Category: General

So, McKenzie’s no longer exists, but many of us have fond memories of specific items from the New Orleans bakery.  My personal favorite wasn’t as popular as their King Cakes or their turtle cookies — it was their iced sugar cookies.  These were BIG sugar cookies cut to a variety of shapes such as Pac-Man, Clovers, Hearts, etc.  They were always iced colorfully, too.

So, I had a reason to make some sugar cookies, and I tried to get as close as I could to McKenzie’s.  The icing still needs some work, but I think that they used a derivative of royal icing.

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup sugar
• 1/2 Cup butter
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 1/2 Cup flour
• 1/2 Cup corn starch
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions:

• Cream the butter and the sugar in a mixer
• Add the egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract.
• Mix together the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Stir to combine
• On slow, mix the dry goods into the wet goods.  Take the time to scrape the sides of the bowl.
• Once the dough has formed, chill it in the fridge for 1 hour.
• Roll the dough out, but keep it pretty thick.  These cookies aren’t going to rise very much.
• Cut into shapes, place on a very lightly greased cookie sheet.
• Make sure the dough is still chilled before putting it into the oven.
• Bake at 375 for about 10-14 minutes, depending on how thick your cookies are.
• Cool on a rack until room temperature.

Royal Icing Ingredients:

• 1 egg white
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar (approximate)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

• This process isn’t a science — Just look at what you’re doing and pay attention to the product.
• Beat the egg white and the lemon juice together until frothy
• Add the vanilla, stir to combine
• Slowly add the powdered sugar, a little bit at a time.  You may not need all of it,  you might need a little more.
• Mix the powdered sugar in slowly.
• Mix until you can see a ribbon of icing fall from the spoon / mixer, land on the mixer, and remain on the surface of the icing for a couple seconds.
• For a good explanation and details on making this without an uncooked egg white, see Joy of Baking

You need to use royal icing immediately (or keep it very airtight)

You can’t really substitute blended / food processed sugar for powdered sugar in this recipe.  You really notice the large sugar crystals.

Hope you enjoy these cookies as much as I do!

So, a woman puts a “notice” on her website saying basically that anyone who looks at her site is entering into a contract and cannot copy the content.

The internet archive’s spider hits her site and provides an archived copy of this.

According to Eric Goldman, the court properly did not dismiss the breach of contract claim.

Now, I’m just a law student, but I’m also a former software engineer.  I don’t particularly know which law applies here, but what sticks out to me is that enforcement of a contract in this case would be totally against the common practice / usage of trade.

Every reasonably informed website operator knows 1) that spiders will come to your site and 2) that they’re going to take copies of your pages and provide them to the public in some limited form.  See Google’s cache for the most prominent example.  Also, every reasonably informed webmaster knows about a ‘robots.txt’ file, which is a file that tells search spiders what NOT to access.  There are also a number of HTML META tags for specifying what the search engines can/cannot do.

This is not rocket science, it’s commonly known how to prevent the spiders from crawling your site. Enforcement of a contract here, well, regardless of what text of the site says or how it’s programmed, well, that would just fly in the face of common practice.

Re: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4562

I agree, the US has a good system that promotes industry and innovation. Not the best system possible, but a good one.

More examiners. Yep, need that.

More open process, yeah, that too.

I don’t think courts should defer to the examiner, though. There should be at least some scrutiny over their decisions.

I actually think rss feeds of applications and wikis for each application are a GOOD idea, as long as there’s regulation over identity. if you can see who is saying what, it matters. you dont want a company to show lots of evidence for its patent without being identified as having an interest.

Anyway, I have to reserve most of my judgment on this issue as I havent taken IP law yet. we’ll see where i stand after i take he class.

I thought this was REALLY well done.

So, i’ve been thinking — a large percentage of my energy consumption is from air conditioning, energy demands on the grid vary through the day, and the temperature usually is cooler at night, when the sun isn’t out.

So, why can’t we build big “coldness reservoirs” underneath our homes.  The idea is this: get an extremely insulated system.  When energy rates are cheapest, make the system cool off the fluid inside the system.  Later, when energy rates are higher, use the fluid productively.  You could use it as part of your air conditioning system, you could use the heat difference as part of a reverse-peltier effect to generate some electricity, etc.

Of course, you could change the actions depending on what the situation is (heat vs. cold and when the rates are high) — you could imagine some future scenario where rates are higher at night because there’s no sunlight (and thus we’d have to rely on gas, coal, etc)

Anyway, why doesnt this work?  I could imagine that you’d need to store way more energy than would be possible to do economically.  Water’s got a pretty high specific heat — if you could use water, you’d probably need to store so much water that you’d end up having to have a couple swimming pools full of water stored underneath your home, and that can’t be cheap.  Also, to be effective, you’d probably need to supercool/superheat the water to the point where you’d be losing energy through system inefficiencies.

Anyway, it’s an idea.