Delicious food tip: celeriac

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Susan’s a member of a local CSA farm, and she often picks up celeriac, which I’d never had until a month or so ago. Celeriac is the root of a particular kind of celery plant. It looks like a very large gnurled potato, but it has almost no starch content so it’s perfect for diabetics. You can prepare it much like you would prepare mashed potatoes, or you can dice it and steam, boil. or stirfry it and serve it as a side vegetable with your dinner. It’s great! It has a very mild celery taste, it’s versatile, and when you can find it it’s dirt cheap. Definitely worth trying if you’re looking to add some healthy variety to your diet.

Friday Fun Link part deux: more zombies, this time in flash

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So, the last post might have bummed you out because it was PC only? Here’s some halloween themed Zombie action anyone with the flash plugin can play: The Last Stand 2, over on kongregate.com. You’re one of the few survivors after the zombie apocalypse, and you have to make your way from town to town, searching for survivors and supplies whilst fighting off hordes of zombies from behind a barricade. If the zombies break through it’s game over. Simple gameplay, decent graphics, and tons of zombie blasting action. What’s not to like on Halloween? Not for the squeamish though. Enjoy!

Friday fun for halloween – Zombie outbreak

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Armed Assault is a first person shooter that aims to be more of a simulator than a run and gun action game. It got decent reviews when it came out, and was notable for the strength of its mod community and the tools available for it, along with the size of the areas you can play in. There are tons of available mods, most aiming to simulate various military activities – using a squad to liberate a city, fight off an incursion from an attacking force, implement an ambush on a military convoy, that kind of thing. In honor of Halloween, I offer up the Zombie Outbreak mod for it, which allows you to set up a sort of ‘Day of the Dead‘ scenario where a number of zombies get introduced into an area and can infect the civilians and military personel in the region. You and a team of friends can then try and combat the outbreak, using the kit you start with and anything you can scrounge. It’s really pretty cool, and I’m posting this partly in the hope that a friend or two will pick up Armed Assault so we can team up, but even as a solo experience it’s pretty fun. You can score Armed Assault cheap off of ebay, or in the $30 range on Steam or Amazon.com. Definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in some Halloween themed zombie battling action. PC only, you need a decent gaming rig to run this.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

An ingame screenshot demonstrating the high dr...

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Here’s a ~5 minute youtube video showing off what the gameplay looks like:

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Incidence of type 2 diabetes doubled in the last decade

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That title pretty much sums up what recent statements by US federal health officials revealed, reported on here on US News & World Report’s website. I don’t have too much to add to this, just getting the word out. They don’t go into much detail in terms of causes of type 2 diabetes beyond the typical ‘sedentary lifestyle, obesity = higher incidence of the disease.’ The one aspect of it that I don’t think I’ve noted here before is how incidence rates are much higher in the poorer southern states than in the northern states. Education is a critical component of the disease that folks don’t seem to focus on as much – new drugs and approaches to treatment are great, but making sure kids are taught from a young age that fried twinkies + 2 quarts of soda + 6 hours of videogame daily = you’re going to be fat and get diabetes seems to be as big if not the biggest piece of the puzzle.

Got mac or Linux? Codeweaver tools are free, today only

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If you have an Intel Mac or are running Linux on Intel hardware, Codeweaver is giving away their Crossover Pro product, which includes both Crossover Pro and Crossover Games. This lets you run many Windows apps and games on a Mac or Linux box without running Windows. You can score a copy over here: http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ Getting hold of it is kind of difficult because their website is getting hammered, but it’s worth struggling through the slow access.

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Credit where it’s due: Netflix and Blu-Ray fees

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Some months ago, Netflix announced that they would be introducing new fees to cover the cost of customers like me who have Blu-Ray and opt to get Blu-Ray movies over DVD when they’re available, because the discs cost more to purchase than regular DVDs. I was irritated by this. While I like Blu-Ray I didn’t neccesarily want to pay a tithe to get movies in that format. It’s great and all, but for most kinds of movies it’s not that much of an improvement over DVD. Only big budget or carefully shot movies are markedly improved by the higher definition. Meanwhile, I figured Netflix’s fee structure would only lengthen the time it takes for Blu-Ray to catch on and for the cost of the discs to come down, because folks would simply opt not to get them if they cost more.

