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This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it's about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture.

White people are nearly 50% more likely than people of color (POC) to own a business in the state of Oregon. Ownership builds wealth in ways that employment does not. The racial wealth and small business lending gaps in the US are pronounced, which allows white folks to open new businesses more easily. These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC to run successful businesses of their own (cooking their own cuisines) by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates. Their success further perpetuates the problems stated above. It's a cyclical pattern that will require intentional behavior change to break. If you've come here in anger, please read at least a couple of these articles before continuing to the list on the next tab below.

In the meat of the spreadsheet at the "Restaurants List" tab, we have

"Many people have asked for us to list alternatives owned by people of color (POC), so we have updated the list to include the nearest (in cuisine and distance) POC-owned restaurant to each of the appropriative restaurants. If you look at these two lists and you have visited more of the red than the green, please ask yourself why.

Note that the backgrounds of the people of color who own the listed restaurants do not necessarily match the cuisine they serve. We could have limited the list to only people selling their own cuisine, but we made the decision not to in order to make a point. If this seems like hypocrisy from the standards set for white-owned restaurants, you haven't understood why white appropriation is a problem.

White business owners wield economic and ""cultural capital"" advantages over POC business owners, so they are ""punching down"" by appropriating cuisines from people who are disadvantaged in comparison. A Vietnamese person opening a Japanese restaurant does not have the same impact as a non-Hispanic white person opening a Mexican restaurant. Healthy cultural exchange can and does occur when the playing field is relatively even, but appropriation is a demonstration of power that perpetuates inequities.

I think this double standard speaks for itself despite the rationalizing of the last paragraph. But is it real or a clever hoax?

Every Sunday I do my ironing. I have to wear reasonably "smart" clothes to work four days a week and on Friday we're allowed to dress down. Every Sunday night, depending on how tired I am, I try to iron four shirts and a pair of trousers.

It has always occurred to me that ironing clothes is a waste of time and energy. It serves no purpose other than to adhere to a social convention. If I were putting Lean Six Sigma onto my life, I think it would probably come under the category of "necessary waste" since it is there to comply with the law (an unwritten social law enforced by the Central Scrutinizer) which adds no value to the value stream.

I just found a calculation I did about three years ago to work out the impact to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions that ironing clothes causes.

I used official UK government statistics on the proportion of electricity generated by fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide gas produced.

I have no idea if these links are still valid.

Carbon Dioxide (Equivalent) Emissions from Electricity Generation (2013)

Historical elctricity data: 1920 to 2013

For my calculations. my electrical iron is rated at 2kW and I estimated the heater to be operational 50% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to iron a single item, and I do 5 at a time.

To cut a long story short, I calculated that in the UK, given 2013 electricity generation data, 1 million of me doing my ironing would produce about 244.5 Te of carbon dioxide gas.

Here's my data:

Constants
Seconds per Minute    60
kcal/joule 0.000239005736
1 billion 1000000000
Seconds per Hour 3600
1 million 1000000

Iron Power (W)    2000
Time to Iron (mins)    5
Time Heating (%) 50
Energy per Item (J) 300000
Energy per Item (kcal) 71.7017208

MtCO2e 178.5
Energy Supplied (Gwh) 304155

CO2(kg) 178500000000
Energy Supplied (J) 1.094958E+018
Mass of CO2/unit energy (kg/J)    1.63019951450193E-07

CO2e(kg) per item ironed     0.048905985435058

CO2e(kg) per million items ironed 48905.9854350578
CO2(Te) per million items ironed 48.9059854350578

Items/person/week 5
1 Million People (Te)    244.529927175289

I’ve built a simple inductance meter based on an Arduino Pro Mini. Here’s a picture. The inductance measurement circuit is based on this but I have made some minor modifications to make use of an I²C LCD I managed to get for cheap and provided for an LM7805-based regulator so it could be powered from a 9V battery. The two large maroon things between the LM339 comparator IC and the Arduino (the board with the surface mount chip and the red LED) are a pair of 1 µF PET capacitors in parallel for a total capacitance of 2 µF. This is set in parallel with the test inductor to produce a tank circuit. The Arduino sends a 5 ms pulse into the tank circuit, which sends its response into the LM339 comparator, and the output of the comparator is a damped square wave at the resonant frequency of the tank circuit. The Arduino can measure this resonant frequency by measuring the width of a pulse it receives from the comparator. The theoretical resonant frequency of the tank circuit is 1/2π⋅√LC, and given that the capacitance is known it is possible to solve for the inductance L = 1/4π²f²C. Seems to work well enough, although actual inductors whose inductances are known are in short supply. The test inductor I have used in the picture is a ferrite core inductor I salvaged from a dead CFL bulb. I’ve tried winding and unwinding coils from it and it seems that the inductance changes, so I think it works, sorta.

