Weekendy update

The Christmas Tree

It was a quite holiday season at the Villa Sternberg. Storm and Kouryou-chan both got B&W Nooks and new clothes and jackets and bedsheets ("Who invited that kid?"). We ate a lot of candy and had a lot of meals, and generally mellowed out. I was given one whole day to myself (!) while they all watched a Harry Potter marathon in anticipation of going to see film seven. I spent the day building my new computer.

Because Storm was at her mother's house until Friday, we waited until New Year's Eve to open the last of the presents.

This past Sunday was the first of the month, so while Storm and a friend went to the movies to see that Harry Potter flick, the rest of us did the monthly groceries. How exciting! I will say that I'm sufficiently geeked out that none of the toys on display at the various stores piqued my interest all that month; right now, what I want most is an updated version of Quicken.

Kouryou-chan had the best social life of any of us, actually going to a friend's New Year's Eve party until almost 1am. That's pretty sad.

Storm and I baked Bittman's macaroni & cheese last night. Yummy!

Grief, we're back on a normal schedule. Up at 6, ballet for Kouryou-chan tonight. Fun!

It's so blue!

The Beast

The New Beast doesn't have a name (and no, I'm not naming it "Beast," no matter how blue it is) but you have to admit, that is a lot of blue. All of the fans, including the power supply, have Blue LEDs installed. It makes a creepy honeycomb image across the wall when it's powered up.

I'm really unhappy with the cabling job. It's still a mess, although it's much, much better than the eight-IDE drive creature I used to have. The gold IDE cable I pulled out of the old one to run the DVD drive here is an ugly stand-out, although it's prettier than an ordinary ribbon cable. And both the CPU and the video card needed their own power supplies, independent of what was supplied to the motherboard-- that was new to me.

And while I was worried at the start about the cooler mount, I seem to have been concerned about nothing. Although I haven't powered up all four cores and the video card at the same time, running all four cores full out in a software build (it's Gentoo, a Linux-from-Scratch variant) barely pushed the machine above 50C.

Monogamous cultures have increased alcohol consumption!

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol, from the American Association of Wine Economists

[ht Tyler Cowen]