I've signed up to ride 60 miles for the BikeMS ride in Ventura the first weekend in October. That would be 30 miles on Saturday the 3rd and 30 again on Sunday the 4th, btw, not 60 miles all at once. That means I'll be training to ride more miles than the current 10 at a stretch I'm doing currently. So expect regular updates on my bicycle (or rather recumbent tricycle) adventures here in addition to the sporadic coffee, sf, pop culture rants, bad puns, philosophical ruminations, and whatever the hell else it is that I do here.

It also means that I'll be pestering everybody I know for donations to work towards a cure for MS. To get serious for a moment. I have friends with MS, and right now they're all fighting a holding action, hoping that a cure is found and that it's found before their symptoms go progressive. Like all autoimmune diseases, it's a tough one to get a handle on, and funding for research is always needed, even more so in the current economy. So help out if you can, by going to my page at the BikeMS site and making a donation, even if it's only a couple of bucks. I can make the ride, but it's up to you to help raise the funds. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

You must do this. Not only is it a very cool challenge, but the prize of laser-engraved business cards made of meat is beyond cool. This makes me wish I were better at costuming.

I've been avoiding games on my iPhone, but the fact that Dragon's Lair has just released a version of the Don Bluth-designed Space Ace, one of the first laser disc-driven arcade games of the '80s, for the iPhone, complete with Commander Borf and his Infanto-Ray, may be the thing that drives me over the edge.

that a politician would lie about having an affair and try to cover it up, then turn around and plead for private space for the sake of his family. Sorry, bub, it don't work that way. If you wanted privacy for your family, you should have kept it zipped in the first place.

I thank Governer Sanford for one contribution to pop culture, though. From now on, when someone says that they're going to spend the summer 'hiking the Appalachian Trail', we all know what they'll really be doing.

Kodak announces the retirement of Kodachrome.

It's a sad day for photographers everywhere.

It's been a while since I posted a recipe, so here's one for y'all.

For several years, I've been going to Fabrocini's Italian Restaurant in Agoura Hills and enjoying their spinach salad. I've been meaning to try and do a spin on it at home. This recipe is very much in the mode of 'I just eyeballed the ingredients and threw it together", so all measurements are approximate, and will be stated as such. This makes a great light dinner, or a great starter salad for company.

Rinse a bunch of baby spinach, I dunno, maybe 6-8 oz. dry it, and place in large salad bowl.

Slice 6 or 7 mushrooms, chiffonade a half dozen or so fresh basil leaves, mince a couple cloves of garlic, and chop up 4 slices of turkey bacon (the Trader Joe's Uncured Turkey Bacon has excellent flavor and is what I used) or pancetta if you're not going for lower fat. Also have available a handful (maybe 1/4 cup) of pine nuts, freshly cracked black pepper, sea salt, and some good balsamic vinegar.

Heat 2 tablespoons of good olive oil over medium heat in a non-stick pan. Add the bacon. When it starts to crisp add the garlic. When the garlic gets aromatic, add the pine nuts and stir. When the pine nuts start to show a little brown, add the mushrooms, a pinch of salt, basil, and however much fresh cracked pepper seems appropriate and stir it around. When the mushrooms just start to darken and shrink, add a couple tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and stir for a minute or so to let it reduce a bit and get a little syrupy. Then pour it over the spinach and toss. The heat from the dressing should wilt the spinach just a little. If you've got a nice soft goat cheese, crumble a little over the salad and serve with crisp bread or crackers. Serves 2.

Prep time 5-10 minutes, depending on how fast you are with a knife. Cooking time 8-10 minutes.

This came out just like I wanted, so it goes in the permanent recipe file. Mangia, my friends.

Last night we went to the Laemmle Town Center theater because Tuesdays are $6 tickets all day and $1 popcorn (or $2 if you want to splurge on the giant trash can o' corn). We saw Departures, which was the Oscar winner for Foreign Language film. What a lovely, gentle, touching, occasionally hilarious, and totally just right movie. A Japanese film about a cellist who loses his job when the orchestra he's playing for in Tokyo is dissolved and he is forced to go back to the town were he was born to live in the house his mother left him when she died. He sees an ad for a job working 'with departures' and applies, thinking it's a travel agency or tour guide. It is, in fact, a job doing 'encoffinment' – the Japanese ritual of preparing the body for cremation, which is done in front of the family, as part of taking leave. His journey through this job and how it forces him to deal with many unresolved issues in his own life is the gist of the film. It's a wonderful ensemble acting job, and every character is treated with gentle respect, even the ones who may not be quite as likable. Highly recommended. We'll be buying it on DVD when it's released. Well worth multiple viewings.

The whole slideshow is on Flickr. We had a swell time visiting with my brother, his wife, and their dog, Max.

We went to a standing-room-only event last night here in Santa Fe. People lined up, clamored to get in, and there was a buzz of excitement. Rock concert? Theater opening? Nope. It was a lecture sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute. The scheduled speakers were Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman and Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT speaking on brain, mind, and consciousness. The crowd treated them like rock stars (and why not?).

