Get yourself a pressure canner and a bunch of 1L jars. Take a weekend to learn how to use it properly. Then, go out and buy yourself a bunch of whole chickens, some potatoes, stewing beef, chicken and beef broth (or just make your own), carrots, celery, and onions. Ensure you have some salt and pepper and some common spices. Roast a few whole chickens, remove the meat, and stick them in jars (one each), top with water and a bit of salt, and put in the pressure canner for 90 mins (you can save the bones for broth). Put some raw beef cubes in the bottom of some other jars, with cubed potatoes, and chopped celery, carrot, and onions, until nearly full, and top with beef broth. Put in the pressure canner for 90 mins. Do the same with raw chicken instead of beef. The raw meat will cook completely within the jar during the pressure canning process, and comes out seriously tender and juicy.

A typical home pressure canner can do 7L of food at once. That can mean seven chickens, seven jars of stew, or seven jars of soup at your disposal, which only need heating, and which only have the ingredients you put in them.

The possibilities are huge, and not only do you get to select the ingredients, but the end result is completely shelf-stable (so long as you follow the directions correctly and verify the seals on your jars are solid). It's usually recommended you eat anything you can this way within a year, but I've heard of people who have ate canned items 5 - 10 years old that tasted just fine (you may lose some of the nutritional factors this way, mind you).

It's really pretty easy, and the US government Dept of Agriculture, as well as some other canning companies and organizations publish tested recipes online. So long as you take care of them the jars themselves last nearly forever, and only need their snap lids replaced, so you can reuse them to your hearts content.

I took up canning roughly a year ago for my family, and we currently have over 40L of food put away, including whole chickens (deboned), crab meat (I live by the ocean, and own some crab traps), vegetables, pasta sauce with meat, jams, jellies, whole fruits, soups, and stews. I'm planning on doing some chilli in the near future. It's so easy for even one of us to have a tasty, nutritious meal -- and considering I can raw pack the stews especially means I can easily make seven meals in about two hours time that are shelf-stable and which take just minutes to heat in the microwave.

I wish I had known what I know now about pressure canning when I was single. You can often buy food cheaper in bulk -- perhaps in quantities more than you'd typically be able to eat in a single week. You can control the sizes (as jars are available in a variety of sizes). Shelf-stability. Quick reheating. Nothing in the jar you don't put in there yourself. And if you plan ahead just a little bit, you can put up a lot of future meals in just a few hours.

Yaz

The best anyone can really say at this point is that gut bacteria might play a role in some peoples autistic symptoms, but certainly not all. It's not a panacea by a long shot. Some autistic children do see some improvement through the use of specialized diets. Others see no change at all. I'm the father of an autistic child who falls into the latter category -- on a typical diet she shows no propensity to constipation, diarrhoea, or other obvious digestive issues, and on a gluten and dairy free diet, she isn't any different than on a typical diet.

Chances are there are multiple routes to the same sort of neural-developmental issues that cause autism in individuals. This research is promising for those whose autism does have a digestive basis, but that doesn't mean that all autism comes from the same source, or that no further research is needed into other possible causes.

Yaz

While EGA was available in '85, I wouldn't call it common. Both home PCs and business PCs of the time still typically had either monochrome graphics or CGA.

Of course, if you really want to discuss a blast from the past, you could get 640x480x256 on a PC XT back in 1984 using the (little known) IBM Professional Graphics Controller.

I had an ATI graphics card way back in the day that could provide EGA graphics on a CGA display (with a lot of interlacing, mind you). Those were the days.

Yaz

...someone starts a bounty on the site for "Kuwabatake Sanjuro"?

Yaz

Technically incorrect, as the JPEG standard has defined a lossless encoding mode since 1993.

However, I suppose it is practically correct, as I know of no camera which implements lossless JPEG compression.

Yaz

It's that sort of thinking that wastes time and effort and money. Mechanistic o-chem is a valuable precursor to biochem. Most of what's in a 300 level p-chem course will never have any practical use in patient-level medicine. And most of what is relevant/ visible in an MD's day is easily covered in a 300-level biochem course. Too many university plans are holdovers from OCD planning that requires everyone to learn in unison, a semester at a time, with a goal of sitting in a lawn chair with a funny hat on a day in May. I'll gladly sit in the chair with a hat for three hours on day one if you can let me get done and get on with my life.

...who went into education after seeing what was/wasn't working in both fields...

I loved undergrad organic chem. Loved it. Loved it. Loved it. It was a system used to unlock a puzzle. I still have all my notebooks and routinely lead my students down the garden path and then try and stump them with hexamethyl chicken wire.

My central issue with it was the nature of needing a whole year in order to do biology. First semester was unlocking the system and working out structures, many of which you will see in an actual living creature. Second semester was petroleum industry chem. Which you rarely see in an actual living creature. My context was US small liberal arts college ending in 1980, mainstream year-long textbook, but from that experience I'd recommend first semester mandatory for all biologists, then on to biochem. Which nowadays likely needs three semesters in order to prep you for current genetics / epigenetics / cell signaling, etc. that's exploded since then.

Perhaps in mathematical topics such as mathematical logic, recursive definitions, automata theory, graph theory, algorithms, Turing machines, computability theory, or complexity theory?

Yaz

... welcome our current reigning overlord champion.

This is nothing. What's next - the labor department will be dispatched to Don Marquis' office?

...at the Fraunhofer facility. Sorry. Couldn't resist.

The place where I've seen MAJOR improvement in this area with iOS7 has been when running iPhone apps on an iPad (in my case, an iPad 2 -- the oldest iPad supported by iOS7).

In iOS6 and prior, when running an iPhone app you had a choice between running it at its native resolution (and it would always choose the older 480x320 used by all iPhones up to (but not including) the iPhone 4) as a tiny window in the centre of the screen, or running it at "2x", doing a straight pixel doubling of everything. Fonts in particular became pretty ugly scaled this way -- they became obviously pixellated.

In iOS7 however, all iPhone apps are auto-scaled. It appears it now prefers graphics for the iPhone 4/4s screen resolution (940x640). Most importantly, the fonts are simply sized to the correct 2x size without pixel doubling -- so the render to the correct size at native resolution. This makes iPhone apps on the iPad vastly easier to read.

I can be a bit jarring mind you when you couple the new, crisp text with a graphic containing text designed for the pre- iPhone 4 screen resolution. The graphic gets scaled, so any graphical text looks pixellated still, however UI fonts in the same display will be crisp and clean.

I don't run a lot of iPhone apps on my iPad -- most are either dual iPhone/iPad apps in the first place, or have iPad equivalents available in the app store. There are a few that I need to run however (my banking and insurance apps don't have iPad equivalents, for example), and the text quality improvement in them is tremendous. It was pretty much worth the iOS7 upgrade alone for those apps.

None of which is helpful on an iPhone of course, and not having an iPhone (or bad eyes for that matter) I can't comment on how easy to read the text is on those devices. They certain do appear to have taken some time to improve things on the iPad however, and there I've ben really happy with the new and improved font rendering support.

Yaz

The last time I tested it, VMware has a really hard time virtualizing the latest OS/2 releases. I was able to get it to work with some degree of stability only if I ensured I never went past OS/2 WARP v4 FixPak 11. Anything beyond that and the VM simply wouldn't boot.

My understanding is the problem is that OS/2 was pretty much the only OS out there to make use of the full range of the Intel IA-32 architecture, in particular Ring 2 access, which isn't used in Windows or most *NIX derivatives.

Wikipedia has some background on this issue.

Yaz