Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Oregon tsunamis

    This article on Bend.com is interesting, about the occurence (and likelihood of) tsunamis off the coast of Oregon.

    Some time between 9 and 10 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700, a similar great earthquake, with the same estimated magnitude as the one in Asia, struck the Northwest, rocking the region with strong shaking for several minutes. The specific time can be told through a variety of evidence closely studied by scientists in recent years, such as land levels, sand deposits, the rings of ancient trees and historic records….

     

    Geological evidence indicates that mega-quakes have occurred in the zone at least seven times over the past 3,500 years, meaning they happen, on average, every 400 to 600 years.

    With a little digging, I found out this was the Cascadia Earthquake (thank you, Wikipedia), a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake that slammed the Pacific Northwest. I also found this page which has a somewhat more consequential description:

    The earthquake collapsed houses of the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island and caused numerous landslides. The shaking was so violent that people could not stand and so prolonged that it made them sick. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the tsunami destroyed the winter village of the Pachena Bay people, leaving no survivors. These events are recorded in the oral traditions of the First Nations people on Vancouver Island.

    Freaky. I knew the area was geologically active—volcanoes and such—but I had no idea it was this active.

  • The Fortune blogging article

    Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it’s pretty good. There’s a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone’s enjoyment:

    • “If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie” — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
    • “Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world.”
    • “E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs.”
    • “Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist’s notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened.” — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google

    Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.

    The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man’s Copyright post. (I don’t know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)

  • PHP Suggest

    Over on php.net, they announced a full implementation of a search field suggestion box:

    The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.

     

    Whenever you type something into the search field, while having the function list search option selected, you will get a list of suggested functions starting with the letters you typed in. You can browse the list with the up/down keys, and you will be able to autocomplete the function name with the spacebar.

    Couple things I find interesting about this. First, it predates Google Suggest by a year (prior art that everyone heralding Google Suggest seemed not to notice); did Google get the idea from the PHP site, or is this more common?

    The second point is a bit more trivial, but I noticed when I was trying it out by typing in “date” that there are two additional PHP date functions that appeared in the list: date_sunrise() and date_sunset(). These are new to PHP 5. They take a timestamp, latitude, and longitude and return the respective time of day for sunrise or sunset. What’s interesting is that they are remarkably similar to two functions I had written well before PHP 5 came out. (“Written” is subjective, more like “adapted,” probably from a Java function somewhere.) However, from the looks of the manual, these new built-in functions only take a Unix timestamp, which limits the results to dates between 1970 and 2038, while my functions take any combination of month, day and year. The point? I just like to toot my own horn sometimes. :)

  • Barney on TV

    Last night on News Channel 21‘s (gack, Z21 to us locals) “Hometown Forum” program, I was surprised to see none other than Bend.com‘s own Barney Lerten as the guest! Did anyone else catch it? It was about the year in news, I think, but I was also finishing up dishes and enthralled in an exciting game of Chutes and Ladders with the kids, so I wasn’t able to pay close attention.

    Came off good, though. Go Barney! :)

  • Post Christmas

    Yes, this is the post where I detail what I got for Christmas, etc. I’ll even throw my birthday gifts in there for good measure.

    It was a good Christmas, too. (First Christmas in our new house.) After we got up and opened up presents, I made some giant French toast on my new griddle (got it for Christmas), wearing my new bathrobe (Christmas). I also got two cookbooks, Quicksilver, a fifth of Jagermeister, several bottles of McMenamins beer, a Jack Daniels gift set (whiskey plus playing cards and dice), a Barnes and Noble gift card, The Return of the King DVD, and A Charlie Brown Christmas (the book adapted from the original TV special).

    For my birthday two days earlier, I received a Peanuts daily desk calendar, a photo Christmas tree ornament (with the kids’ picture in it), an unusual sculpture/pen holder for my desk at work, several bottles of McMenamins beer (this was kind of a boozy holiday, I think) along with an Old St. Francis School pint glass, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books (the local comics shop), a personalized keychain, and cash. Cold, hard cash.

    All in all, a nice haul.

  • Merry Christmas!

    Some Christmas Eve wishes for everyone. I likely won’t be online much tomorrow, there’s just too much fun to be had in realspace. So, Merry Christmas, and I hope Santa Claus brings everyone what they want!

  • Happy birthday to me!

    Yeah, a straight-up ego/vanity post. I’m off from work today, the first day of a five-day weekend. How’s everyone else’s day going? :)

  • Eggnog

    Okay, it’s the holidays, who doesn’t love eggnog? Of course you could buy all the eggnog you want from the store, but that’s boring. Searching through the cookbooks we have, I found no fewer than three different eggnog recipes. The one that appeals to me the most is a combination of an egg custard and whipped cream; the others use uncooked eggs and while I know there’s almost a zero chance of getting salmonella from properly handled and stored eggs, the thought of consuming anything that’s mostly raw egg just doesn’t sit well with me.

    Here’s the preferred recipe, from Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook. It says it makes about 10 servings of ½ cup each.

