In honor of Valentine’s day, Scientific American has gathered a few optical illusions for your viewing pleasure. Happy Valentine’s Day! Enjoy!
Where’s Noah, the great ship builder when you need him? The central valley is just getting dumped on. Drive safely, everyone.
Gotta love the alliteration in the title up there.
Charlene makes this amazing Thai/Burmese-style curry chicken that I absolutely love. We had it on our 23 month anniversary last week. It’s one of my favorite dishes that she makes. In any case, here’s the recipe so you can go out and make your own delicious dishes.
Charlene’s Curry Chicken
2tsp minced ginger (or grate your own on a microplane grater)
1Tbsp minced garlic (or same as above)
3 medium potatoes
4 boneless skinless chicken thighs chopped into cubes
1 C chopped onion
1/4C canola oil
7oz (1/2 can) coconut milk
20 baby carrots (or just a few handfuls)
2tsp curry powder
1tsp fish sauce
1/2t salt
Mmm…delicious. Makes me hungry just thinking about it.
I don’t think I can agree with Juan Enriquez’s assessment that we are becoming an entirely new species. Traditionally, a species is defined as any group of organisms that can breed and produce fertile offspring. Somehow I doubt that the technological advances we’re making would render us incapable of procreating with other humans who lack those technological advantages (think First World vs. Third World countries). But I do think he makes a good point that we are coming to the point humanity has the technology to “control its own biological destiny.”
I’m all for technological advancement and improved medical science. I guess my caution would be against a “tower of babel” scenario where we head in the direction of “making a name for ourselves” simply because the technology exists. We all know what happened in that story.
Earlier this week, I suddenly began to have trouble with the USB ports on my computer. It was quite inexplicable. Of the 6 USB ports on my computer (2 front and 4 in back), only one of them worked. I tried plugging in a number of devices (USB drive, two wireless mice, keyboard, iPod, digital camera, etc.) into various ports to no avail. And for some reason, I kept getting this utterly unhelpful message:
I would click on the message, and come to a window that showed an “unknown” device somewhere on a USB hub. But it didn’t give me any indication of what the device was, or where it was plugged in. If I clicked the X to close the pop up it waited about 2 seconds before showing it again. The only way I could get it to stop popping up was to leave the device window open. I tried restarting my computer, shutting down, leaving it off for a while, and booting it up again, but none of these fixed it.
I even imaged my hard drive, reformatted, and reinstalled a clean image on the computer. I figured if anything, that would fix my problem. Alas, I was wrong.
So I went to everyone’s favorite troubleshooting tool: Google. I searched for the error message I was receiving, and I came up with the following article:
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/usb-device-not-recognized/
It suggests a stupid simple solution to the problem: unplug the PC, and plug it back in. And you know what? It worked! All I did was unplug the computer, I mean, literally unplug it from my UPS
Exactly why this works, I have no idea. The above article suggests it has something to do with static electrical buildup. But I’m no electrical engineer, so I have no idea.
In any event, if you happen to have similar issues, and can’t get your USB ports to work, try this stupid simple solution.
I had noticed from a number of photographs (here here and here) that President Obama is left-handed. Live Science has an interesting article on Left-Handedness. I thought it was particularly curious that a disporportionate number of presidents have been left handed (8 out of 43) compared to the overall population (1 out of 10).
Nevertheless, left-handers can rejoice that our President shares our plight of having to live in a right-handed world.