While not your usual step-by-step instructions, it provides more information than I think 98-99% of the U.S. population has that’s required to know what’s “good” and what’s… not good.

The February 2006 issue of Gourmet magazine has a nice ranked list of chocolate (available in the U.S.) that they tested in a brownie recipe. Valrhona was ranked #1, an relatively unknown at #2 (no one I know has heard of them), and Scharffen-Berger at #3.

(Click on Read This Post (right-side menu) for full entry. (CSS in the theme is screwing up the formatting if I leave the entire post to display here.))
[Read more...]

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Mediocrity by “areas of improvement”
How many times in your life (school, career, relationships) have you been told about your “areas of improvement”? How much time and energy have you spent working on those areas? If you’re a manager, how much emphasis do you put on those areas during a performance review?

Maybe instead of working on our weaknesses, we should be enhancing and exploiting our strengths? What if the price for working on weakness (and who even decides what is and isn’t a “weakness”?) is less chance to be f’n amazing?

There are several books out about this, although I haven’t read them — but the idea gets my attention:

Teach With Your Strengths, which says on its Amazon page,
“Defying the orthodoxy that teachers, to be more well rounded, should work to strengthen their weaknesses, this book, drawing on research by the Gallup Organization, maintains that great teachers are those who teach with their greatest talents and abilities.”

Excerpt:

WWdN: In Exile: Seeking a potential Marrow Donor
One of my fellow Los Angeles Poker Bloggers, StudioGlyphic (who won the WPBT Winter Classic last December) is looking for some help for one of his friends, whose girlfriend is very sick with cancer, and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. The odds of finding a donor match are about 1:20,000, but this girl’s odds are even longer because she is Fillipino:

So please, contact your friends, and ask them to contact their friends. Anyone you know who is Filipino and between the ages of 18 and 61 is a potential donor. The system is nationwide, so it doesn’t matter where they live. Signing up on the registry is easy and painless. All it requires is a simple blood test. Some hospitals charge a small fee for this blood test, however if your friends contact me directly, I can put them in touch with one of the hundreds of local organizations that will do the blood test for free. They can use this email address: jacobkrueger@gmail.com

…and…

There are lots of misconceptions about donating bone marrow. (I know I was terrified of doing it before I learned how minor the procedure actually is.) The procedure is simple and safe. You will be anesthetized the whole time, so you will not feel anything. When the procedure is over, you may have some soreness in the area for a few days and you may feel a little tired. That’s it. The bone marrow you donate is replenished within 3-4 weeks. And again, you will only undergo this procedure if your blood sample shows that you are a match and you decide to donate, in which case the slight soreness you’ll be feeling will be saving someone’s life.

Excerpt:

Jupelo – Who Be Me?
The Most Basic Basics

Goal 1: Spend an entire year at Walt Disney World and record every second of it for you to see.

Goal 2: Begin building the world’s largest Disney collection (there’s more to this – see below).

Goal 3: Not go insane.

Excerpt:

Play Again Games : MonopolyHomeRules
Monopoly Home Rules
These optional rules may make Monopoly a whole new game for you. Please let me know if you have played any good home rules that I have not mentioned, or if you play with any of these rules tell me what you thought of them. I mark the ones I recommend.

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Crash Course in Learning Summary
Here’s a PDF (500k) with a two-page summary sheet (with the graphics as icon/reminders) of the full post I made previously. Do NOT look at this until you’ve read the earlier (big) post… it’s not meant to be stand-alone.

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory
So, as promised in an earlier post, here’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department. This is the long version, and my next post will be just the bullet points with the pictures–as a kind of quick visual summary.

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to prentations, user documentation, or classroom learning. And remember, this is a BLOG, so don’t expect academic rigor ; ) but I do have references, so leave a comment if there’s something in particular you want.

I… I… Um… Cool! Hehe…

HW-PORN – Girls with Network Equipment

I’ve known for a long time that the best way to learn non-technical things and create artistic thingies was to get my logical brain the hell out of the way. This puts that idea into a very digestible, and vastly more useful, form.

Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Creativity on speed
One of the best ways to be truly creative–breakthrough creative–is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast. From the brain’s perspective, it makes sense that extreme speed can unlock creativity. When forced to come up with something under extreme time constraints, we’re forced to rely on the more intuitive, subconscious parts of our brain. The time pressure can help suppress the logical/rational/critical parts of your brain. It helps you EQ up subconscious creativity (so-called “right brain”) and EQ down conscious thought (“left brain”).

For all my procrastinating and/or overwhelmed-by-the-details friends, please for Heaven’s sake read this article (comments too; there are some gems) — and use it! You know you need to. :)

Excerpt:

David Seah – Much To Do About Task Tracking
However, when it comes to my personal time, I’d rather be more free-form. Unfortunately, I tend to think of projects that are way too big for a single person to do in one free evening, so I…don’t do them. And this, my friends, is procrastination.

Intellectually, I know that it just takes determination: putting one foot in front of the other over and over again, until victory is just over the next foothill. But any procrastinator worth his salt has the uncanny ability to previsualize all the minutia that goes into a project, estimating with astonishing candor every bit of time, effort, heartbreak and disappointment it takes before anyone gets to sip from the Chalice of Higher Achievement. So taking that first step is awfully hard. When my faithful Tivo is stuffed to the gills with good TV and is just a remote-control click away, my resolve falters; laziness, as they say, always pays off right now.

I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that this was also the key:

Make achievement pay off right now, not later!

Excerpt:

Cognitive Daily – What are we doing when we look away during a conversation?
In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we’re speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them.

But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.

So what’s the cause of this behavior? Do several different causes lead to looking away, or is the root cause the same for all of them? Perhaps we look away when we are feeling socially challenged. After all, difficult questions, or social intimacy, or the heightened social awareness involved in deceiving others could all lead to the same feeling of being put on the spot.

But another explanation is possible at least some of the time. We get a great deal of information by looking at faces, and this information places a significant load on our cognitive systems. Perhaps, when we’re asked a difficult question and need to concentrate, looking away from a face helps us focus on the cognitive demands of the question.

Excerpt:

Cognitive Daily – How “gut feelings” influence memory
What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don’t know her at all – but you’ve still got a feeling you do. What’s that all about?

Excerpt

Wired 13.11: The Mystery of the Green Menace
It’s been celebrated as a muse and banned as a poison. Now an obsessed microbiologist has cracked the code for absinthe – and distilled his own.

I tend to be pretty picky about this sort of thing. This example is news to me, though. Check out the list for some others that might surprise you.

Excerpt:

100 Most Often Mispronounced Words
often: We have mastered the spelling of this word so well, its spelling influences the pronunciation: DON’T pronounce the [t]! This is an exception to the rule that spelling helps pronunciation.

Excerpt:

Boing Boing: Bugged games from World of Warcraft makers Blizzard?
Breaking the rules isn’t nice, but this is a game, people — a game! It’s not a matter of national security; nobody is going to get killed except the stupid video game avatars. Do you realize the government would have to have a warrant to get the kind of information Blizzard claims it has the right to suck out of your computer to stop cheaters? Doesn’t that seem a wee bit wrong?

Excerpt:

Salon.com… Books | The blogger who loathed me
To be clear: Some bloggers, such as Wendy McClure, also happen to be terrific writers. They use their blogs to undertake the honest labor of self-reflection. The improvisational form activates their love of the language. More power to them.

But there are also bloggers who [...] are simply too lazy and insecure to risk making art, to release their deepest emotions onto a blank page with no promise of recognition. So they launch a blog instead.

I can understand the temptation. It’s one I feel every day. [...] horrifies me precisely because he represents certain desires that live inside of me: the desire to avoid the solitude and humiliation of sustained creative work, to choose grievance over mercy, to find a shortcut to fame.

Yet more proof that chocolate is good for everything! :)

Excerpt:
Dark Chocolate Helps Diarrhea: Study Confirms Ancient Myth
History shows that the use of cocoa to treat diarrhea dates back to the 16th century by ancient South American and European cultures. Until now, no one knew exactly why the cocoa bean appeared to be a remedy. “Our research successfully proves that this ancient myth is really based on scientific principals,” said Dr. Illek. For more than a year, scientists tested cocoa extract and flavonoids in cell cultures that mimic the lining of the intestine. All of the cultures reported lower fluid levels. Consequently, the tests confirmed that cocoa flavonoids are a possible remedy for diarrhea.