    Ingredients for the egg custard:

    • 3 large eggs, slightly beaten
    • 1/3 cup sugar
    • Dash of salt
    • 2½ cups milk
    • 1 tsp. vanilla

    Mix eggs, sugar and salt in heavy 2-quart saucepan. Gradually stir in milk. Cook over medium heat 10 to 15 minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture just coats a metal spoon; remove from heat. Stir in vanilla. Place saucepan in cold water until custard is cool. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours but no longer than 24 hours.

    Ingredients for the whipped cream:

    • 1 cup whipping cream
    • 2 tbsp. powdered sugar
    • ½ tsp. vanilla
    • ½ cup rum (subsitute 1 tsp. vanilla for non-alcoholic)
    • 1 to 2 drops yellow food color, if desired
    • Ground nutmeg

    Beat whipping cream, powdered sugar and vanilla in chilled medium bowl with electric mixer on high speed until stiff. Gently stir 1 cup of the whipped cream, the rum and the food color into custard. Pour custard mixture into small punch bowl. Drop remaining whipped cream in mounds onto custard mixture. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Serve immediately. Refrigerate any remaining eggnog.

    Sounds pretty good to me. Now, here’s an old recipe for a single serving of eggnog, from the 1956 Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook:

    • Beat together 1 well-beaten egg and 2 tbsp. sugar.
    • Beat in 1 cup chilled rich milk and either ¼ tsp. vanilla or 1½ tsp. sherry flavoring and 1 tbsp. brandy or rum.
    • Serve cold in a tall glass sprinkled lightly with nutmeg.

    Yeah. Not sure about that. Anyway, that’s one variation; the other, from The Joy of Cooking, calls for separating the yolks from the whites, beating the whites to stiff peaks and folding them back into the mixture:

    • Beat until light 12 large egg yolks.
    • Gradually beat in 1 pound powdered sugar.
    • Add very slowly, beating constantly, 2 cups dark rum, brandy, bourbon or rye, or a combination.
    • Let stand, covered, for 1 hour to dispel the eggy taste.
    • Add, beating constantly, 2 to 4 cups chosen liquor(s) and 8 cups heavy cream.
    • Refrigerate, covered, for 3 hours.
    • In another large bowl beat until the peaks are stiff 12 large egg whites.
    • Fold the egg whites gently into the other ingredients.

    The recipe claims this makes 40 servings! My favorite part is the “dispel eggy taste.” That just sounds nasty.

    Otherwise, drink up! And if it tastes too eggy or you get salmonella, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  • Christmas parties galore

    So Thursday evening the kids’ daycare/preschool had their Christmas program, with each class performing two (or more) songs. Before the performances, Santa and his elves had arrived and all the kids waited in line to see them (although when you’re talking about kids ranging in age from 1 to 5, “waiting in line” is relative), and there was a big table full of cookies and treats for everyone. The kids (ours especially) all did great jobs with their respective songs, and while this wasn’t a “big” pageant or anything, it still kind of feels like you’ve “arrived” as a parent when your kids are in a school program on stage.

    Friday (last night) was my company’s holiday party. (“Holiday” as opposed to “Christmas” because we—as a company—didn’t want to offend anyone who might not celebrate Christmas. Have we really gotten so PC and “sensitive” that…? Ah, but that’s another rant.) It was a great party, lots of free beer and wine and excellent food and company. Everyone laughed a lot, and even though I didn’t win any cool prizes like I did last year, that’s all ancillary anyway; it’s just as much fun to dress up for the night and go out.

    Tonight was my wife’s Moms Club Christmas party, so the kids and I had a “night out” of TV dinners (the kids love the frozen kids meals) and Shrek 2. I helped my wife make rum balls earlier in the week for tonight’s party, so you know that sets the stage for a long night.

    And while not quite like a party, all last week we did Secret Santa at work. That’s always fun because getting free stuff is always a great distractor from work itself.

    Next week, my birthday, along with Christmas Eve and Day. Oh, and I have a five-day weekend for it all, too. Gotta love this time of year!

  • Science night

    A bunch of science links tonight. Kind of a year-end thing. First, as reported by the BBC, Science Magazine has compiled their list of ten key scientific advances of 2004. The top three are the Mars rovers finding evidence of water on mars, the discover of the Indonesian “hobbits,” and the South Koreans announcing the cloning of human embryos.

    The next link, via Slashdot, is this New Scientist article about Mt. St. Helens:

    In late September 2004, a series of earthquakes signalled that the volcano was awakening. Since then, enough lava has oozed into the volcano’s crater to build a dome the size of an aircraft carrier. The new dome, standing 275 metres off the crater floor at its highest point, is now taller than a nearby dome built by a previous set of eruptions over the course of six years.

     

    “Something extraordinary is happening at Mount St Helens. We are scratching our heads about it,” says Dan Dzurisin of US Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, Washington, US. The new dome has grown so quickly – almost four cubic metres every second – that it has bulldozed a 180-metres-thick glacier out of its way. If this rapid growth rate continues, there is a growing risk of a dome collapse which could trigger a major eruption, researchers warned at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

    Finally, via Boing Boing, The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2004. These include the “hobbits” again, Ogopogo in Canada, and (good grief) Chupacabras.