Death by Twizzler

When I was recently informed that eating black licorice could kill you dead, I said "Nuh-uuhhh".  I mean, I knew that it was the third least desirable item you could get in your Halloween candy bag (behind Necco Wafers and Chowards Mints and barely ahead of loose pieces of Candy Corn and pennies) but deadly?  No way.

Well, it turns out that the natural sweetener present in the licorice plant, glycyrrhizin, in addition to being 30-50 times sweeter than sugar, can cause arrhythmia and other bad health things when consumed in large quantities.  The compound sucks the potassium out of your body resulting in or exacerbating cardiopulmonary issues - especially if you are over 40.

Wow.

For the sake of argument let's say you lack the self control that allows normal people to stop themselves from doing things well before being beckoned into the light by long dead loved ones. How much of the black chewy stuff is too much?

Just calling up Hershey's (they make Twizzlers and Good & Plenty) and asking them a question like that is just going to get you put on yet another watchlist and they are unlikely to give out manufacturing secrets to a stranger over the phone anyway. 

Before I read the FDA warning I assumed that you would need to eat a coffee table sized chunk of the sweetener every day for a year or something bizarre like that to cause problems.  Not so.  Looking into it I found that you only need to eat two ounces of the candy every day for two weeks to mess yourself up. 

Hershey's confirms the FDA's info that too much glycyrrhizin is harmful and that they actually use a mix of real licorice and anise oil.  But, since you don't know how much of each is used, prudence demands you play it safe and assume all the flavoring is licorice-plant-based (BTW, lower-grade candies like most black jelly beans sold around Easter time use solely anise).

Oh... before I go on... I am not picking on Hershey's here... They aren't the only ones in the world that make black licorice candies – they just make the most popular ones in the U.S. As a matter of fact they put glycyrrhizin information on their website along with other useful stuff about peanut allergies and whatnot.

Anyway... a fatal dose of turns out to be less than two 1-lb bags of black Twizzlers in two weeks, or about five 8-inch Twizzlers per day. Alternatively nine 6-oz boxes of Good & Plenty candies (assuming the licorice part is half the weight) appears to be all a human being can handle in a fortnight.

You can do your own calculations on how much of your favorite licorice candy you would need to commit the perfect crime... I mean, uhhh, hurt yourself... My numbers seem ridiculously low, and I am almost certain they are on the way-too-conservative side. Feel free to post a correction in the comments.

Just in case, though, I am gonna stay away from the Blackjack Chewing Gum and Snaps this year.

Time Hole

Once again, a huge gap in writing.  What gives?  What could possibly be more important than writing down every errant thought I have about every shiny thing that catches my eye?


Nothing.  Sometimes I just don't feel like blogging.  Also, sometimes the act of actually doing stuff prevents the documentation of that same stuff.  You know how it is.  Or maybe you don't.  You might not...  That would be sad.

Now the muse is back upon me and I have a little lunch time in which to write, so here we go again.  Here is a shotgun summary of the past month or so:

Read three books (well, nine if you count kids' books, and 11 if you count kids' e-books).  The grownup books were Snuff by Terry Pratchett, Worldwar: In the Balance by Harry Turtledove, and The Official Red Book: A Guidebook of United States Coins.

The Pratchett book was OK, not great (Night Watch sets the bar pretty high, you see).  Also, it looks like someone bought him a Word-a-Day calendar and challenged him to use every page.  I am glad my Kindle has a built-in dictionary. The second book was an alternate history story that had aliens attacking Earth right in the middle of WWII.  It started off very exciting but the action died in the middle so suddenly and dramatically it felt like the author decided to make the novel into a series half-way through. That's too bad...  I won't be getting the second one. I read the coin book as part of researching a question my father-in-law asked me about pennies.  I will post on that soon. 

I am currently reading nothing.

Music: I added a few more songs to my iPod, including a new montage song: Uprising by Muse.  Why is it a montage song?  Video below.

Asking my iPod for its Genius Recommendation based on that song results in a new playlist I'd like to name "Music for a Dangerous Loner to Write His Manifesto By", but due to space limitations I just call it my "Watchlist Mix".

Started and finished Mafia II, Osmos, Contre Jour, Water, Scribblenauts Remix, and most of the new Angry Birds levels. 

If you have the means, get Osmos.  The physics-based gameplay is very well done and the whole thing is utterly beautiful to look at and to listen to.  Very relaxing.

Scribblenauts is awesome because you have the power to call into existence virtually anything in order to solve an on-screen puzzle.  For example, if the puzzle was to help your hero Maxwell rescue a man trapped in a snow cave you could say FIRE and *poof* a roaring fire appears, making him nice and toasty.  Alternatively, you could summon a FLAMETHROWER or an ANGRY DRAGON, which also results in him getting nice and toasty albeit for a much shorter period of time than he probably would have liked.

