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195 Fluoride facts, horror stories and cover-ups

Ever wonder what the fuss was about fluoridated water? This site has information a lot more sophisticated than the stereotyped "it's commie mind control!" If you live in an area with fluoridated water, use fluoride toothpaste, pay for fluoride treatments, or know organic/bio chemistry....check it out.

I grew up on well water. Ahhhh.
posted by Julie(lipse 21:43

Saturday, May 19, 2001

Projects to work on

• Instar


• The Open Glyph Project


• On-line involvement ratings


• RevolutionMUCK


• Shopping Cart Reclamation


• Lighting code


• Ridesharing Registry


• Lathe Biosis


• Unschooling C?


• Dragons in Chocolate Land


• Hydrophone


• IguanaCog

posted by Julie(lipse 11:46

A recipe for Pita bread & hummus:

Ingredients:
Yeast (you don't need much)
Wheat flour (I prefer organic)
All-purpose flour (I prefer organic)
Salt
Oil (I prefer olive oil)
Chickpeas (a.k.a. garbanzo beans, dry or canned. I prefer the former.)
Tahini (or sesame seeds & oil, to make your own)
Lemon juice
Garlic

A blender. Makes the hummus a lot easier to do.

One of my favorite meals. Yummy, cheap, filling, fun and easy to make (plus lots of people don't know how to make it and will be impressed).

Morning:
Fill a nice bowl with 2.5c really warm water. Add 1t yeast, stir, and add 2.5c wheat flour. Stir (same direction). This is called the "sponge." Cover with something, and let it sit for 30 min - 8 hours, as your schedule allows.

If using uncooked chick peas, set in water to soak.

Afternoon:
Put uncooked chickpeas in pot, cover very well with water, leave to boil. Be sure to replace water as needed or the hummus will taste like charcoal. You can also use canned chickpeas... Chickpeas are done when they are very soft--their outside coverings will have slipped off and be floating around with them. Takes roughly 3 hours, but keep an eye on them.

Sprinkle 1T salt then 1T oil (olive) over sponge. Stirring in same direction add all purpose flour until dough is moderately firm and elastic with a slight sheen. Takes about 10 minutes of kneading. Place in clean dry bowl coated with oil. Lightly coat dough in oil as well. Cover, and leave to rise to double.

If making tahini, toast sesame seeds lightly--spread out on cookiesheet and place in preheated 350F oven for ten minutes, turning often.

Evening:
Dough can be placed in closed container/plastic wrap and stored in fridge for up to a week, if you like. If it's dinner time, either preheat a cookie sheet (air-layered baking sheet works best, if you have one... if you want to be really fancy, line the oven with quarry tiles (for Martha Stewart perfection, use an actual tiled oven)) or heat up a skillet/griddle, lightly oiled. Divide dough into 16ths and roll out into flat circles. The rounder they are, the better the pockets will be. Should be less than a quarter inch thick. Bake in oven for about five minutes, or on griddle, also for about five minutes. Pockets form magically on their own, if circles are fairly round and heating is fairly even.

If making tahini, blend toasted sesame seeds with small amounts of oil on high setting. Harder than it sounds, but don't worry about cleaning out the blender, since you'll make your hummus in there.

Put a third cup of water and an equal amount of lemon juice in blender. Add tahini (quarter cup ish), clove of garlic, seasonings. Very slowly add chickpeas, preferably while blender is on. Blend on high. Continue to flavor as needed. Add more water if it's too thick. Etc.
posted by Julie(lipse 11:41

Thursday, May 10, 2001

Welcome to Spirit Tribe - Home School, Un-School, Home Learning, Web Site!

I've found a community! Right here in Sarasota! They were just started last fall. They have meetings and outings and picnics and an e-mail list. I'm quite excited. :)
posted by Julie(lipse 17:18

Monday, May 07, 2001

How real does it feel? - involvement ratings for online interplay?

Wben you're online chatting with your friends, how involved are you in the experience? Does it matter if you're typing through IRC or ICQ, AIM or your favorite MU*, a webchatter or telnet talker or a graphically represented world? Does it matter what else you're doing and how much you have to say? Does it matter who you're talking to? Can you hear your friend's voices in your head, or see their faces in your mind's eye?

=========----======== My experiences (skip them if you like) ========-============

My early experiences with realtime communication on-line were with Turquoise. I was 13 and he 16 and we were madly in love, and we talked on his BBS every night. The door was closed and the lights were out and the only program open was my terminal program. Black background, green text. We'd both been touch-typing since the tender age of five or so and playing with computers since. We were both writers, and we both had an abiding fascination in each other.

The upshot of this was an immersion experience, at times slightly better than getting lost in the best work of fiction you've ever read. The imagined space that we occupied was clearly defined, a node with its own set of rules and etiquette. It was a world that was represented concisely, ASCII text transmitting information that was expanded by shared assumptions and shared experiences. When I was completely focused, as was usually the case, I would sometimes forget for hours on end that I was actually sitting in my bedroom, a human girl in a flimsy nightgown all alone.

On the 'Ocean, where we talked for the first two years, we'd start out on the grid. Faintly glowing, bright green gridlines stretching on forever in all directions. Above and below was black. The grid was actually solid and smooth, but not slippery, like cement, but more forgiving. Like smooth tiles with no cracks. There was no obvious source of light, and we did not cast shadows, but there was light enough to see by. This place was "inside" Turq's sentient computer, AILACC, who was always silently watching. If we desired to change our surroundings, all we had to do was wish it, or at least, subtly make our desires known to AILACC. We could load up whole worlds... caves, islands, cities, mountains, oceans, arctic snow, etc. complete with simulated inhabitants. Sometimes I would take a human form, sometimes a dragon form, sometimes a dolphin form. My default was dragon. Turq had a similar set, but his default was human--wearing a black jumpsuit and a wristpad.

