No soup for you!

I recently had an opportunity to return to Japan after finishing a Navy tour there about ten years prior. The thing I was most looking forward to was getting another taste of a mystical magical soup from the Capricciosa restaurant at the top of More's City Mall in Yokosuka!

The restaurant had relocated to the other side of the building and presumably some if not all of the staff had changed, but the "Italian Meat and Vegetable Soup" was still on the menu, yay! In fact the menu had been updated and there was another name for the soup provided. Another clue to the riddle behind the secret soup that had haunted me for a decade! The decoded soup name was... ready for it? Minestrone!

I felt a bit disappointed to be honest. Isn't Minestrone one of the most common soups in the world? Had I waited ten years and traveled thousands of miles just to have some run of the mill Minestrone soup? In fairness the Japanese versions of food are sometimes, often, different than the American versions of the same food, for example Tacos with BBQ Sauce on them and Spaghetti with ketchup and butter for sauce (which tastes way better than it sounds)

This Minestrone soup is made without any beans or pasta and although "Meat" is one of the primary words in the title, it's difficult to find in the soup! I separated some of the soup into another bowl so I might reverse engineer it. Can you identify the mystery meat?

The known and suspected ingredients are as follows:
Tomato
Onion
Celery
Potato
Spinach Leaf
Chicken Stock?
Tomato soup?
Ground Pork?/Bacon?/Pancetta?/Beef?
Heavy Cream?
I attempted to recreate the soup and my creation was good, but not the same. The original soup (shown below) is a yellowish color which I can’t explain. Any ideas?

Thanks for the password

Here's one for you, do you think Google has too much integrity to try your password on other sites log in as you and data mine personal info from other sites? How about this, what if you enter the password for another site by accident into Google and it fails do you think they would store that failed attempt and try to log in to other sites as you using those credentials? Lately it seems to me if I can imagine it someone is doing it. What do you think?

Chase the carrot

I was thinking about how our text messages and emails are being analyzed with the expressed purpose of serving up advertisements that in theory we might want. I wonder how often for example a married couple after communicating a stressful moment in their relationship would have otherwise went about their business and things would have returned to normal, but with the help of targeted advertising are lead toward marriage counseling or proceeding with a divorce. And which of these options would be the most profitable to the company serving the advertisements? I'm guessing the divorce advertisement would be considerably more profitable to the advertising company. I suspect this model would apply to many situations where the individual would be basically thrown under the bus in order for big business to profit from the cleanup. I'm deeply saddened that we no longer have any basic privacy. Our private expressions are used against us to generate profit for others who we may oppose and we should expect to experience reprisal for expressing our opinions privately.

oooh look, a bubble! yay!

I find it amazing the extent that the world we live in now collects, sorts and uses data collected from our every day activities to adapt and dare I say influance our behavior. I am surprized more people don't seem as concerned as I feel about the way the information super powers such as facebook and Google have implemented algorithyms that create Filter Bubbles where some information is hidden or other information is given priority. The premise is that the results will be tailored to our interests and help us to more easily find what we are interested in. The end result is some information posted to Facebook doesnt appear on my feed because facebook decided I might not be interested in it, and my google search results may be diferent than yours. My biggest concern with this behavior is that it could be easily manipulated to influance our decissions and manipulate our comprehention.

Parking Lot Mafia

Valet parking, when the driver takes your car to a location where you never would have parked on your own is fine, but when shopping malls block off half of their normal parking and then charge you to let someone else park your car in the same spot you would normally use is not!

Space Time

Assuming the human race will eventually migrate to space, how should we measure time in the future? Our current method of counting how many times the earth rotates and the time it takes to orbit the sun may not make much sense once we abandon our home planet and eventually colonize other planets and or pockets of space far removed from mother earth. It seems to me we should measure the time it takes for something with a constant speed to pass between 2 non-variable points. I believe light is a good object to measure since I believe it’s present in all habitable areas of space and has a constant speed. I’m not quite sure what the start and end points of its travel should be used to signify the passing of one unit of time. One suggestion from a friend was the distance between peaks of radio waves. It would have to be a significant number of radio waves measured by the speed of light to create a unit useful to time every day events like boiling an egg.

Black Thursday

The last couple of years Black Friday "door buster" sales have been starting earlier and earlier. This year many stores will actually begin the sales on Thursday, and early in the evening! In fact Wal-Mart has announced it will start at 6:00pm Thanksgiving night! Many people have expressed displeasure with Wal-Mart’s decision to kick off Black Friday so early on Thanksgiving day because people want to have the option to participate in the sales, but they don't want to feel rushed to get Thanksgiving dinner over with so they can abandon their family for the deals. I'm pretty sure most of the Wal-Mart employees would like to spend thanksgiving with their family rather than at the register. If you think about it the deals we get aren’t really that great anyway. Usually there are a very limited number of exciting items used for the advertising which get sold to people who have been camping in front of the store for many hours if not days! The rest of the sale items are for outdated items that the store wants to unload to make room for the new stuff you will wish you waited for. Another concern is safety. There have actually been rioting and deaths in recent years at Black Friday events. Personally I feel the standard of living and feeling of desperation has been getting worse of late each year and this year is no exception. The likelihood of violence this year is high in my estimation. How much money would you trade to abandon your family on Thanksgiving Day? Would you put your family and or yourself in a potentially deadly situation in order to get those Black Friday savings? I hope people will do the right thing and stay home with their family all day on Thanksgiving, If we do, Wal-Mart won't see huge profits and will stop encroaching on one of our most sacred family traditions.