Started playing around with Rocksmith, and now I can't get Nirvana's In Bloom out of my head.  Having a lot of fun with this game even though I can't shake the feeling that the virtual people who came to see me play guitar in what looks like a smoke filled middle school cafeteria are just there to make fun of me.  At best, I would gauge the crowd's reaction to my performance as "bemused and pitying".  Same as my wife's reaction to basically anything I do, now that I think about it.

Started gussying up the sidebar some more.  Added a new link to the blogroll: OVZombie.  It's a site dedicated to tracking and reporting on the off-putting and possibly illegal shenanigans of one of my friend's neighbors.  I guarantee you will love it. Unless you are my friend's neighbor, of course.

Made a new puzzle for Halloween.  I will post the answer once it slips off the bottom of the page. Here it is. It's cinchy. If you know the answer, leave a comment.

My body has healed enough to where I am actually running on the treadmill occasionally.  I will most likely miss my "5K" resolution goal.  I have no excuse for missing the other goals.  I need to get on the stick...  Or quit trying things... Meh, something will come up and I will rock one of the things out.  Maybe my Mafia II experience can be applied toward my handgun qualification...  Who knows?

Finished building the Red Box Treasure Chest kit with my 3-year-old son and father-in-law.  It looks great and it is his new de facto piggy bank.  He is very proud of it.  An unfortunate side effect is that he is now constantly grubbing for spare change.  I'm all like "Get a damn job, hippy" and he's all like "Moooommm!  Dad said a bad word!" Then I'm like "He's lying! Here's a handful of pennies shuddupwoodja."

He and I also built a McDonald’s out of Lego.  This resulted in an alien vs. ghost gun battle and helicopter crash when the waiter heard that a patron's grilled cheese sandwich was "very very very bad".  These things can get out of hand quickly.  As far as I know this rarely happens in real life.

But all play and no work makes Jack an utterly intolerable man-child so...

Nearly finished resealing the deck.  As of this Sunday it will have taken four weekends to complete but even now it no longer looks like a ticked-off Jackson Pollack impersonator with ADHD begrudgingly did the job as part of his community service for his repeated Painting While Intoxicated offenses.  I would like to thank my wife for her patience and support while I dealt with this self-created disaster. 

For those newbies out there thinking of sealing your deck using a pump sprayer (cuz the can says you can) and not thinning the pigmented sealant (cuz the can says you're not sposedtuh) just suck it up and use a 3 or 4 inch brush instead. Please trust me on this - it will take forever but you will be a lot happier with the results.  Also, mix the sealant way more than you think is remotely necessary.  After all, that 5-gallon drum may have been sitting there on the floor at Lowes for a very long time...

That's about it for now.  Go in peace and junk.

R.I.P and Thanks for Everything, Sir

I guess Someone wanted their 4S delivered personally...

Nice One, Genomecop.

For those of you who are not accustomed to seeing bot-driven comment spam this might seem a little odd.  However, since I laughed for about 15 minutes straight this morning after reading this comment in an Engadget post, I thought I would put it up here, anyway.

Well said, sir.  Well said.

LOL.

Small Site Update

Nothing to say today... Might as well do a little housekeeping, eh?

I added my list of my MP3 montage music to the sidebar on the right.

Song recommendations welcome.

A Maker in the Making

Usually while I am on the treadmill at the gym I usually tune the TV to the Travel Channel or Food Network since they are adjacent on the "dial" (remember dials?). I like watching Adam Richman cheat certain death whenever Man vs. Food is on, and I think that the Barefoot Contessa has awesome dinner ideas. The Hungry Girl show is pretty good, too.

Shut up. I know how it sounds... although I really didn't consider how it probably looks to those around me until just now... It might explain the lack of eye contact and the surplus of disgusted head-shaking...

Anyway, I will pretty much watch anything to help distract me from the fact that I am on a treadmill, but one show I refuse to watch is that cooking show with the horrifying Southern lady who looks like the plus-sized offspring of a cockatiel and a half-melted candle. Even though I don't actually listen to the show – I rely on closed captioning while my MP3 player drowns out the ambient noise of the facility – actually reading “y'all” upwards of one hundred times an episode somehow makes my ears hurt.

So, while I was hoofing it on Saturday I was flipping through the channels on the TV and ran across Lego Star Wars: The Padawan Menace. At first I thought it was just a toy commercial but it turned out to be a very funny half-hour show about the mayhem that ensues when Yoda tries to take a group of younglings to the Galactic Senate on a field trip.

I got home and DVR'd it for my three-year-old. We watched it together and he loved it. Nothing for it but to put “buy Legos” on the to-do list.