We spent about 4-6 hours a night together those first two years or so, and rarely were we distracted from each other by anything. WWIV's chat program and our own imaginations were enough for us to communicate very effectively, enough so that we quickly fell in love and became a pair. On our grid, we role-played ourselves dozens, hundreds of times, exploring different facets of our personalities, each other's feelings, values, desires. We talked about our daily lives as well, of course, and discussed ideas we'd come across and projects we wished to start, debated views of the world. We explored our young sexuality ever so slowly, virtual touch by virtual kiss.

Well, by the time I was 15 or 16, we started to meet more often on the internet. Some of the simplicity was lost, but in its place were worlds already described with inhabitants with real people behind them. We set up residence on FurryMUCK, where even now we share an apartment in Lyric Theater. We had mutual friends, a few of whom were every bit as involved in their experiences on-line as we were. I had other friends other places as well, and distractions multiplied as we'd keep two or three windows open at a time.

Over the next two years, things spread apart in all directions as we suffered his move to college and subsequent loss of telephone access (long story), until I went to college and our relationship officially ended. The first year I spent at New College I was on-line infrequently, since reallife held great fascination in this new place with new people and plenty to do. So it wasn't until this year that I really started keeping in regular touch with my distant friends, and thinking about the time that I used to spend staring at the screen.

In particular, since here I am around real people, and many of them use computers, I've noticed that others usually seem to take the online chats casually. Not that they consider their online relationships casual, as these are often with very close friends or romantic interests, but that they chat while doing other things--things like carrying on completely different conversations with people in real life, reading books, webbrowsing, schoolwork, playing with pets, etc. The emotions people express online, laughing or smiling or yelling or shrugging or whatever, often don't seem to have any bearing to the emotions they're expressing in real life. If attempts are made to establish a mental context for interaction, I don't really notice them. None of these things are bad--there's much in real life to hold one's attention, and being a busy person, I understand the need to multitask--but they are notable in that they came as something of a surprise to me. An experience (mine) that I had thought was fairly common may actually be fairly unusual.

=======------=======

Thinking about this, I think it might be useful to devise some sort of ratings system by which to communicate one's level of involvement when one is chatting online. Maybe ratings for involvement at particular times, as well as for a particular person's level of interest/skill. Like for specific discussions, a scale from one, casual, lightweight, lightcontext discussion with frequent interruptions and no specific interest with what's happening to the people you're talking to at the time......to five, serious conversation/self-sharing/expression with an established context, *no* disctractions, a few hours to devote, and some sort of investment in whoever you're talking to and what their experience is (and that it match your own?).

That's a lot of different factors, so it would probably have to be elaborated/expanded/divided to be useful, and then there would have to be a way of conveniently representing it in a variety of online situations. And people would have to use it fairly consistantly, which might be the hardest part.... despite all that, I think it would be a useful conceptual & communications tool, as level of involvement is not always readily apparent or easy to describe and discuss. Sometimes it's easy to tell when someone has something that needs to be seriously discussed and attended to, but other times it's not... why not try and avoid miscommunications when possible?

Examples:

Starx: Wow, my mom just told me something pretty... heavy... can we level four?
DemiG: Absolutely, let me just get the door and close up netscape.

or

InDiegurl: Hi! Anyone awake? I'm bored.. :/
Shell: Hey Indie...sorry, I'm just level one tonight.

-------
The one for personal interest/skill might be harder. Some people aren't interested in very deep online involvement, and like best to have chatting be a shorthand sort of communication with friends or casual aquaintances, and nothing very time consuming or demanding. Some people are interested in online realms, but are sort of in the middle--maybe they type really slowly, or don't have thinking processes suited to thinking in pictures...people who don't read fiction, and so on, so they might be involved, but without quite the same amount of flow of the experience. And at the top, people who laugh IRL when they laugh on-line, who giggle if you *tickle* them and tingle if you *kiss* them and always seem to be aware of "where" people and things are in the room... people who need channels to have descriptions of some kind and need to know where new people sit and refer frequently to the created context. Good writers who can sustain visualization and are capable of being very very close to people they've never 'really met'. Again, there are a bunch of different factors there that could go together in a bunch of combinations, so the rating system would have to be elaborated or made into a bunch of smaller scoring systems or something, but still be simple enough to be useful.

So if anyone reads this, let me know what you think, maybe talk about your own experiences. I'm going to go do laundry.
posted by Julie(lipse 16:23

Thursday, May 03, 2001

This sunset will only happen once.

It's so hard to feel bad about my detestable performance in organic chemistry when it's such interesting material. I mean, I've spent a year reading and hearing about things that I had utterly no earthly awareness of before. And now I've finished actually reading all of the discussional text of the 1350 page textbook. (The thing weighs a ton, which is really very inconvenient, 'cause if I try to bring it with me anywhere it hurts my back.) I haven't missed any lectures this term that weren't for something more important (trip to EPCOT, Mike's bacc--which went splendidly, by the way)... and, I admit it, once or twice when I overslept. 8-| Other than that though, I go to the lecture (every weekmorning, 9 - 10). I'm not at my most lucid at that time of the day, but I'm present and accounted for and taking notes. And it's neat stuff, especially now that it's more big molecules and biologically significant molecules. This morning we talked about
posted by Julie(lipse 20:46