As usual, good stuff from Kathy Sierra.

Exerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: “Dignity is deadly.” – Paul Graham
What goes away when a company moves past the start-up phase? Living only on take-out and caffeine. Working in a [small] living room. Crazy, stupid, unprofessional behavior. Wearing nothing but shorts and ripped t-shirts.

Is this a good thing?

Very handy!

Excerpt:

Boing Boing: Database of voice-jail shortcuts to speak to humans at big companies
Database of voice-jail shortcuts to speak to humans at big companies
The Find-a-Human database is a collection of touch-tone recipes that get you through big companies’ voice-jail systems and through to a live operator.

Excerpt:

collision detection: A bioterror attack in World of Warcraft
Dig this: An Ebola-like epidemic is raging in World of Warcraft, the enormously popular online game — and it’s killing players left and right. The trouble began when Blizzard, the company that runs World of Warcraft, introduced a new opponent called Hakkar, the “god of blood”. When you fight him, as a defense he infects you with something called “Corrupted Blood”, which shaves off your hit points so rapidly that your character dies very quickly. Problem is, the Blood is infectious — get close enough to another player and you’ll pass on the disease.

I discovered the 9rules site via Creating Passionate Users. If you’re looking for a way to find the creme de la creme of weblogs, this is certainly a really good place to start. My Newsgator/Feeddemon article count just grew a bit. :)

Excerpt from the ‘About’ page:

9rules network
Overview
About the 9rules Network

The 9rules Network is about building a community of high quality websites as well as a community of highly discerning readers. Content is king and looking good helps. We add sites that meet these rigorous standards and leave bribe money under our keyboards.

Many people hear the word “weblog” and go running to Google to find weblogs on their favorite topics, but weeding through the crap to find the cream is a daunting task. Fortunately there are hundreds of thousands of great websites and weblogs that provide quality content, and our goal is to connect hungry readers with passionate writers so that they can live in harmony.

The 9rules Network is about great content, and if any website/weblog/wiki produces that on a regular basis then who are we to filter them out. Passionate writers don’t need to be tied down to vernacular. Great weblog. Great website. We don’t discriminate.
It’s For Everyone Readers and writers unite

The network is here for both experienced writers and bloggers, for newer authors trying to gain a foothold, and for the millions of readers who flock to sites in our network everyday. Site authors can join the network and boost their audience, newer authors can get some help from more experienced members, and web users now have a place to find great content on the web. 9rules is for everyone.

Excerpt:

The Week Magazine
The evolution of the Big Easy
Its French Quarter is actually Spanish, many of its streets are below sea level, and many of its former public officials and judges are in jail. How did New Orleans become the nation’s most eccentric city?
9/16/2005

Why was the city built below sea level?
Founded in a marsh in 1718, Nouvelle-Orl�ans has always been a victim of its location. The French chose the site, on a crescent of soggy land extending into the Mississippi River, because it was the last landing place before the river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico; they envisioned it as a booming port serving fur trappers and other traders, and a fitting capital for France’s burgeoning North American empire. But in its first four years of existence, the settlement was leveled four times by hurricanes. Engineers begged the French commander, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, to relocate above the swamp, calling it a place “where God never intended a city to be built” and where “only the madness of commercial lust could ever have tempted men to occupy.” But de Bienville refused, unwilling to forsake its strategic location.

This looks entirely too awesome! I’ve been toying with Gallery2, and obviously already have WordPress going. The combination of the two will be a lot of fun, assuming setting it up isn’t too great a headache. :)

WordPress Gallery2 – WPG2 Main Page
WPG2 is a WordPress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the WordPress Sidebar and Blog entries. The current version of WPG2 is RC2, released on August 22nd, 2005.

Have I mentioned lately how awesome the Creating Passionate Users blog is, in particular how much I agree with their teaching/learning methodologies? They rock, man.

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Foo Camp: ad-hoc learning
A lot of adult learning environments (including colleges) do have scenarios in which the students/learners are asked to help evolve the course itself… including taking turns presenting some of the material, but these kinds of activities are the exception, when they should be a key component. I’ve argued with instructors for years over this–as they claim, “Students didn’t come here to be taught by other students who don’t know anything–they came here to get the facts from ME, the expert.”

