Banana bread

This is a very forgiving recipe that has a lot of room for slighlt wrong amounts, different sized bananas, and tolerance for coooking time. It's a bit of a slow cook but not tricky at all. We make this a couple of times a month, sometimes doubled recipe and freezing some.

Start off with

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup sugar

Cream together. I use a stand mixer but whatever.

Add in and mix well:

• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 very ripe bananas

Next add and mix:

• 2 cups flour (up to 1/2 cup whole wheat)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or chocolate chips

In our household, adults always use walnuts and kids always bake it with chocolate chips.

Pour into oiled/floured loaf pan. Or multiple pans. Or make muffins.

Bake 45 minutes to an hour at 350°F. Use the clean toothpick test. Smaller cooks faster, so cupcakes may be 30 minutes, big loaves closer to the hour mark.

Long Silence Again

With no feedback from people reading, it's really hard for me to maintain motivation for writing. So I stop and write in places I do get feedback. That's been Net News (eg Usenet and Usenet like) forever and Mastodon-flavored Fediverse recently.

I created a Mastodon account perhaps four years ago, but due to the "no feedback" thing, and not knowing anyone else on the platform, it got little use until Musk started his Twitter purchase and then Twitter destruction. So Twitter link no-more on Contact section and Fediverse QAZ link instead.

I've also revamped the robots.txt file, because of other Internet "enshitification". Google is useless as a search engine now, time to drop their bot. At the same time, I added some more "SEO" related bots and the one "AI" bot I've noticed ("ChatGPT", which people tell me is phonetically the same the French phrase "Cat, I farted", « Chat, j'ai pété »).

Part of the prompt for robots.txt was a persistent highly personalized campaign from some Internet advertising company urging me to put ads on my site through their service. I suspect one of the "SEO" metrics company was how I came to this guy's attention. Better to just block those bozos. Web advertising is just a downhill spiral to the worst profit motives on the web.

Mini Monopoly

Years ago I found some miniaturized games for sale. I don't remember how many were available, but I got Scrabble, Mousetrap, Etch-a-Sketch, and Monopoly. The Scrabble set had a tiny bag for letters, but not a complete set of letters. Mousetrap did have the full rube-goldberg trap, but lacked other pieces. Etch-a-Sketch worked. Monopoly came with a couple of markers (metal, magnetic, to stick to metal board) and dice, but lacked money, property cards, houses and hotels, and the various draw cards. Those small games still appealed to my taste in shrunken versions of things, working or not.

Now I find out there's a new maker of miniaturized games, going by the name "World's Smallest". And they have a Monopoly, too.

Side-by-side the older gimmick version (dated 1998) and the new World's Smallest (dated 2020) version. The board is about 3" square (around 75mm) on both. The quarter helps provide scale.

All of the game components (including the board) fit inside the 3" × 1.75" × 0.5" case. The older edition had a pull out drawer instead of a folding box. The drawer has much smaller storage capacity.

It's playable in the most technical sense. There are all of the pieces to play the game, but there are many ways this falls short. The houses are not the same scale as the board, so you can't fit two on a property. The Chance and Community Chest cards are also much larger than one would expect given the indicated spots for the draw piles. This board is cardboard, and the markers are plastic: no magnets to hold them down. The money is very hard to manipulate with one's fingers. And many people would want a loupe to be able to read the property cards.

Playable or not, if I saw a smaller edition, I'd still be tempted.

A Protein Alphabet

Mark Howarth, having looked at a lot of protien visualizations, realized that there is enough diversity to easily create an alphabet of protein shapes.

This is all the more impressive since the proteins are all three dimensional shapes, and only look like letters from certain angles.

I used the 3-D visualizer at the protein database he links to create my own images of the Q (3SZV, Pseudomonas aeruginosa OccK3) and Z (4BTA, Peptide(pro-pro-gly)3 bound complex of N- terminal domain and peptide substrate binding domain of prolyl-4 hydroxylase (residues 1-244) type I) letters.

And then made a QZ logo for the blog out of them. First new logo in a while, and currently the largest one in the collection (by file size). Very, very, few of more than one thousand QZ images in the logo collection are color, which makes having them small much easier.