thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Tasty

From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon:

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef—flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments.

Washing your underwear at Google

You never know who you'll meet.

When inanimate objects blog

I love that I live in a city where popular statues and geological entities blog about each other. Portlandia is upset that all of the city's attention is on "that bitch volcano over the river in Washington. She's tried to steal my thunder before. Let her come over here and try that shit."

Low-literacy web users "plow" through text

Oh, goody. This week's Alertbox is about web page use by those with low literacy levels, which is exactly what my NSF proposal was about. Maybe the committee will give me bonus points for being au courant. Nielsen finds that, while people with strong reading skills can glance over sections and glean meaning quickly, people struggling to read must attend to each individual word, narrowing their field of focus and making them lose concentration whenever scrolling is needed. Given that a quarter of Americans cannot read a food label and another quarter cannot solve problems requiring basic integration of written information*, complicated websites marginalize a huge population.

Simplifying text, prioritizing menu items, streamlining layout, and accommodating spelling errors in search all improve sites for low-literacy users, which Pfizer demonstrated in a site redesign. Like most accessibility improvements, the changes benefited high-literacy users, as well.

*Stats from the National Institute for Literacy.

Quiet again

Posts will continue to be sparse here until next week, when I return from my six-city tour. (I'm getting really good at spatial reasoning as applied to suitcase optimization.) In the meantime, here's a helpful sign:

Happy Pi Day

Do something nerdy at 1:59pm.

Extremely loud and incredibly close

Jonathan Safran Foer's latest novel just came out, and there are few things I'm looking forward to more than reading it. His last novel, Everything is Illuminated, quietly reduced me to sobs while I was distracted laughing.

Ten years of vegetarianism

And to think it started as a whim on a Model UN trip in high school. (Because I liked a guy.) With the exception of a few months of misguided fish-eating at the start and a couple of surprise bites of pepperoni in the dorms, I've been meat-free for ten years. My culinary horizons have expanded from gardenburgers and Coke (teen years) to falafel (college) to baby bok choy with shitakes (now-ish), and I've become more aware of local and organic produce choices, and the effect food has on my body and mood. Originally I thought I'd be a vegetarian for ten years, but now I can't imagine eating meat again.

I'll be celebrating my tenth veggie birthday on April 1st by going out to a chichi restaurant with friends. Any recommendations? So far, I'm thinking about one of these:

• Plainfield's Mayur
• Caprial's
• Higgins
• Farm Cafe

Of course my brother thinks I should just have a barbecue.

New York photos

A few photos of the Gates at Central Park are now online.

Hatoon

I found out this evening that Hatoon, the mentally ill woman who lived on the steps of the Knight Library was hit by a car. The Register Guard article has some poignant details about her life (including her penchant for lipstick and the generosity of Blue Heron Bicycles), and even the guys at the Commentator abandoned most of their usual sardonicism in their memorial post.