Next step will be to perform calibration. I need to somehow find actual inductors with an inductance known to a high tolerance, and use them to calibrate the circuit. Those aren’t easy to find in the electronics stores around here. And then I need to fix up the case. I managed to fortuitously find that plastic box which fits the prototype circuit boards I have almost perfectly (it’s actually one of a set of three food storage boxes I got from the equivalent of a dollar or ¥100 store here). Now I need to find a way to make clean holes in the lid for the LCD, the probe terminals, and the power button. I’m not using a box cutter to do that… I’m too clumsy to do that properly and mistakes will result in waste. I’ll probably just glue the standoffs that hold the circuit board up to the bottom of the case, so it will be necessary to unscrew the circuit board from the standoffs to replace the battery, which I will also have to fix to the bottom of the case somehow. Enclosures are harder than they have to be. I’ll go scouting around for 3D printing services when I have the time, so I can make a real honest to goodness case.

In the future I’ll perhaps make a few changes to the circuit so it can measure capacitance as well, but in order to do that I’ll need an inductor with a known inductance, and then it will be the test capacitor in parallel with the inductor forming the tank circuit. It will just be a matter of adding a reed relay controlled by a switch and the Arduino to alternate between L and C measurement.

Too much going on in the world. Can't get anything done.

And so my first attempts at programming a PIC seem to have failed. Upon further research, there seem to be two main ways of programming PICs, one of which involves using either a high voltage (at least +8Vdc, up to +13Vdc on older devices) on the PIC’s MCLR pin or a low voltage +5Vdc on the same pin. Not sure if the latter method is enabled by default on new PICs straight from the factory though. If it isn’t, that might be why my efforts aren’t working. I’m going to have to shop for some new parts to build a PIC programmer that can do high voltage programming, just to be sure. This looks like another promising circuit and method to try. If it works on the breadboard I’ll solder it onto one of my prototyping boards along with a ZIF socket and start using it to do my PIC work.

I graduated college with a degree in electronics and computer engineering eighteen years ago, and haven’t seriously done hardware almost since then. After I wound up looking for hardware random number generators in an attempt to respond to a post here, I decided to try building one myself, based on the design here. I ordered a few Picaxe chips just for the purpose, though I wound up using a circuit design based on this instead but used a 74LS14 Schmitt trigger inverter instead of the 74ALS04 described there. As suggested on the link I used a MAX232 RS-232 Line Driver to generate the 16 V the transistors use to generate avalanche noise. Unfortunately, the Picaxe-08M2 could only send the random data back at 2400 baud, and so I wired the same circuit up to a cheap Arduino Nano clone and managed to at least get 115200 baud. Going to higher baud rates doesn’t seem to improve data transfer speed.

The random data it generates seems to be very good though, and passes the ENT and FIPS 140-2 tests. The Dieharder tests almost all pass, with only two or three getting a Weak rating, but from what I can see even that is already very good. Just seems to mean that I might not have completely eliminated the bias from the circuit using the von Neumann algorithm alone. The hardest part about this project seems to be getting the random data out of the circuit and into my computer at a reasonably high speed. And that leads me to USB, which looks to be rather complicated. ordered a few PIC16F1455 microcontrollers which should be able to do full speed USB at 12 Mbps, which is good enough for my purposes, although it looks like getting that to work is going to be complicated to say the least.

My PICs just came in today. Later, I’m going to start with getting them programmed with some basic stuff and try to get familiar with the toolchain (SDCC), start with the “hello world” of getting the microcontroller to flash a LED, using my Arduino as a programmer, and then try to figure out how to do the rest later on. Once I have a working design I’ll upload it somewhere, both the hardware designs and the software.

Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprise Foe: Legal Immigrants

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.

Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.

Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.

What follows are the stories of four immigrants in Maryland who oppose sanctuary status — people whose voices have rarely been heard in the long debate over how to fix the nation’s immigration system.

Some supporters of sanctuary had dismissed them as white-collar professionals whose personal struggles could not compare with those of undocumented people now facing possible deportation.

But anyone who thought their journeys were easy, these immigrants said, has never walked in their shoes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/legal-immigrants-who-oppose-illegal-immigration.html?_r=2

Please, click the link, and read their stories.

I'm not doing this up as a proper story right at the moment because I'm not feeling especially professional and I prefer to be when talking about site business as a staff member. That said, this needs some attention.

A combination of personal issues and burnout have caused staffing on the site to drop annoyingly low. Here's the current shortfalls in staffing:

• Half a dozen or so Editors. We could use ten. Preferably folks not on a GMT or east coast time daylight hours schedule.
• Two perl coders. NCommander is still around doing systems and infrastructure but it's just me and paulej72 writing perl for the site currently. We realistically need four to six.
• Two board members. We need a bare minimum of three to prevent tie votes.
• Zero treasurers. The two board members have been covering this but we need someone who's good with finances and can keep track of everything officially.
• Zero artsy types. All UI design choices and graphics are currently done by us code monkeys, this is far from ideal.
• Zero wiki admins. We usually have to figure out who even has emergency backup access to it when something needs administratively done.

Again, this is not an official call to arms. This is me being annoyed at the state of things and venting. Board and treasurer decisions will be made by the board and it's not even my place to ask for recruits, so I'm not. That said, if you want to volunteer for any staff position, we're always open.

Best way to get in touch is to contact us on IRC (look over to the left) but don't expect an immediate response because we're often busy doing Life Stuff. Email works as well. themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org or any other staff member will get you forwarded to someone happy to help you on your way to exploitation.

Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!