Rotundus.com

I was feeling somewhat uninspired around Canadian Thanksgiving about what sort of dessert to try to whip up. My brain was thinking chocolate cake - which sounded like a terrible idea for Thanksgiving but delicious for most other locations.

In desperation, I hit Google and, amongst a list of other Thanksgiving-themed recipes came up with this recipe for "Crustless Cheesecake with Cranberry Sauce" (in which, strangely enough, all cranberry related elements were listed as optional). I didn't have a springform pan, kicking around, but managed to find the following on Superstore's shelves for a whopping $4.24, and Google suggested that you could peel a cheesecake out of one of these without breaking the thing:

(I've had a silicone loaf pan for years, but I still find the flexibility of silicone pans amusing)

Given that the "cranberry" cheesecake didn't seem to require cranberries, I googled a cranberry sauce recipe and came up with this. The cranberries seemed to "pop" earlier than suggested by the recipe but I decided to cook it down further.

With the cranberry sauce done and starting to cool I worked on whipping up the cheesecake batter and, on a whim, decided to try mixing about half the cranberry sauce into the batter.

The cheesecake seemed to turn out intact, and remembering I had a cake caddy kicking around (don't all bachelors?), it was off to party. Lots of dessert there so the entire thing didn't wind up getting downed, but it gave me the opportunity to photograph the leftovers:

I found a recipe for pumpkin spice latte syrup so perhaps the end of the month will be a good time to take a second stab at cheesecake-making - that one with a pumpkin spice theme.

Aircraft Carriers in Space

"Naval analyst Chris Weuve talks to Foreign Policy about what Battlestar Galactica gets right about space warfare."

Estimated 2.8 million Canadians live abroad

"the emigration rate for the naturalized portion of the Canadian population from 1996 to 2006 was 4.5 per cent. For the Canadian-born population, the exit rate was estimated at 1.33 per cent, which translates into 500,000 Canadian-born leavers over the 10-year period."

Backyards are highly overrated

"Evidence shows that for all we lust after outdoor sanctuaries, such retreats have little to do with the lives we actually live. Neither adults nor children spend much leisure time outdoors, and in making the trade-offs to have private outdoor space, we could be making ourselves less happy overall."

Mom sues police over arrest: Says she was wrongly accused of child endangerment

"Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside. She said her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away. "I was out there the entire time," Cooper said. "I never left that lawn chair the entire time." Cooper said a little while later, a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home. "I went out there to see what he was here for and he said, 'Ma'am, we're here for you.' I said, 'Oh really? Why?' He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised. Cooper said she was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and forced to spend the night in jail."

One of the issues that I've seen crop up with semi-regularity in this US election cycle is talk of gender-disparity in the rates charged for health insurance down there. CNN noted the following:

New research by the National Women's Law Center released Monday shows that, in states that have not banned gender rating, 92% of the top plans charge women more -- despite the fact that the vast majority of them do not cover maternity services.

I would have tended to assume that pregnancy would indeed account for the greatest difference in healthcare, but that appears to be false. What do you find if you look at data on the subject? Though women on average spend between more healthcare dollars at all ages excepting under 18:

... the greatest disparity in health care spending between men and women was in the population aged 45 to 64 years. In this age group, the median annual per capita expenditures for women were approximately 50% greater than for men ($2,871 vs. $1,849).

That's not an age range that many women become pregnant at. Even if maternity services aren't covered, insurers would seem to have a genuine reason for charging women higher rates. To quote the CDC:

... excluding pregnancy-related visits, women were 33 percent more likely than men to visit a doctor, although this difference decreased with age. The rate of doctor visits for such reasons as annual examinations and preventive services was 100 percent higher for women than for men and medication patterns differed significantly.

In Canada auto insurers are allowed to charge young men higher rates do to having a bona fide reason for this. A ruling by the EU a few years back that gender-discrimination in auto pricing had to end wasn't exactly met with a lot of enthusiasm by some - prompting headlines like Car insurance: why women face £300 rise in premiums.

Is it fair to charge women more for health insurance? Is it fair to charge men more for car insurance? ... or for life insurance? ... or to pay out at higher rates on annuities held by men? How do you deal with the reality of pregnancy? Could you, e.g., spread the costs of maternity coverage across the whole population but allow insurers to account for other gender-differences in healthcare costs? Should you ban gender-based pricing for all forms of insurance?

it's the world's first bottle made with ocean plastic

Seems like an interesting idea though as the plastic is hand-collected off beaches it seems to be likely only usable by rich hippies until they find some way of doing this more economically.

They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?

The intro: "It's 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don’t come off as a slacker." Add to this "Because of my expertise, I could often answer a client’s questions quickly, saving both of us time. But because my firm billed by the hour, as most law firms do, my efficiency worked against me."

Reforming Software Patents

"In 2012, Google spent $12.5B to buy Motorola Mobility and its patents, and $5.2B in 2011 on R&D. In 2011, Apple spent $2.4B on R&D but contributed more, approximately $2.6B, to a single transaction to buy patents from Nortel." Found this in discussion on a recent New York Times piece on patent problems in the high-tech sector

7 Myths about the Columbine Shooting

"I thought I knew the basic facts about the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. I was wrong. Here are seven common myths about that tragic day"