called these David Eyre’s Pancakes when I was a kid. They it must be a very old dish with many names, for example Yorkshire Puddling, but my favorite is Dutch Baby.

This article is totally weird.  To begin: “scheduled pipeline maintenance in Colorado reduced the system’s capacity to export out of the Rocky Mountain region”.  So then what happened? “gas supplier Colorado Interstate Gas dropped the price”  I have no idea why they did that.  And there were buyers, in particular the city owned utility in Colorado Springs.   Now this stuff “normally trades at $3 to $4″ but the utility did pretty well: “2.6 cents”.   Sadly most of their storage was already full; so they only managed to save a few million dollars.  Too weird.

Here’s an interesting game: find a book on Amazon who’s “also viewed” relatives are particularly diverse and distinctive from the first book. In this example a book on the Challenger disaster (i.e. it looks into the question was the Nasa culture embracing increasing risk over time) that is paired with a book on how the law treats the economic under currents of intimate relationships (for example does a Husband have rights to his patents granted to his wife), a book on story telling’s role in political movements, and finally a book that looks into what pleasures a criminal finds in his craft.

My first reaction when I saw this set what WTF, but actually it makes sense. These would all make fine selections for a geeky Social Sciences book of the month club. Which isn’t a bad first approximation of what I’m into these days.

I find this extremely obnoxious. Link-in is sending marketing to it’s customers and using my name in the subject lines. Obviously they are doing this to increase the chance people will read, rather than just discard the junk mail. Social network hosts should be very careful about this kind of thing. I wonder what the hell their product management was thinking. Presumably this indicates that Link-in’s days are numbered.

From: LinkedIn Updates
Date: March 30, 2006 1:06:05 PM EST
To: …
Subject: Find the people that you and Ben Hyde know in common

LinkedIn Updates
Dear …

Thank you for using LinkedIn! Did you know that you may not be connected to people you know and trust? We would like to help you connect with your trusted contacts and get more value from LinkedIn.

It’s easy to find people that you and your trusted connections like Ben Hyde both know. See someone you recognize? Just click on that person’s name to view the profile. From there, click “Invite to connect” to send an invitation.

Check to see who is in Ben Hyde’s network.

…

Of course the joke is on them. Any of my aquantances immediately hit the delete upon seeing my name!

This is amusing. I have here an email from Amazon dated March 21st, 2006 stating that they have shipped my new windshield wipers. Further down it says that the estimated delivery date is April 26th. Over a month! Too late for April showers. I assume this means that Jeff Bezos has set out walking from Seattle to hand deliver them, that’s nice.