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Saturday, January 17, 2004

March 7 = beginning of a new season for The Sopranos. I loved this series but IMO they jumped the shark when they killed Big Pussy. The dramatic arc and the hyperbolic shark, where's my breakfast? 11:59:55 PM    comment []

The end of the space shuttle also means that scheduled maintenance will be terminated. NASA has already cancelled missions to it, meaning it will be out of commission in 4 years. It will become space junk and that’s okay, because it has no soul. It is a piece of disposable equipment. When humans are sent into the hostile environment of space, they must be maintained on a daily basis and brought back safely. That is an incredible cost-multiplier for no significant gain in returns. It is an example of the quality of vision that made Arbusto, Harken Energy, and the Texas Rangers the indomitable forces they are today. 12:40:05 PM    comment []

Not just green anymore   Henry Ford is famous for saying “You can paint it any color, so long as it’s black” even if he didn’t say it. I thought the same was true, a priori, for green beans. Technically that’s right because the yellow ones are called “wax beans” (mmmm…wax) and the purple ones are imaginatively named “purple beans”. I hear there are red ones too. The purple ones supposedly turn bright green when cooked.   No attempt will be made to keep these separated during processing since they’ll all be cooked together anyway. They exist mainly as an excuse for me to play with my green bean slicer.   The photo was trickier than I imagined. I should have reversed the positions of the green beans and wax beans. With a flash, the wax beans came out as a bright amorphous mass while the purple beans were a dark amorphous mass. An attempt to correct this by separating to RGB channels and tweaking each produced an entire photo that was a multicolored amorphous mass. After many failed attempts to make the purple beans visible, I got this picture by pointing a flashlight at them while snapping with the other hand, making sure they were the object selected for the auto focus. See! – they are purple and they are not amorphous. 9:31:45 AM    comment []