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This smilling, Danish scholar is professor Ole Fanger, whose 1970 book "Thermal Comfort" is the rock on which the whole edifice of modern HVAC is built:

Over on the coworkout blog, you can read more about:

• The "Predicted Percentage of People Dissatisfied" (PPD) index,
• The fct ratio, which takes into account the percentage of skin covered by clothing
• The Sandex, which is an index that Randy and I are working on to measure the relative awesomeness of your local weather when compared to the weather in San Diego, CA.
• The Sandex, automatically calculated from NOAA forecasts, will be used to answer the question: "Should we work outside tomorrow?"

Anyhow, if you're interested in working outside this spring and summer -- Fridays, generally, or whenever the Sandex tops 90%, then check out the coworkout blog, and follow @coworkout on Twitter!

I keep writing and rewriting this blog post about how Eric Lewis, Harold Ross, Randy Schmidt and I met at Harold's studio last weekend to see what coffee tastes like when you start with green beans, roast the beans, grind the beans, then brew them up in a fire-powered siphon brewer. All outdoors, because coffee-roasting makes a lot of smoke.

No matter how many times I rewrite the blog post — talking about how we want to have a full-stack "green2steam" coffee operation mounted on my sidecar — somehow this picture that Harold took of me and Randy, gawping at coffee master Eric roasting the beans in a hacked popcorn popper, says much more than I could:

There are plenty of pictures at the "Green2Steam" photoset on Flickr. Harold took almost all the photos. Most surprising to me was the way the hull chaff from the expanding beans covered the table. And MAN, does just-roasted coffee smell good.

Randy's job was to stir the coffee, using a bamboo stirrer never before touched by human hands. Japanese siphon-bar attendants carve the bamboo stirrer to fit their palm, and stir exactly four times, without touching the sides of the pot. No pressure!

Click any of the photos to go to the photoset on Flickr:

I think the next time we do the full-stack coffee-preparation exercise will be for the 2009 Polar Plunge, February 7th at Brandywine Picnic Park. We'll have to roast the beans using propane, since there won't be any electricity. Hey ho, more FIRE! Is anyone interested in coming out to help make the most complicated cup of coffee possible?

The first batch of Nerd Merit Badges arrived! The little inch-and-a-half embroidered patches are backed with "hook-side" velcro. They came from the embroiderer in a small plastic tube, the patches back to back, like a little stick of candy. Here they are, decanted into Ikea bins:



The little Tikaro gearxels aren't merit badges; I'm not sure what I'll do with them, but I couldn't resist having them made. If I ever have a squad of turtlenecked heavies, I suppose the pattches will go on their berets.

Our first Nerd Merit Badge is pictured at the right, it's the logo for GitHub, one of the newest and shiniest hosts of open-source software. There are lot of important, thriving, and storied open-source hosts out there, but Simon Oxley's Octocat is our very favorite OSS-associated logo.

Randy and I printed up a bunch of cards, then put velcro dots on the cards. The result actually looks like a, you know, product!



Randy and I ran down to the West Chester Post Office and put a few of the first badges into the mail for the folks at GitHub. That's Randy on the right, taking a picture of the first batch going out. He microblogged the picture, and now of course I'm blogging that microblogging.

Which is appropriate, since the next badge we're working on is the all-important Regular Expressions merit badge. There's nothing closer to a geek's heart than regular expressions. When I met Kate, she was doing regular expressions to clean up museum's collection listings. That is such an awesome nerd job that it doesn't seem real; like maybe the heroine's job in a romantic movie. Oh, Regular Expressions, you make everything good better, and you make everything wonderful EVEN MORE AWESOME.

Right now, we can't decide whether we want to use a superhero-type shield on it with the motto similar to "s//*/g (substitute nothing with everything!)" or a mailed fist clutching the symbols to build the Regular Expression THAT ENDS THE WORLD: "s/*//g (substitute everything with nothing!)"

Or Will suggested the uber-regular-expression's uber-regular-expression: "s/s/*//g/s//*/g/g "Substitute (substitute everything with nothing, globally) with (substitute nothing with everything, globally), globally"

How do you fit both CREATION and DESTRUCTION onto 1.5" of embroidered cotton twill? I'm not sure, but I think it will involve some Perl.

