I read a story in the paper yesterday about a product called Nicogel. It is a hand lotion substitute for the nicotine patch. Only it’s available without a prescription, because it’s not a drug. It contains tobacco extract, rather than purified nicotine, so it is presumably categorized as an herbal supplement. Or it would be if it were a food. As it is, it appears to be completely unregulated. And it contains a highly addictive substance. And it’s in a form that kids love.

I can just imagine lots of 12-year-olds trying to get high on hand lotion, only to find themselves addicted.  And perhaps getting skin cancer.

George W. Bush said we went into Iraq to give them freedom.  Another famous American said that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

It was raining all day on New Year’s Eve.  That’s not supposed to happen in Minnesota!  When the sun went down (before 5:00), it turned into snow and we had a nice blizzard.  Even so, if I wanted rain on December 31, I would live in Seattle.

At the intersection of highways 169 and 62 in Eden Prairie (that’s a Southwest suburb of Minneapolis) there are giant light poles which illuminate the cloverleaf intersection. I don’t know how tall they are, but they are several times taller than standard highway light poles. At the top of each pole is a circular metal platform. A ring of gymnasium-style lights dangles from below each platform. I don’t know how big any of these are, since at these heights, all sense of scale is lost.

Covering the top of one of these platforms is a nest. I can see birds in the nest during my daily commute. I can’t tell what kind of birds they are, nor is it safe to take too close a look while driving. But suffice it to say they are big. I don’t know how big, but I would imagine somewhere between huge and giant. I haven’t seen them flying. They are probably eagles.

I often see hawks sitting on highway lamp posts. Most drivers never notice the raptors that are a part of their commute. But nothing compares to the giant nest.

Non-technical readers, just skip this post. Completely. Trust me.

I can’t believe this. According to a note at the end of this Wikipedia entry:
“The GNU Hurd project… currently have decided on the Coyotos kernel.”
Coyotos is a kernel based on EROS (Extremely Reliable OS) written in the BitC language. Looking at the latter page, sample source code looks like this:

(define (fact x:int32)


(cond ((< x 0) (- (fact (- x))))

((= x 0) 1)

(otherwise

(* x (fact (- x 1))))))

which is to say, Lisp. And it will have a Linux-compatibility layer. Insert Emacs joke here.

(Since they describe ML as one of their inspirations, they could have at least used a C-like syntax, so that other kernel hackers won’t loose their sanity trying to count parentheses.)

Last weekend was Jordan’s 10th college reunion. We were happy to discover that the Back Table is still around, despite rumors of its demise. The Back Table is a bunch of folks who dine together and work hard to be over twice as eccentric as the rest of Grinnell College.

The table itself, situated in the Quad dining hall, is going away. Next fall a huge new building will replace both old dining halls, the mail room, and the old student center. It’s designed by a famous architectural firm, and it’s named after the Grinnell graduate and financial wizard under whose guidance Grinnell’s endowment ballooned to over 4 billion dollars. No expense is being spared on this new building.

When Jordan and I toured the new building, we couldn’t help but think “spoiled rich kids.” But that is unfair. Like always, most students will be getting financial aid. At the same time, even though the college doesn’t need to, they are raising tuition steeply next semester. Why? To bring tuition more in line with so-called peer institutions. Which is to say, they don’t want to look cheap. (Not that this would be an issue to anyone visiting the campus.)

Sometimes I think my chances of getting super-rich would be better if I lived in a socialist country. There, they just take 60% of your income.  Here, if your nest egg is smaller than your kids’ college tuition, the financial aid department takes it. And if current trends continue, soon you’ll have to be a billionare to avoid being at the mercy of financial aid.  Thus, everyone can just barely afford college.

Dell, HP Deliver POS To Retail

That’s news?

I’ve been waiting a long time to see an ambiguous use of that acronym.

One of the fun things about owning the leppik.net domain name is the occasional out-of-the-blue email. Like last week when a woman from Wales wrote to say that she shares my last name.

I got a similar message last year from another Leppik. What makes this all the more interesting is that, aside from these occasional blips, nearly all the Leppiks in America are my immediate relatives. For example, Yahoo’s white pages has six listings for Leppik, five of which are me, my parents, or my siblings.

Leppiks are most common in Estonia, although the typical spelling there is Lepik. My grandparents added the second p to make it easier to spell when they got to America. Not that it helps much.

Pour a can of ginger ale into an equal quantity of orange juice.

For some reason I’ve been craving these lately.

I’ll admit to being rather geeky. When I think of what I’d want in my dream home, the first thing to come to mind is energy efficiency. Two things in particular have been on my mind.

One is high mass radiant heating. I saw an article about a New England home that’s had a system like this for the last 30 years, and they haven’t payed a heating bill the whole time. What stuck out for me was that it was just a long black wedge on top of a sun room. Solar heating is far more cost-effective than solar electric, though it’s not as pretty.

The other is using holograms to concentrate solar power.  The idea here is that solar cells are expensive, and this is a really cheap way to maximize the light going to the solar cell.  It’s like using sun-tracking lenses to concentrate the light, but without the moving parts.

One thing about the holograms is that they only concentrate light at particular frequencies. With real lenses, infrared light gets concentrated as well, which can overheat the solar cells.
So in my dream home there’s a south-facing solarium, with a long, skinny solar collector on top:  mirrors that focus light onto a black pipe, so that only a black wedge is visible.  The hot water (or other fluid) in the pipe heats a hot tub, hot water supply, and a sand bed which in turn keeps the house warm.  And on the front of the solar collector is the holographically concentrated solar cells, which make the whole apparatus prettier and provides electricity for the house.

Not most people’s dream home, but I don’t have most people’s dreams.