unexpectedly, leisurely.

It’s been a while since the last time I booted up excel. Since rolling off my last project ~2 weeks ago I’ve been experiencing a lot of this thing called…free time. How bizarre.

Over the weekend I did a lot of perusing the aisles @Trader Joes (awesome) trying to decide what I wanted to eat. The result was a lot of chicken (difficult to screw up):

Chicken experiment number 1 - Veggie lovers’ chicken soup:

Ingredients:

• 5 chicken legs
• 2 large leeks, chopped
• ¼ packet Trader Joes ready to cook Kale (super easy, prewashed and prechopped)
• 1 large potato
• 1 large yellow onion
• Dried shiitake mushrooms
• ample salt, pepper, and rosemary, dash of cayenne pepper for a bit of kick

     

boil on low heat until the chicken is falling-off-the-bone delish! (~3 hours)

Chicken experiment number 2: Veggie lovers’ (can you tell I’m a fan of the veggies) roast chicken

     

Start with a liberal layering of vegetables on a foil-lined baking sheet (then most importantly, douse in lots of olive oil) I used:

• 1 large fennel (don’t toss the fuzzy green stuff! Its super fragrant)
• 2 large onions (1 red and 1 yellow for color contrast)
• Asparagus - 1 bunch, chopped into thirds
• 1 large potato (left over from weekend soup)
• 1 lemon, cut into quarters
• fresh rosemary and thyme

Then add chicken!

Rub chicken with sea salt, pepper, chopped garlic and squeeze the lemon on top

then bake! (1 hour @400 degrees, or until “juices run clear” not quite sure what this means, but its what all the cookbooks say…)

omnomnom. This was all gone in about 30 minutes. (we added kale on top about half way through the baking process, and voila - kale chips to boot!)

Switching gears from cooking to my other favorite activity –shopping (so much for my efforts to limit my amount of stuff…) Today’s post gym wandering down Newbury st. yielded an awesome pair of red heels!

Not sure if I am “kickass” enough to sport them to work…I’ll report back once I actually get back to the office dressing frame of mind.

Why all our kids should be taught how to code →

Completely agree with this (minus the hamster comment). The biggest regret of my education is never having had the sense to take programming when I was given opportunity after opportunity.

The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don’t act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we – rightly – want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don’t have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind.

spring cleaning.

How did I accumulate so much schtufffff. Need to stop shopping.

lotto mania

If M. wins he promises to pay for medical school. There, its now on the internet in case he tries to go back on his hypothetical word.

thatluciegirl:

Journey Through Healthcare

Helping my good friend R spread the word about this video, which is part of her senior thesis at Parsons, on how design can intersect with healthcare and make it more understandable and dissectible.

It also offers some pretty interesting commentary on the how knowledgeable young Americans are of the current healthcare system. And how we learn, process, and expect to access information differently from generations past.

(Also, if you’re looking for a website that tells you what doctors are covered by your insurance, allows you to schedule an appointment directly, and lets you read patient ratings/reviews of individual doctors: I love and use ZocDoc. Seriously. It’s probably one of the most helpful things I discovered as someone new to a city.)

tradeoffs

High heels somehow have the ability to endow a sense of power and strength – they make you stand up taller, and walk with more conviction, but are unfortunately difficult to balance in, and a terrible impedance on speed when trying to keep up with the other (male) members of my team. So I have learned to travel with a pair of flats at all times. Such is one daily trade off: to be short and fast or tall but slow. Option three (to be tall, and fast) is ostensibly unrealistic for me. 

theatlantic:

Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality

If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.

Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which the above graphics were drawn. The book’s authors, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation and the Institute’s Mark Graham and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, reluctantly conclude that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”

“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” they write. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.” 

We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The researchers also sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.

The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal. 

Read more. [Image: Oxford Internet Institute]

#marchsadness

chriszee:

missouri loves company.

at least tomorrow is national drown your sorrows in alcohol day.

pluiedavril:

“To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.”

- The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Achieving the promise of women executives →

McKinsey & Company, 2012