One of the great things about Trader Joe's food is how you get create (or maybe I should say assemble) a good tasting and nutritious meals in minutes. A few days ago, I microwaved the pre-washed green beans for five minutes and pan fried some Thai potstickers.

1. I borrowed Oranges on Flickr - Photo Sharing!, which I found in the Creative Commons Search engine. I looked for pictures of oranges that I could reuse for commercial purposes.

2. I applied a PaintShop Pro Circle filter to get Oranges for remixing on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

3. I then generated favicon.ico using FavIcon from Pics to go from a jpg to ico.

4. I'm using the Digital Ramble » Favicon Manager WordPress Plugin to tell my WordPress blogs about favicon.ico.

I moved my entries from MT to WP by using the export feature of MT and the import feature of WP. The translation wasn't perfect; for instance, a lot of formatting was not done correctly. However, it's good enough to move ahead with.

One thing that excites me about moving to WordPress (on dreamhost.com, where I'm hosting a bunch of my sites) is that I can easily keep up with the latest versions of WordPress through a one-click install and update process. In theory, I should be able to keep my software up-to-date; in practice, doing so was never high enough priority to go through the steps needed. A simple process makes all the difference. Keeping up with the latest software also enables me to enable commenting on my blogs without getting overrun by spammers. So far at least, I've been impressed with the ability of Akismet at blocking spam through its WP plugin.

Four of the five studies on chocolate found reduced blood pressure after eating, but none of the tea studies showed significant benefit. The magnitude of the effect of eating three and a half ounces of dark chocolate a day was clinically significant, comparable to that of beta-blockers like atenolol, known by the brand name Tenormin, or propranolol, known as Inderal. The authors acknowledge that the studies were short and that results may not apply to habitual use.

Such news, of course, will not stop me from continue my tea-drinking habit. It does he me and Laura justify our newly revitalized eating of dark chocolate after dinner!

I had just walked out of the Holocaust Museum, where I was attending an academic conference on the great culture war between fascism and communism in Europe between the world wars. A couple of the morning presenters were pretty good, but the literary critics were front and center for the afternoon. After a paper full of words like 'transgressive,' 'essentialist,' 'inversions,' 'subversive' and so on, and on, I had had enough. As I headed for the exit, I remembered the comment of someone who dropped out of Yale’s English Ph.D. Program: "It’s become the place where language goes to die."

I'm pondering Nicholas Kristof's words in Driving Up the Price of Blood - New York Times:

All this makes genocide easier to stop than people imagine. Where it arises from a weighing of costs and benefits, then it is possible for outsiders to impose additional costs and change the outcome. That’s what we need to do. The U.S. should lead other countries in pushing hard on all sides for a negotiated peace agreement among the warring factions, for that is ultimately the best hope to end the slaughter in Darfur and in neighboring areas in Chad and the Central African Republic.

I find President Bashir’s ruthlessness pretty easy to understand. What is harder to fathom is President Bush’s refusal to stand up to the genocide for four years. Why not impose a no-fly zone, why not hold an international conference on Darfur, why not invite survivors to the White House for a photo-op, why not give a prime-time speech about Darfur?

Perhaps the explanation for Mr. Bush’s passivity is the same as the explanation for Mr. Bashir’s brutality. Maybe Mr. Bush has made his calculations, looked at the number of calls and letters he gets about Darfur, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that Americans really don’t care enough about genocide to make him pay a major price for allowing it to continue.

BTW, how does one link to a specific spot in Shakespeare's plays? I see the use of an Act/Scene/line number reference system. Is that prevalent? For instance, I see from Hamlet that the beginning of Hamlet's "To be, or not to be: that is the question:" is Act III, Scene i, line 64. What versions of Shakespeare's text are in use? (In looking for ways to link directly to Hamlet, I found main, which an image of the 2nd Folio of Hamlet, III.i.)

For Christmas, Laura's folks gave me a large plain Moleskine notebook. Although I quickly took to writing in it sporadically, it is only during this last week that I've been writing many times a day in it. The notebook is, of course, not the only instrument for recording my thoughts. It has, however, become a guiding one as I sort through the jumble of thoughts that buzz around in my brain. Forcing myself to write my thoughts in a linear narrative often helps make sense of the nonlinear, illogical scramble of notions, emotions, questions, and conjectures.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

Wikipedia is good for academia -- nice to see an essay about how the Wikipedia is good for the university and academic culture. I should say more about what I mean here....

Zenph also announced it had accomplished this feat of technological legerdemain with one of the most remarkable recordings of the last century: Glenn Gould’s 1955 mono rendition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. Gould, who retreated from performance into the private realm of the recording studio where he could splice and fiddle with sound and phrase, would be posthumously pulled back into the realm of public performance.

I'm almost ready to plunk down the money to hear the recreation of Gould's famous Bach recording. (See *BACH: The Goldberg Variations - Glenn Gould's 1955 performance re-created in modern hi-res surround sound and hi-res binaural sound by Zenph - Sony Classical for the album cover.) Where can I buy it?

Enchanting TED - Pogue’s Posts points to the latest round of TEDTalks (audio, video).

Guidelines for Using a Cellphone Abroad - New York Times is useful if I ever go to Europe or Asia -- but mostly, when I leave the USA, I'm in Canada.

The Bach Birthday Bash sounds tempting. Stanford is just a bit too far away these days for me:

Join us for a celebration of the master's 322nd birthday with a musical party, featuring Bach family videos, a wig tossing contest, and an intimate performance of several of his wonderful Brandenburg Concerti. Featuring the award-winning Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra and their music director, Benjamin Simon, this evening will be an opportunity to brush up on your Bach trivia, have a fugue explained to you, and learn the names of all of Bach's twenty-plus offspring. Those attending in period costume are eligible for valuable door prizes!