There are reports of POS credit/debit card terminals and cellphones jumping from 2009 right past 2010 to 2016. The problem seems to be the interpretation of what's intended to be a BCD value, as a hexadecimal one.

(For non-geeks: remember way back in school when you learned about different "bases" for numbers? Because computers use on-off signaling -- two possibilities -- we need to use base-2, "binary" arithmetic a lot. But because base-2 is a pain, we often use base-16, "hexadecimal", which is easy to convert to and from binary. In hexadecimal, the string of digits "10" actually means the value sixteen: instead of the ""one times ten plus zero times one" that we usually mean, we read it as "one times sixteen plus zero times one".)

I've been critical and disappointed regarding Obama's treatment of the LGBT community. But he earns back some points with the history-making appointment of transgender woman Amanda Simpson as a senior technical adviser to the Department of Commerce.

As a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend (a FFOAFF?) noted, this has the added benefit that it will likely make Glen Beck's head explode.

Until fairly recently, it was generally thought that the use of grains for food was a Neolithic innovation, that we only started eating grain after we started farming. But around 2004, analysis of a 23,000 year old site in Israel showed that the inhabitants were eating wheat and barley, as well as small-grained grasses -- and even suggested that they were baking grain-flour dough back that far. That makes breaking bread an ancient tradition indeed.

Now comes evidence suggesting (but by no means proving) that human use of grains for food may go back as far as 105,000 years:

Two years ago, Mercader and colleagues excavated a cave in Mozambique called Ngalue. They uncovered an assortment of stone tools in a layer of sediment deposited on the cave floor 42,000 to 105,000 years ago. The tools can't be directly dated, but Mercader presumes that the ones buried deepest in the layer are at least 100,000 years old. Other researchers had identified tubers as an important food source during the Stone Age, so Mercader decided to check for starch residue on 70 stone tools from the cave, including scrapers, grinders, points, flakes, and drills.

About 80% of the tools had ample starchy residue, Mercader reports today in Science. The starches came from the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges, and the African potato. But the vast majority--89%--came from sorghum, a grass that is still a dietary staple in many parts of Africa.

According to Mercader, the findings suggest that people living in Ngalue routinely brought starchy plants, including sorghum, to their cave. He doesn't have definitive evidence that they ate the grass but says it seems likely. "Why would you be bringing sorghum into the cave unless you are doing something with it?" he asks. "The simplest explanation is that it would be a food item."

You hopefully know that Atkins-style, low-carb fad diets have been widely criticized by every major scientific and health organization. The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Medical Association, the American Kidney Fund, and the Mayo Clinic are among those who have condemned low-carb, high-protein diets rich in animal products as useless for long-term weight control and dangerous in their health effects.

But I've not found a single page that lays it all out nearly as well as this one at atkinsexposed.org. The Atkins Corporation Legal Department sent Michael Greger, the physician behind atkinsexposed.org, an intimidating letter in an attempt to silence his criticism. Instead of folding, though, he engages in a point-by-point refutation of the Atkins Corporation's claims, demonstrating not only the scientific evidence of the diet's ineffectiveness and dangers but the fraudulent means by which it was promoted.

There is no "miracle weight-loss diet", folks. The reason this country is so damned fat is because our caloric intake increased by 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000 (and I'm sure it's only gone up since then), while we sit on our asses more. We've got to eat less and exercise; trying to treat obesity by shifting calories between macronutrients is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you, or someone you love, is among those who have been flim-flammed by the low-carb fad, you must read this page.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem using words from the following list, generated around the theme "snow": orange misaligned aching oppressive flange £cocoon grimy fluffy damp glitter confined peaceful cotton bombastic cluster deep isolated comfy

the oppressive ache of winter
cold and confined in the dark

we gather together to fight it
we cluster around the orange glow of the hearth
set the lights to glitter on trees and houses

but the deep cold will come
and we will be isolated each our own cocoon of warmth

but cocoons make for metamorphosis
and in the spring, we will burst forth, bright, flying, transformed

Me, I get a paper cut and I'm done. But some people are just tough. Like this guy, who got stabbed in the chest during a robbery attempt, then walked into a diner with the five-inch knife sticking out of him, sat down, and ordered a cup of joe while waiting for the ambulance.

Happy Solstice to all!

As I've been working on my book recently, I've been researching a chapter about Shinto, which has a wonderful myth about the sun's return:

Susanoo-no-Mikoto, a storm god, was the brother of Amaterasu, goddess of the sun. He was also a bit of a trickster and a rude fellow, and finally his antics so angered Amaterasu Omikami that she went and hid in a cave, and closed the opening off with a huge rock.

With the sun gone, everything got dark (duh), and living things began to wither. All the kami, the spirits, tried to lure her back out. Finally, Ama-no-Uzume, the goddess of merriment, got an idea. She hung a mirror on a tree, a started an erotic and uproarious dance! The kami laughed so loud that Amaterasu got curious, and stuck her head out. She saw her own reflection in the mirror, but didn't recognize herself -- she thought this was a new kami and, fascinated, came out of the cave.

So, remember -- around the Winter Sostice, be sure to laugh lots and party hearty to help trick the sun out of her cave and bring back the light and warmth!

It's beautiful, can stop everything, cause disasters, come unexpectedly. Some can live without it, others never get enough. Snow or love?

Snow is the big story this weekend. It started about 10pm Friday, came down all day and all night Saturday, was still falling lightly around 1 am this morning. I measured 19 inches of it last night, and it was still falling. Dug out this afternoon, which was a decent workout. So just about everything that was scheduled for this weekend -- including the big Solstice show with Telesma and Alex Grey -- got canceled.

After all that digging out, felt like I had to go somewhere tonight! Came down to Fells Point, figured maybe the Grind would be open (it is) and some Zelda's folks might make it (none yet) -- and if not, surely some bar would be open.

I was just down here Friday -- sort of the other half of the question, as I met up with Jen for the first time since October. We had planned to play some chess, but her set got left in her car when she had to borrow another. Still, we spent almost four hours talking, lingering over coffee at the Grind and a drink at Birds of a Feather. Bittersweet, but so it goes.

Got some work done on the book while snowed in yesterday. The chapter on Shinto is shaping up, and when I've finished that, I just have one more to go! I've set the goal of having a rough draft complete by my birthday, and am well on target for that.

So. How about a little writing exercise? What can we make of "nineteen inches of snow"?

nineteen inches of snow
covers the graves
nineteen inches of snow
keeps writers holed up, working
nineteen inches of snow
weighs down the roof
nineteen inches of snow
buries many sins
nineteen inches of snow
makes the city go slowly
nineteen inches of snow
take all day to fall
nineteen inches of snow
will take a long time to melt
but
eventually
will

Another story from the "why do they put so many lunatics on police forces"? file: a plainclothes cop drew his gun on a bunch of people having a snowball fight in D.C., after he (or his car, not clear) was hit by a snowball.

From the ThinkGeek catalog, cheack out this Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, commemorating the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo saves Luke Skywalker from freezing by slitting open the belly of Luke's dead tauntaun (sort of a horse-like giant snow lizard...) and placing Luke inside the warm carcass.

See also the New York Times story on how this product came to be.