K-Squared Ramblings

Man-Eating Birds, Algae-Powered Cars, and Googly Androids

• Fossils linked to Maori legend of man-eating bird. # The giant Haast’s Eagle, which died out at least 500 years ago, was originally thought to have been a scavenger, but new analysis of fossils indicates that it was a lion-level predator…making it the probable basis for the Maori Te Hokioi legend.
• Top Cyber Security Risks 2009. # Operating systems are becoming less and less of a problem, as attackers focus on client applications like Adobe Reader, QuickTime, and so forth.
• Odd headline combo: “The algae-fueled Prius hits the road” and “Flesh-eating bacteria hit the beach.” (ZDNet newsletter) #
• I like the sound of “Googly Android devices” #
• Not sure what this song is, but what I can hear of it sounds like the chorus from Gethsemane – over and over and over. #
• WTF? Allergy recall of “Fannie May Milk Chocolate & Almonds” due to undeclared almonds. How is that undeclared? #

Cashew! (Gesundheit)

Ack! Who puts cashews on Hawaiian pizza? Apparently Red Brick Pizza does. They kindly made a replacement without them. *whew* Constant Vigilance! #

It was listed on the menu, and I should have looked more closely…but who expects nuts of any kind on Hawaiian pizza? It’s standard: crust, tomato sauce, cheese, ham, and pineapple. Checking for nuts on that would be like checking for strawberry jam on a cheeseburger.

Cold Stone Fedora

• Smell of waffle cones from Cold Stone makes me wish I could eat there. Ice cream vs allergies. #
• Ran into one snafu w/Fedora11: xkb error popups every time I wake the computer from suspend. Resetting keyboard worked. #

Cupcake, Fedora & Benadryl

• Cupcake has arrived! (Android 1.5 update for my phone) Now I just need time to try out the new stuff. #
• Oh, fun: Fedora 11 #linux is now coming out on June’s Microsoft Patch Day. #
• Real Life Comics on allergy medication. Oh, yes, I’ve been there. #

Food Allergy Awareness & Mobile True

Ironically, I wasn’t aware it was Food Allergy Awareness Week (and I should know about this stuff) #

Cool: daily @thisistrue story suitable for mobile phones: i.thisistrue.com #

Docs and Cheese

• Latest spam trend: Word docs in Chinese. No clue what they are – I’m not going to open them! Also: Make Money Fast seminars…in Shanghai. #
• Making a list of my allergies. And I keep thinking I’m missing something. #
• I still find it amusing that caminobrowser.org focuses on a picture of the browser showing the Wikipedia entry for Cheese. #

Backwards

From a food allergy alert released today:

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc., is recalling “Chocolate Covered Almonds” due to undeclared peanuts and “Chocolate Double-Dipped Peanuts” due to undeclared almonds. [emphasis added]

I have to wonder: are they just really bad about keeping their ingredients separate, or did they get the labels switched on a couple of batches?

Linkage: Authorship, Allergies & Alternate History

Catching up on interesting links from the past week.

Balkanized North America: what if every region that started independent had stayed that way, and every region that threatened to secede from the US or Canada had succeeded? (via ***Dave)

Enter Sandman: Who wrote “Footprints”? You’ve probably read the poem, or heard it, in which the narrator dreams of walking along a beach with God, and looking back and noting how many sets of footprints there are at different points in their life. It turns out at least four people claim authorship. (via Neil Gaiman)

Retro-Future: To the Stars! Science-fiction illustrations from 1930–1970, many of them from Soviet/Eastern Bloc countries. (via Slashdot, though I noticed it popped up again today on The Beat)

My Son’s Food Allergies: Danger Every Day: An essay on a family dealing with their toddler’s serious (i.e. life-threatening) food allergies. I am so glad I didn’t have things this bad when I was younger. Fortunately for me, mine didn’t get really dangerous until I was around 17 or 18—just in time to go off to college and get exposed to all kinds of strange food! (Found on CNN)

Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam (CAUSS): volunteer group that tears down unsightly (and illegal) signs stapled to telephone poles and such. I saw their site a few years ago, but had no idea that they were not only still around, but had expanded to multiple cities. (again, via ***Dave)

Church to 8-year-old: Drink the Kool-aid

Time to add an “outrage” category. This is just insane: A church panel has invalidated a girl’s communion because she can’t eat wheat (original article here).

The girl has celiac disease, which means any amount of wheat can cause her serious health problems. A local priest was willing to let her use a rice-based wafer, but higher-ups declared it was invalid — that if there wasn’t wheat, it didn’t count. She can either take the communion with a wheat-based wafer, or not take it at all.

For all intents and purposes they’ve excommunicated this girl because of a medical condition.

Good thing I’m not Catholic and the sacrament doesn’t involve peanuts.

I wonder if the church would be willing to pay for emergency room visits (or funerals) resulting from this kind of situation?

Allergy labeling

Congress has passed passed the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, mandating the top 8 food allergens appear on labels in plain English! The voluntary labeling over the past few years has been very helpful. Well, some of it has — the “processed in a facility that also processess XYZ” labels mainly amount to a CYA statement, although I’m sure there are people sensitive enough that it does help.

The NPR story provided some examples of why this matters, including a story of a college student who had a very similar experience to one I had a few years ago: he bought a chocolate chip cookie from a vending machine — a brand he had been eating with no problems for several years — but they had added peanut flour to their mix without labeling the change. He died within 15 minutes. When it happened to me, I had enough medication to stop it. But I don’t eat anything from Famous Amos anymore.

Some other nice provisions include having the FDA do a study on cross-contamination [archive.org], and having the CDC track allergy-related deaths.

Further reading: The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, The Food Allergy Initiative