As of this month, Netflix is charging the fee, and they made a great compromise move. It’s only $1 more a month, easily palatable and an acceptable balance between cost and access. I was pleasantly surprised, figuring they would raise it by at least several dollars, or start charging a per Blu-Ray disc rental addon fee. Kudos to the folks at Netflix for how they handled this.

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No better way to enjoy a lunchbreak

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So a slightly embarrasing admission: for the last 8-9 months, I’ve often spent my lunch hour playing desktop tower defense, this excellent flash game where you build mazes out of little defensive towers with various capabilities, attempting to stop endless waves of creeps from making their way to the opposite sides of your maze. I play it over on Kongregate.com, where they have various challenges integrated into their flash portal, and the top challenge for Desktop Tower Defense is to score >12,000 points on one particular level. It’s hard. REALLY hard. I’ve spent an unbelievable amount of time trying various strategies on that level, reading up on the game’s forums, and watching Youtube videos of others who’ve managed to beat it. Today I finally managed it, barely squeaking by with 12,054 points. I can’t tell you how psyched I am to have beat this, as silly as it seems. I haven’t been this engrossed with a game in I don’t know how long. Now I can throw down the gauntlet: anyone else think they can do this? I scoff at the notion 🙂

Below is my winning maze, for those that are interested. Note that the big central area was filled with anti-air towers for most of the game – I sold them off right near the end and bought several additional bash towers, also spending a good deal on upgrading a number of pellet towers. For most of the game, the only non-anti-air towers I had were 1 bash tower and two ink guns.

Now that I have a winning formula I suspect I could bump up my score a bit, but… I’m done. I’ve been obsessing on this for months, now that I’ve beat it, I’m moving on.

(I’ll just go off to find another tower defense game to obsess over 😉

Spelunker returns

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Back in the day, I had a Commodore 64 and loved it. There was a brutally difficult little platformer on the C64 called Spelunker, featuring you as a miner making his way to the deepest depths of a mineshaft infested with critters out for your blood and a constantly depleting air supply. It was fantastic, and I still pride myself on the fact that I actually beat the game way back when. The Tokyo Game show just finished up on Friday and a remake was announced featuring updated graphics and some kind of multiplayer mode for the Sony Playstation 3. This is a definite purchase for me and I’ll be looking for companions in the multiplayer mode, assuming it’s worth playing.There are some screenshots of the new version and some impressions of the gameplay over here on Joystiq.

One mortgage, infinitely leveraged

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From the ‘why we’re fucked’ file, here’s a great little sample from a lengthy thread over on metafilter covering what’s up with credit default swaps:

20Rafaelloello, yes, that is true, but as I understand it, most holders of CDS have them hedged off to someone else. …”

In (most?) lines of insurance you cannot take out a policy unless you have an insurable interest in the asset or life. In CDS’s there was no requirement of this.

Somebody buys Rafaelloello’s mortgage, they want to hedge that risk with a CDS, fine.

5,000 other investors say, “Hey Rafaelloello hasn’t missed a mortgage payment, I want to “insure” that he continues to pay.”

Then 5,000 more say, “I’ll take that bet, because even though it looks like he’s going to continue to pay, I can hedge my bet that he wont…” Enter the next 5,000 “investors”.

Before you know it, Rafaelloello is the equivalent of a top-ranked college athlete. Tens of millions of dollars are being bet on my ability to perform, with no direct ties to the underlying assets (My home and my ability to pay).

You’re only hedged as well the ability of all parties to pay their bets/bookies/vigs obligations. In this ring of hedges it only takes a player or two to skip town and the whole game implodes.

The rest of the thread is over here, and it’s well worth a look if you’re trying to grok what’s going on with the financial system. I’ll repeat my oft repeated assesment though – in layman’s terms, it was a giant fucking ponzi scheme.