You can follow our progress at nerdmeritbadges.com!

December really has turned into Sterno craft month. It turns out that it's easy and fun to upgrade your winter crafts with FIRE, HUMANITY'S WEAPON AGAINST THE FROZEN AND BRUTAL WILDERNESS. For instance, my brother Oliver is in town (hurrah!), and he came over to build graham-cracker gingerbread houses with us. First, we decided that we wanted to build an Awesome Wizard's Keep, because Awesome Keeps are where Awesome Wizards hang out.

From there to the fearsome and terrible TOWER OF STERNO was just a short, logical step:

Oliver has been painting mandalas, and so he was able to shave the graham crackers into perfect little octagons. The crenelations are all his, too. I had planned on putting some little marshmallow heads on the little pretzel pikes, but overall the Tower of Sterno doesn't really give off the grim, foreboding aspect that we had been shooting for. I thought maybe if we put a little marzipan wizard out in front, shooting lightning bolts at a hovering dragon, that might give the whole thing the aura of 1970s van-mural majesty I had in mind. Perhaps graham crackers and royal icing is not the medium for Heavy-Metal Awesomeness.

So we decided to just toast some marshmallows instead:

Then, on Christmas, I received the long-awaited Yama 3-cup tabletop vacuum coffee brewer that I had asked Santa for. Hurrah! Oliver and I set it up, carefully replacing the included alcohol burner with the same trusty can of Sterno:

The vacuum coffee brewer worked really great, though I was too engrossed in the bubbling and boiling and chemistry going on that I forgot to take any pictures of the actual coffee (here's a good photoset of a vacuum brewer in action.)

Okay, so the project is all coming together really well. Today, Oliver, Matt, Randy, Lydia and I went to The Fire Store in Coatesville (here's a photoset of my last visit.) Matt bought a Pelican case for his video camera; Randy snapped pictures of an actual fubar (I think it may have been a titanium fubar), and Oliver picked up a "Pocket Homeland Defense Operations Manual", for which he got questioned at checkout.

I bought a foam-lined flight case for the siphon pot's laboratory-style glassware, because EVERYTHING looks cooler in a foam-lined flight case, and so it'll survive rough terrain in the sidecar:

Okay, so now THAT part is complete, and I can find a suitable sidecar mounting point. On to the propane tank, the wok burner, and a brazing up a wire-mesh basket for the bean roaster. Onward and upward!

Hmm, if I'm going to mount the pots on the motorcycle, I'm going to need to replace the pot's stand with some laboratory glassware stands. There's a great big laboratory-supply company in West Chester, and a friendly local blogger who runs their website, so I'm going to ask him what the official name is for "a right-angled flask holder grabby thing, suitable for inserting into a countersunk galvanized pipe so you tan take it in or pull it out." I bet there's a name for that, like a "Hachtsenfeffer stand" or something.

Tikaro Interactive (by which I mean me, my desk, and my Lucky Dotcom Chair) has moved offices! I've teamed up with some really excellent Philadelphia web developers to start a shared office space. We're at 20 North Darlington Street in West Chester, right above local ice-cream and donut shop West Chester Scoop. For those of you that know the area, that's right behind the new justice center. It's the brick building in the middle of this picture: The best thing about an office space above a donut shop, besides the constant access to fresh coffee, is the delicious smell of fresh donuts. The worst thing about an office space above a donut shop is also the delicious smell of fresh donuts. To see if it was do-able, we spent a day working in the front office (with no furniture yet):
That's Randy Schmidt and Chris Conley from Ümlatte, and Jason Tremblay of Alert My Banjos. These are the fellows that put together purty iPhone app iSepta. Randy just launched isFeasting, which is a microblogging service to show what you've been eating. Jason is the programmer behind wcdish.com.

Here's my side of one of the three rooms above Scoop. I'm about halfway through the pcoress of surrounding my computer with houseplants, which I've always wanted to do. My desk drawers are still in the old office:

As a part of the lease we negotiated, we get to name and design a sundae. Any suggestions?