The audio wasn't great, and I was standing at the back door of the theater for Edelman's talk, so there was a lot I didn't really catch, but he was talking about his theories of Darwinian selection as they apply to the development of consciousness that stemmed out of his Nobel work on natural selection in the immune system. He spent a fair amount of time on what we know about how memory works. It was kind of a Cliff Notes version of the last 30 years of his work, and makes me want to go get a few of his books and dive a little deeper. The statements that most resonated with me from his talk were these: "Every perception is an act of creation. Every memory is an act of imagination." He also talked about the inherent difficulties in considering consciousness as a thing, rather than a process, and in evaluating it as an isolated topic, saying, "The brain is embodied and the body is embedded in the world." My take on this is that consciousness cannot exist independent of the sensory stimulus and input we receive from physical existence, hence making a disembodied brain an unlikely occurence.

Minsky appeared by video conferencing from his MIT office, as his doctors had told him that he shouldn't travel. There were a few technical glitches (and the phone in his office started ringing in the middle of his talk, which was pretty funny), but his talk about why AI doesn't quite have the 'I' part really working yet, and how far we are from a real 'thinking machine' was very interesting. The two statements I took away from Minsky's talk were these: "If you only understand something in one way, you don't really understand it." and "An expert is somebody who knows all the really bad mistakes that can be made.", both of which reinforce my belief that the best way to learn something is to learn what not to do. He also made the statement that what holds humans apart from most other animals is the ability to learn from somebody else's mistakes, not just our own.

My only regret was that there wasn't more time for the talk and that there wasn't more interacton between Edelman and Minsky. It was interesting to see the differences in approach between Edelman, a neuroscientist, and Minsky, an engineer and 'general specialist'. Edelman has the scientist's very narrow focus and his interest in the relationship between consciousness and computers is in the developmemt of a tool that can help him towards the end goal of better understanding of neurological function on the biological level, whereas for Minsky, the development of machine consciousness is the end in itself. Minsky definitely thinks in broader strokes and bigger pictures, but Edelman probably probes somewhat deeper, though with a narrower range.

All in all, a most thought-provoking evening, and one of the things that has made this vacation extra special. Now, I got me some readin' to do.

Caught this shot this afternoon. More at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gvdub/sets/72157618845946598/

We're in Santa Fe this week visiting my brother. We had a nice long weekend doing stuff with him and his wife (museums, galleries, a couple of good food places, hanging out and getting caught up), but they're both back to work and we've got a couple of days to amuse ourselves before we head back to L.A., so today we decided to drive up to Los Alamos.

Being New Mexico, there's some pretty spectacular scenery along the way, and seeing red sandstone buttes in sunshine silhouetted against a distant thunderstorm with visible rain sheets was quite the classic postcard moment. The climb up to the plateau where Los Alamos sits is pretty spectacular itself, and I was playing in my mind scenes of Oppenheimer, Teller, Feynman, et al making that same trek on unimproved roads during the war years as we were driving up with a 600 foot drop just a couple feet to our right.

We stopped into the Bradbury Science Museum, named after Norris Bradbury, who was the post-war director of the labs. Part of the exhibit there is actual size replicas of Fat Man and LIttle Boy displayed next to replicas of modern warheads. To realize that I could have fit the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in the back of a pickup truck (admittedly a little of it would have been hanging out the back) was a little chilling. Seeing the modern warhead that could fit in the back seat of a sedan was even more so. The museum was, overall, PR spin for the lab, which was pretty much what I expected (what else would it be?), but still a worthwhile visit because of some excellent science content.

But the high point was a visit to Los Alamos Sales Company, better known as "The Black Hole" blackholesurplus.com/, which sells electronic and other surplus mostly generated by the lab. Want a mechanical calculator that was actually used in the Manhattan Project? They got 'em. Want' some outdated radionic test equipment? They got it. I picked up an electronic instrument chassis box for a project I'm working on, so my espresso will soon be made with the assistance of some Los Alamos surplus. Atomic Coffee, indeed!

My father-in-law turns 94 today. I'm hoping he has a good ballgame to watch and a fine song to sing.

I cherish the time I've been able to spend with him. One of my favorite memories is sitting in the kitchen with him at the apartment in Co-op City while plunking away on my little travel guitar. Didn't have to say anything - the music was enough. God bless you, Tom.

I've grown sick to death of reboots, remakes, and regurgitations. Considering that I wasn't particularly a fan of ST:TOS, I just can't get excited about the post-modern, trendoid take on it.

It is, in fact, only a test of the Dreamwidth cross-posting marching and chowder society (and do they eat the chowder while they're marching? Wouldn't that get messy?). Stay tuned. Film at 11, although who knows of what.

Got the machine from Italy, delivered pretty quickly. the Flickr stream is here. Not quite as Streamline Moderne as my other machine, but it pulls a real nice shot.

Okay, the vintage Italian espresso machine thing seems to have taken hold.
( You know the drill )

Thought you might be interested in this auction on Ebay. It's still got a week to go.

Short ristretto shot of Monday roasted Mokha/Sumatra blend.

Soon, she will be mine

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Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha