Perfect!

I can't believe how well this rice cooker worked. There was not a drop of water left, and every single grain was perfect. None dried out at the bottom or anything. The pot cleaned up with a soft sponge -- no scraping necessary.

It does take a bit longer than cooking in a pot (about an hour and a half for short-grain brown rice versus 50 minutes recommended on the package) but that's mitigated by the fact that you can set it up in advance and program it to have rice ready for you when you get home.

This will probably revolutionize my eating habits.

My Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 is here!!!

No, it isn't the latest crotch rocket, it's my new 5.5 cup fuzzy logic rice cooker. Cooking white rice apparently isn't too hard, but I wouldn't know since I prefer brown, and I always have trouble with it, so I'm turning loose artificial intelligence technology on its ass. Aside from which, I really only enjoy cooking when there's either danger or expensive gadgets involved.

Come to think of it, that goes for most things. Maybe the reason I like diving is because there's plenty of both! When I obsess over cool photography gear I feel sort of materialistic and ashamed afterwards, but with dive gear I can always tell myself that I'm just investing in the best to maximize my safety.

I'll let you know how the thing cooks as soon as I try it out. I have some short-grain organic brown rice that's been waiting for this baby!

Unbelievable

Apparently things have somehow gotten to the point that you have to give out your social security number to get television. That's right -- Time Warner won't install cable or Internet at the house unless I tell them my social security number. Not only that, but they want a letter of permission from the landlord to do the installation, even though the cable is already there (there's an existing cable outlet in every room, including the kitchen).

I told them to forget the whole thing. I'll make do with two fuzzy channels and Netflix. If I want Internet I'll dive five blocks to the goddamned lab. I am really sick of this cable company shit.

On the other hand...

Now that I think about it, India may not be the best candidate for outsourcing the ordering of dead cow! It might work for KFC though.

AI or Outsourcing?

I was talking to one of our lab techs, Tony, this afternoon about outsourcing in the software industry, and in general. He brought up something I hadn't heard of before: outsourcing the fast food ordering process to remote sites. Apparently if you pull up to certain McDonalds and other restaurants you may actually be talking to somebody hundreds or thousands of miles away. It seems to me this can only lead one place eventually: to India, which handles most computer tech support calls already.

Then I started thinking about AI applications like voice recognition. Why can't Microsoft Word hook up somebody at an Internet-based "call center" in India that will take your dictation more reliably than any AI voice recognition can. Certainly they can do better than "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." Potentially there are quite a lot of other little functions that computers aren't good at but that even a minimally trained human could do.

Finally

I finally found a long-term place to live in Morehead City. My new housemate, Jess (an intern in Pete Peterson's lab) and I moved into a house about 4 blocks from IMS on Friday. Unfortunately we don't have much in the way of furniture yet. Most of mine is in storage either here or, worse, in Asheville. Jess, having just graduated college, doesn't have much, though in some respects (kitchen stuff) she's ahead of me.

And yes, I'm living with a cute 22-year-old blond. Eat your hearts out!

The house is pretty nice, though it's older and small. It has a big den, though only one bathroom. The location is really convenient, and only a block from the sound.

I'm a little reluctant to spend money filling the house up with stuff, since I sort of think my next "house" will actually be a sailboat or trawler.

Dive #75 Indra Wreck

Date: September 9, 2006
Location: Indra wreck
Boat: Midnight Express (Olympus Dive Center)
Max Depth: 68 feet
Bottom time: 40 minutes
Gas: EANx30
In: 12:05 AM Out: 12:50 AM
Buddy: Jamie R.
Visibility: 15-20 feet
Temp: 79 degrees

The Indra is a very neat wreck. Visibility was pretty poor this time, but I still managed to see one small sand tiger shark.

Dive #74 U-352 Wreck

Date: September 9, 2006
Location: U-352
Boat: Midnight Express (Olympus Dive Center)
Max Depth: 111 feet
Bottom time: 16 minutes
Gas: EANx30
In: 9:12 AM Out: 9:36 AM
Buddy: Jamie R.
Visibility: 40 feet
Temp: 79 degrees

Dove on the U-352 for the first time, two days after finishing "Last Dive" (a book about a father/son team who died diving another u-boat). Visibility wasn't the best, but not too bad -- maybe a lingering effect of the tropical storm.

The wreck is very cool. Bottom time was more limited than it needed to be because my buddy had his dive computer in air mode instead of nitrox mode! Still managed to see many fish, including a 6-inch volitan lionfish. They've been introduced to local waters from the pacific, apparently courtesy of the the aquarium trade.

This was my first dive with my new backplate and harness setup, as well as my Dive Rite NiTek Plus computer. I've downloaded the profile of the dive and you can see it by clicking on the "111 feet" above.

Stabbed with a what?

An interesting factoid from Wikipedia (my primary Internet source for truthiness) on the stingray species that killed Steve Irwin: it was a short-tailed stingray, or bull ray, and they can be up to 14 feet long and weigh more than 350 kg (771 lbs).

There was also a quote by documentary filmmaker Ben Cropp, who saw the tape of the incident. "It stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest. It's a defensive thing. It's like being stabbed with a dirty cock." Hmm...either cock means something different in Australia than it does here, or there's been some vandalism.

Update: it appears the latter. The word has been changed to "dagger." From the discussion on the Wikipedia site I'm guessing that it's some sort of reference to a god-awful nutty Australian feminist who made some badly-received public comments that basically Irwin got what he deserved.

That's a beauty.

Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was killed this morning in Australia by a stingray. You had to know this guy was going to be killed by some animal at some point, but a freaking stringray??? Who ever heard of anyone being killed by a stingray?

Update: apparently marine-medic.com has:

"Stingrays often burrow under the sand in shallow water. The usual method of injury is a reflex forward whip of the tail when the `wings' are trodden on. The tail contains one or more sharp barbs, which may embed in the skin of the victim and break off, or glance across the skin causing a laceration, which may be quite deep and extensive.

The wound is usually (though not always) acutely painful. Most occur on the lower limbs but there have now been two deaths in Australia after the barb penetrated the heart. Other serious injuries have also occurred after the barb penetrated the chest or abdomen.

At least 17 fatalities from stingrays have occurred worldwide, including New Zealand, Surinam, West Atlantic, Texas, Fiji, California, Australia, and many more from a fresh-water species in Colombia. Trunk wounds cause most of the fatalities, but acute exsanguination has caused at least two, and one death occurred from tetanus complicating a lower leg wound."

I Hate This Stuff

One of my major projects this summer has been, and continues to be, some analysis of data collected over the past 10 years in the Neuse River estuary. I can't really get anywhere with it. The problem is that I'm smart enough to know that what I'm doing is wrong, probably in two or three different ways, but I don't know enough to do anything about it. If I were dumber I'd be finished, because I'd have no idea how statistically dubious some of my results are. I'd be satisfied. Wrong, but satisfied. If I knew a lot more statistics I could probably fix it. But I can't. And nobody in the department seems to know much more statistics than I do, so I'd have to call in somebody from applied math or something, which would probably wind up being a whole big thing. I just want it to go away!

Ernesto

Tropical storm (formerly hurricane) Enrnesto made landfall south of here at Long Beach last night around 11:30 PM, with 70 mph winds and storm surge of only 1 to 3 feet. It got really windy here, but only enough to knock down small branches, and dumped a ton of rain. Apparently there was a tornado here in Morehead City, but I'm not sure where it touched down.

Click the photo of Ernesto to get the animated version of him making landfall, from the Weather Underground.