Since he still had $10 left over from a Toys R Us gift certificate he got from his birthday and he has been doing especially well as school we went there to get a little something before dinner. After suffering some extremely hard lessons on what $10 can purchase (or, really, not purchase... He actually threw up his hands at one point and said “I can't buy anything!”) he picked out Lego set 7049: Alien Striker. Not a Star Wars set, but space-y and within his budget.

I said “Fine” although I was pretty worried that the 42-piece kit would be too much for him. He has plenty of Duplo blocks (which he loves) but they are easy to handle and those Lego kits can have some pretty complicated pieces as I recalled.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have sweated it. He can throw together any 48-piece jigsaw puzzle you care to give him without looking at the box top. It's 50% frustrating and 50% fascinating to watch, FWIW. In your mind you are screaming “Find the damn edge pieces first! What are you doing? Why are you starting in the middle? At least flip over all the pieces so you can find everything! How the hell are you supposed to... oh... you're done...”

Once I showed him how to “read” the instructions, he was off to the races. I only had to help him with some pieces because they were, in his words, “too slippery” (read: too small to maneuver and snap into place with weak, clumsy fingers).

“Ages 6 to 14”, eh? To that I say “Pfft!” “Pfft,” I tells ya!

Yep, I am proud. You will understand that, pride aside, I need to write this down now because Future Me won't remember this when he backs his mother's car into my truck thirteen years from now and I find myself screaming at him and accusing him of having garbage spacial skills. My memory... well, let's just say it's not getting better with age. (Sorry in advance, son).

It looks like a whole new aisle at the toy store has opened up for us... him... I mean him. I am happy about the Legos but I am not sure how I feel if he is going to get into the whole Star Wars thing. After all, I want him to be a Creator and a Doer... not a Taker or a Watcher. And, please, God, not the Star Wars Kid... Jimmydunes, I am relying on you, here... :)

Regardless of how things turn out, though, I swear to all that is holy that my kid will always know that Han shot first.

Done is Done

I finally finished Atlas Shrugged and I want to say right out of the gate that I liked this book.

Why do I mention that now? Apparently, there was some confusion as to whether I liked Jane Eyre or not based on what I wrote a while back. Both of these books were recommended to me by my sister and, although I enjoyed them both immensely, I hope she recommends a Foxtrot collection or something like that next 'cuz I need a break from the deep stuff.

I swear my Kindle used to be a lot lighter...

I also need to say that, although I vote, I am as apolitical as someone can get. I am not interested in anyone's political ideology other than my own. Oh, it's not because I think my ever-evolving hodge-podge of tenets I currently live my life by is any better than anyone else's... it's because I know what is right and what works for me (in the context of “now” and with all the logical caveats that statement implies). When I say “I don't care if you qualify yourself as a Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Whatever,” I mean it. I find discussing categories like that as tiresome as... well... as you are probably finding it reading this paragraph. I just don't care.

So enough of the preamble. Here's my spoiler-free “review” of this... sigh... 1,200 page book. (As Arlo Guthrie would say, “I'm not proud... or tired”.)

In my opinion, this novel can be separated into three sections:

The first section (which was my favorite and which takes up the first 85% of this book) can be summarized like this (wear headphones if you are at work):

The second section (the next 10%) is a looooooooonnnnnnggggg speech. Once you get to this part, you can safely skim it or skip it without missing anything or feeling the least bit guilty. Dude, seriously, a three-hour speech with no breaks? On all channels? During prime-time? FCOL, somebody throw a pie or something!

The third section (the final 5% of the book) is a description of the most unlikely rescue mission ever conceived. Picture the gang from Ocean's Eleven replaced with a rag-tag band of life-long industrialists who rely more on “the element of surprise”, “suicidal audacity”, and a “can-do attitude” rather than “military skill”, “planning”, or “firepower” to extract a comrade from an extremely well-defended torture chamber. This whole portion of the book made me feel like Ayn Rand looked at the huge pile of pages next to her typewriter and said “Holy crap! I better finish this up! This is getting way out of hand!” then quickly tacked on this Mack Bolan-esque ending. Frankly, I am surprised there wasn't a car chase complete with a description of watermelon crates or chickens or plate-glass windows being smashed apart in a wacky, mayhem-filled closing scene.

Overall, I thought this book was awesome and I am looking forward to the next recommendation from my sister.... Just not right away :).

Look Out Below!

UARS, a defunct research satellite, will be re-entering Earth's atmosphere and mostly burning up on its way to the ground sometime in late September or early October. The resultant fireball will be quite spectacular even in the daytime assuming it falls where someone can catch a glimpse of it.

Due to the complicated structural geometry of the satellite (that is, it's not a perfect sphere) and since the Earth's atmosphere fluctuates significantly over even short time periods the exact minute of reentry cannot be predicted. This means, when the official decay starts, the center of the 500-mile-long impact zone cannot be determined to within better than +/- 7,000 miles. It could land anywhere.

This article states the odds that someone on the planet will be hit by the surviving portion of this satellite are 3,200 to 1.

“No. No no no no no. That can't be right,” I thought to myself.

A quick aside. I was going to post some comparative odds here that dealt with the usual “being hit by lightning” or “dying in a plane crash” stuff but I found that both of those things are shockingly frequent when you actually do the math, even though “everyone” knows that those things are so rare as to be inconsequential. I'll leave that for a future article.

 In any case I knew from various sources out there that 1) something has survived reentry about once a day (or week, depending on where you look) over the past 40 years and 2) no one (or only one person, depending on where you look) has ever been injured by falling orbital debris. The odds of being hit, according to this source, are “one trillion to one”. Way different than 3,200:1 and way more in line with what I “knew” the right answer was.

So which is correct? After some digging I eventually found a reliable source for the 3,200:1 claim, but there were no justifications given for that number.  Let's do some back-of-the-envelope estimations. Surely we can get to an answer that is within an order of magnitude of the 3,200:1 estimation or the 1,000,000,000,000:1 estimation, assuming one of them is right.

Based on the orbital data, anyone who lives between about 57N and 57S latitude is at risk. The world population is about seven billion, and nearly all (~90%) of those people live between those latitudes. Assuming that each person takes up one square meter and dividing by the surface area of the planet we get 65,580:1 per piece of falling debris. The satellite is calculated to break up into 26 survivable pieces, making the odds that someone will be struck by a piece of this satellite somewhere around 2,500:1.

My rough guesstimate (Really? No red underline, OpenOffice word processing program? What a world...) shows the 3,200:1 number is probably correct after all. Huh. You learn something new every day...

You can catch updated information regarding the orbital decay and reentry of UARS at http://www.space-track.org/.

Are You Sure You Don't Want to Borrow My Thesaurus?

"More inclusive"...  the phrase you are looking for to sell scales to people who weigh over 400 pounds is "more inclusive".  As on-the-nose as it is, "broader" is not the word you should use here, IMHO.

Jaws With Pineapple Salsa

After going to the gym and getting my truck inspected I went to the grocery store with the intent of buying crab legs and flounder for dinner. I got the flounder but found they had no crab legs. They did have shark, though... Go figure. I never tried it so I thought I would give it a go. If it was gross or if I cooked it badly (thereby rendering it gross) it didn't matter - I always had peanut butter sandwiches at the ready and will have gained a few XP nonetheless. Win-win.

For those of you who have never had shark steaks, do yourself a favor and try them. They are very easy to cook – just brush them with a little bit of olive oil and throw them on the grill. You just kind of know when they are done. If you can cook a beef steak, you can cook these. Since I had some pineapple and some pepperoncinis I made a quick salsa – equal parts of each, a little cracked pepper and a little olive oil.

How was it? Shark meat is the least fishy tasting fish I have ever tried. It has the texture of (and tastes very much like) steak. Really unexpectedly amazing. My impromptu salsa also rocked, FWIW. Definitely getting shark steaks more often.

Some of you might be thinking “Oh, la-ti-freaking-da, Uncle Moneybags. Aren't you afraid that the cost of your exotic snack will dip into your 50-year-old-scotch-and-monocle-polish fund? Boo-hoo... you had to cook it yourself? What's the matter? Didn't it come pre-packaged with a team of geisha that prepared and fed it to you while they entertained you on the shamisen?”

Um... no. But I understand where you are coming from.

The 4-oz steak I bought was $2.40. This is on par cost-wise with sirloin steak and might even be a little cheaper. This brings me to the real point of this article: How is that even remotely possible?

According to Wikipedia, 800,000 tons of sharks are caught each year around the globe. Assuming an average weight of a mako is 800 pounds per shark that's about 2 million sharks per year. Yikes, that's a lot.

But how many cows die per year? Shockingly, I couldn't find an easy answer to that but WolframAlpha thinks that 70 million tons of beef are consumed worldwide each year. The average cow weighs 1,400 pounds that means that 100 million delicious, delicious cows volunteer to become food each year. (Obviously, I am assuming, here, that about the same percentages of shark and cow are steak-able... This is wrong, but not super-wrong... probably close, even).

Doesn't this mean that, on average, shark steaks should cost fifty times as much as a cow steak of the same size? Also, I didn't mention that the shark steak I bought came from Ecuador! Ecuador, man!  Not only is that 2,500 miles away but I would think that it must take a lot of specialized people, time, and equipment to hunt, catch, and kill a shark. In comparison, to hunt, catch, and kill a cow would take me about 20 cents in gas, about five minutes, and a rock.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know jack about economics but that just blows me away. I mean, what kind of world do we live in where I can get a hunk of shark meat sent to me from near the source of the Amazon River for about the cost of a typical shipping fee on a book from Amazon.com?

Answer: A freaking awesome one.