Gabbro B-Sides

Scienceblogs is planning a pie contest for Pi Day, March 14. I am waiting for clarification on just how many pies we will be allowed to enter, but I suspect it will be a finite number of pies, which means I need your help to decide which is most likely to win.
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The LaTeX memoir class has its own way of setting the leading (line spacing) in a document. By default, it will ignore without comment any attempt you make to load in packages like setspace.sty or use commands like \linespread or \baselinestretch. Those people in all those other Google results for your problem, telling you that the answer is \doublespacing, \singlespacing? Not quite.

To invoke memoir’s native line spacing controls, use the Spacing environment:

\begin{Spacing}{2}
blah, blah, blah
\end{Spacing}


To use the setspace package, you need an extra line in your document preamble:

\DisemulatePackage{setspace}
\usepackage{setspace}


This was giving me a nasty headache, until I found this thread. There is probably more useful documentation of spacing commands in the memoir manual, but that is a huge friggin’ book; using the Spacing environment has solved my problem for now.

I was looking for an easy way to post links I’ve bookmarked in del.icio.us to my blog.

Not all the links - there’s no sense inundating readers of my geology blog with a bunch of recipes and quilting patterns. Just the links with a particular tag. And not every day, either - I don’t do enough bookmarking, or enough blogging, to justify that. Maybe some people like blogs where two out of every three posts are entitled “Links for [today's date]“, but I don’t.

So I wrote a little perl script to use with the offline blogging client Ecto. When you run the script, it pulls the 20 most recently posted links from your del.icio.us account that have been tagged with a special “blogthis” tag, formats them nicely, and dumps them into your currently open draft.

It’s only semi-automatic - you still have to manually delete any links you’ve already posted, and add titles, extra formatting, etc. - but it gets the job done. Continue Reading »

For the first time in my life, I have been on the winning side of a major election. Everyone around me is jubilant. It’s not just for President-Elect Obama, either - my choices for Governor and Congressman both made it in. I even got 2 out of 3 on my county judicial picks.

Last night was also a great one for public transit. The Puget Sound’s Proposition 1 passed, bringing expanded bus and rail service to the Seattle area, while the car-addled Washington Initiative 985 (aka you will pry our single-occupancy vehicle commutes from our cold dead hands) was soundly walloped. A new high-speed rail line will go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Citizens in Sacramento, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and northern New Mexico voted to raise their own taxes to improve transit services. I take it as a sign that high gas prices are finally sinking in and prompting real change.

Yet I have not felt such anger and bitterness towards my fellow citizens since they re-elected Bush.

While our first African-American president asked us to embrace a politics of hope and unity, voters in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas embraced the politics of fear and lies, singling out a different group of Americans for second-class citizenship. Each of those measures stung, but California’s Proposition 8 made me absolutely heartsick. California was my home for 9 years, and is the bluest of blue states, the sort of state one expects to be accepting - but that’s not why I’m so upset. Continue Reading »

I haven’t been eating many sandwiches lately, so yesterday, when I reached into the refrigerator to cut a few slices off of my “sandwich cucumber”, it was… no longer suitable for sandwiches. It wasn’t rotten, just decidedly un-crispy, and definitely in need of quick rescue. I immediately combined it with the wealth of heirloom cucumbers that came in my CSA box this week to make a light and green-tasting soup.

The cucumber plays more of a supporting role here than in most cucumber soups, but it is still definitely present, and unites the flavors of the other vegetables behind the fennel. I filled the flavor out with some smoky bacon; if you are going to make this a vegetarian soup, you really do need to find a substitute. Try some black cardamom pods, or a few handfuls of pre-cooked kasha.

Ingredients

• 1 giant cucumber and 2 medium ones, plus the 1/3 of the medium cucumber that prompted this exercise, peeled and de-seeded
• 1 medium onion, more or less caramelized
• 1 strip bacon, including all the fat from the pan
• small handful spinach
• small handful arugula
• half a dozen ice cubes of stock or broth (I save bones and veggie butts in the freezer, and make stock whenever the bag fills up - this week’s batch was mostly onions, carrots and carrot tops, and summer squash)
• one ice cube of rose hip stock
• 6″ or so of fennel stem
• 1/4 cup buttermilk
• 2 spoonfuls of sugar
• small dollop garlic-lemon aioli left over from the wedding - if for some reason you don’t have my wedding leftovers in your fridge, a clove of garlic and squirt of lemon juice should do, but the soup does benefit from the extra fat

Put everything in a pot. Boil it for 10 min. or so, just enough to soften the veggies, then purée. You may wish to remove the fennel stem before blending; it’s very fibrous, and will wrap itself around your blender blades, which is very annoying to clean. If you do, then while you caramelize the onions you should also simmer the fennel in the stock, to extract more of the flavor.

Add salt, pepper, and MSG to taste. Garnish the soup with a sprig of fennel.

Cucumber soup is traditionally served cold, but it’s good warm, too. It’d be more satisfying served with a dollop of sour cream, but it’s healthier without - and besides, we were out of sour cream. And it would probably also be better if you let the flavors get to know each other for a day or so, but we were hungry.

I currently live in a Craftsman house, and I love it. I would love to move to another one, so I appreciate your attempts to target my demographic with your Craigslist ad. However. The architectural wing of the Arts and Crafts movement produced a particular, recognizable style.

• Does your roof have a low pitch? Gables? Hips? Luxurious eaves? No.
• Are there exposed rafters and/or decorative brackets? No.
• Square pillars? No.
• What about carefully handcrafted stone or woodwork? Or anything that displays attention to detail and respect for the skill of the artisans who built the home? Goodness no.

• Is it small? Yes.
• Does it have wainscoting or some shit? Eh, a couple of the walls change color halfway up.
• Was it built before the sucker grad students you are trying to rent to were born? Yes? Then what the fuck, call it a Craftsman!
• “Unit has wonderful craftsman touches including dishwasher, washer and dryer, and microwave”

This one’s making the rounds again: Put your music library on shuffle. Post the first lines of the first 25 songs that come up. The game: Guess which songs the first lines are from! Google = cheating.

(NB: I’ve skipped over songs where the first line contains the title, songs in languages I can’t order beer in, and exceptionally mumbledy singer-songwriters.)
Continue Reading »

I was recently convinced that there are three possible fates for the universe. Sci-fi narrative fates, not bona fide cosmological ones:

1. Nothingness
2. Trick question! The universe never ends
3. God
   Mr. McMoots added a fourth:

4. Trick question! The universe never existed at all

Lazyweb, has that last one ever been done? For values of “universe” and “exist” that require an impressive degree of ontological contortion?

Just in case there’s someone reading this on LiveJournal who isn’t on my flist… you can add the new blog to your friendslist as green_gabbro_sb. Thanks, Dalryaug!

Non-LJ users, please ignore this message.