Monthly Archives: June 2004

Learning about the Supreme Court

The inner workings of the Supreme Court have always held a certain fascination for me, and since my wife got me an iPod, I’ve found two audio resources to help me learn.

The first is oyez.org, an online archive which contains many mp3 files of oral arguments before the Supreme Court, all licensed with permissive Creative Commons licenses. During a recent trip, I listened to the oral arguments concerning the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and the case of Jose Padilla. They also have many recordings from older and historic cases. It’s often pretty hard to understand the proceedings unless you are well versed in the fine details of the legal arguments, but it is nifty stuff nonetheless.

The other is the Barnes and Noble Portable Professor Series entitled Shaping Justice – Landmark Cases of the Supreme Court. It is an eight CD audio book which covers the history of the U.S. Supreme Court and details 13 of the cases which have shaped the power and scope of the Supreme Court. It can be a bit sketchy at times (I’m still not sure I really understand what “substantive due process” actually refers to) but the choice of cases are intriguing, and several seem particularly timely, especially Korematsu v. United States, 1944 which details the decisions regarding forced internment of Japanese citizens in World War II.

Ouch! Chavez HBP, moved to DL

I was watching the Oakland A’s game against the Chicago White Sox in preparation for sneaking out of work for today’s day game ($2 tickets? How can you resist?) and was treated to “bonus baseball”: a twelve inning game in which the role of hero was played by Bobby Kielty, who hit his first career walk off home run to win in the bottom of the 12th.

Unfortunately, Chavez was drilled in the right hand by Sox reliever Damaso Marte, and was forced to leave the game. Later X-rays revealed a break in his right hand, which may require a steel pin to be inserted. Oakland Athletics News reports that he’s expected to spend at least three weeks on the disabled list.

Ouch! Best wishes Eric, get well soon!

Addendum: I’m wearing my (somewhat unlucky, if truth be known) A’s baseball jersey today for the game. Last season it was actually getting unreasonably tight, and now it is actually baggy. Losing weight rocks. 🙂

Addendum to the Addendum: The A’s tied it up in the bottom of the 9th courtesy of a pinch hit double by Scott Hatteberg, and went on to win in the 10th when Mark Kotsay hit a walk off home run. Beleaguered reliever Arthur Rhodes gave two innings with none scored, although managed to load the bases in the 9th for an anxious moment for the fans of the green and gold.

Biodiesel

The rising cost of gas makes one consider alternative sources of fuel. Lately I’ve been hearing a great deal about biodiesel fuels. I found a recipe for cooking up a batch. Unfortunately making biodiesel still appears to be more expensive than ordinary petroleum (at least when made from fresh soy), so it might be a while before this catches on, but the chemistry is at least mildly interesting. I was trying to sort out the potential for using waste fats and oil, but it seems rather obvious that even when my diet consisted largely of fried food, I used more gasoline by volume than cooking oil. Thus, while using waste oil may be temporarily cheap, there simply isn’t enough supply to make it more than a curiousity on the path to renewable energy.

More Stereo Stuff…

Keeping with the stereo theme, Jim Gasperini wrote up an idea so simple that is surprising how effective it is. To display stereoscopic images, he merely creates an animated gif with the left and right eye images. That’s it. While it doesn’t give a true 3-D effect, the resulting images do seem to give that feeling of depth.

Heck, the idea is so simple, I had to try it out. I dug around the web looking for stereo pairs, and came up with some nice public domain source material: pictures from the Spirit Lander. You can view the result on the right. Sure, they aren’t as cool as naked people in the surf, but it will demonstrate the idea. It would help if there was some left to right and right to left motion in the frame, and the degree of motion is somewhat large. I swiped a couple of pictures from Rob Crockett’s gallery and retried it with better results. I’ll try to get some more of my own examples up sometime soon.

Alton Brown — My Kitchen Hero

I love Good Eats, and am a big fan of Alton Brown. His no-nonsense pragmatism has vastly improved my skills at preparing steaks, chicken broth and cheesecake. In honor of his brief mention in Wired, I’ve added his weblog to my list of Celebrity Blogs. Thanks Alton!

To pad this entry out, let me recommend one technique which has turned chicken breasts into something that you might actually want to eat. Alton described his broiled, butterflied chicken in his episode A Bird in the Pan. I’m sure it’s great, but I don’t buy whole chickens very often. The basic idea works very well with just ordinary chicken parts. I’ve used breasts (both bone in and boneless) and parts like thighs and wings, and they all come out tasting yummy.

The basic idea is to roast them over a bed of carrots, onions and celery. I often use veggies that are a little past their prime: it simply doesn’t matter since you are using them for their aroma, not for eating. I chop up one or two onions, a couple of carrots and a couple of sticks of celery. I then scatter them over the bottom of a roaster pan (I use my nonstick one for this) and just plop chicken parts over the top for roasting. I like my food spicy, so I hit them with a tiny bit of oil, and then dredge them in my favorite spice mix (I’ve got a big bucket of cajun style spice that gets used a lot for this). I then roast it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 35 minutes for the boneless breasts, about 45 minutes for the bone in ones (use your electronic thermometer to check for doneness if you are unsure). Yank the chicken out, let it rest for five to ten minutes tented with foil, then enjoy it with some cool side dish like coleslaw or potato salad. The aroma of the vegetables will permeate the chicken make it very flavorful. Yum-my.