Oh really? If you drill down, you’d find that most of the students/learners are there to learn. They may have been conditioned through tradition that this means the student listens (and does the occasional “lab exercise”) while the expert dispenses facts and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly what most learners want. They want to learn.

And surprisingly little real, deep learning comes from sitting in a chair listening. Think about it… you often learn best (or at least, most memorably) when you’re suddenly thrown in the deep end of a situation where you must figure something out in order to keep going or fix a problem. We learn from doing, and we learn from interacting and discussing with others.

But we often learn best that which we have to teach.
It’s only when you have to explain something to someone else that you really find out how little you understand. And that realization motivates you and points to the right direction for getting the rest of the story.

Via Boing Boing:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. “I’d seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then,” Cohen recalls, “and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we’re going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?”

Here was a singularly odd idea: To re-engineer the most inhumane and destructive weapon of all time, so that it would _reduce_ human suffering. Cohen’s unique achievement was to prove that this could in fact be done.

His first requirement was that wars should be fought as they had been historically, confining their damage to military combatants while towns and cities remained undamaged and their civilian inhabitants remained unscathed. This concept seemed quaint in a new era where everyone and everything was at risk of being vaporized in a nuclear exchange, but Cohen saw no reason why nukes had to be massively destructive. Technology existed to make them so small, they could cause less damage than even some conventional weapons.

Ideally he wanted to reduce blast damage to zero, to eliminate the wholesale demolition of civilian housing, services, and amenities that he had witnessed in Seoul. He saw a way to achieve this if a fusion reaction released almost all of its energy as radiation. Moreover, if this radiation consisted of neutrons, which carry no charge, it would not poison the environment with residual radioactivity.

The bomb would still kill people–but this was the purpose of all weapons. _If_ wars were liable to recur (which Cohen thought was probable), soldiers were going to use weapons of some kind against each other, and everyone would benefit if the weapons minimized pain and suffering while ending the conflict as rapidly as possible.

Cohen came up with a design for a warhead about one-tenth as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If it was detonated at 3,000 feet above ground level, its blast effects would be negligible while its neutron radiation would be powerful enough to cause death within a circle about one mile in diameter. This was the battlefield weapon that came to be known as the neutron bomb.

Via 101reviews.com…:

DigitalCamera@101reviews � New patented lens made of liquid paves way for slimmer digital cameras
Named Fluidlens, this lens is made of liquid and is no bigger than a contact lens, but can achieve an optical zoom of up to 10 times, matching the zoom capabilities of lenses found on mid-range and high-end digital cameras and superior than most cellphone cameras which use digital zoom that relies on software rather than the lens to zoom in on an object.

Via The Register:

Brits steal carloads of F**king Austrian roadsigns | The Register
An Austrian village called Fucking will not change its name despite sniggering Brits making off with its roadsigns.

Mayor Siegfried Hauppl has asked visitors to lay off the signs which began to attract outside attention after British and US soldiers passing through in 1945 illuminated the locals as to the English meaning of Fucking, Ananova reports.

Star Trek Business Cards on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
I bought a set of business cards for the characters of Star Trek (The Original Series) in the 1980′s at a Sci-Fi Convention. UnfortunatelyI don’t know who the original manufacturer is or how to get more. I found them today whilst digging for some old photos.

If you want to know how to make divine espresso, click the link below. Via boingboing (excerpt):

Boing Boing: Espresso crema shots
Crema is the wonderful tan colored foam that appears on the top of a well-shot espresso. High quality espresso joints have a saying: “No crema, no serva.”

I recently got a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker, generally considered the best consumer espresso model available. Trouble is, I can’t seem to get it to make a shot with crema. It’s shooting blanks, so to speak. The next issue of Make magazine is going to feature a couple of coffee hacks that should help espresso fanatics produce precious crema. I’m going to give them a try.

In the meantime, I’ll just drool over these photos over at espressoporn.com…. The photo here shows a machine using a “crotchless” portafilter. Some people might consider that a cheater’s way to get creama, but I’ll take it any way I can get it.
Link (thanks, Kate!)