Sebastian @ ObWi:

There is a certiorari petition before the Supreme Court on the question of whether or not bringing a drug sniffing dog to somone's home counts as a police search. It is a legal problem at all because using drug sniffing dogs on a person's car has been deemed "not a search" under the 4th amendment. This is a surprising result in itself, but leave that aside for the moment. So having discovered that using a drug sniffing dog around a car isn't a search, some police officer decided to use it around a house. This ends up implicating all sorts of problems, because constitutionally speaking homes are specially protected areas when it comes to police searches.

So now various high courts have to decide how to distinguish the case of the drug sniffing dog near a home from a drug sniffing dog near a car. Great. But that is the wrong question entirely. It turns out that drug sniffing dogs have an incredibly high false positive rate--they alert many more times than drugs are actually found once a search is done. Worse the dogs seem to alert much more often if their handler suspects there should be an alert--independent of whether or not there are actually drugs present. So the dog launders the police officer's suspicion instead of actually adding new information.

Read the rest.

Knowing my fondness for tubular meat, dear sweet Mrs Wife bought me a meat grinder, and a book of sausage recipes, for Christmas! Yay!

So, wanting to get into it as quickly as possible, but not wanting to get into the whole "hog casing" thing right away, I decided to try a loose sausage. And luckily, the first recipe in the book was "basic breakfast sausage" which obviously works fine un-cased.

Butt, the recipe requires 2.5 lbs of lean pork butt and 1/2 lb of pork fat. Where to get pork fat? My usual supermarket doesn't even sell fatty pork, let alone straight-up pork fat. The guy at the meat counter confirmed that there's nothing in the store with more than 1/16" fat on it. Hmm...

Butt! There's another, older, smaller, supermarket here which was probably once the only place one town, decades ago, but now primarily caters to the Hispanic population. And they have all kinds of stuff in their meat cooler - tongues, feet, heads, ten pound sacks of chicken livers, etc.. So, I figured they'd have a chunk of pork fat in there somewhere. They didn't. And the butchers there didn't have any either. Butt, they had big packages of pork butt chops, with a solid inch of nice white fat around the outside of each chop. Cheap, too. So, three packages of those was enough to satisfy my pork requirements - plus, once I separated the bulk of the fat and lean, there was a big batch of pork bones to snack on! (dust in chili powder and broil until all the leftover meat and fat has gone crispy). Thanks, Scott's Galaxy!

An hour later, I had three pounds of pretty pink sausage. Success.

The result was good, butt not quite as awesome as I hoped. It was a milder, leaner (far leaner) style of sausage than I prefer. Butt that's easy to fix. Next time, I'll add more fat, more chili, more sage, and grind it all a little coarser, too. And then I will come up with a classy marketing name, and corner the market in breakfast sausage.

31,536,000 Second Exposure

Rex has a drumstick and his brain stops ticking.

Reports of illnesses in dogs given chicken jerky treats have spiked dramatically following a new government warning about pet snacks made in China.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has logged at least 353 reports this year of illnesses tied to imported chicken jerky products, also sold as chicken tenders, chicken strips or chicken treats, a spokeswoman said.

We import dried chicken from China? Really?

Reviews Written by Automated Message "estrus jones"

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have failed to qualify for Virginia's March 6 Republican primary.

The Republican Party of Virginia announced late Friday and early Saturday that Gingrich and Perry fell short of the 10,000 signatures of registered voters required for a candidate's name to be on the ballot.

I M LOL

Comet Lovejoy (2011 W3) rising over Western Australia from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

Cats4Gold

Today's xkcd posits that a good way to build brand identity would be to label each item with the simple description of its contents, using big black letters on a plain white background.

Readers of a certain age might remember that this is exactly what many of the original "generic" lines did, back in the 70s/80s. You could buy "BEER" or "SOAP" or "BEANS" - plain white wrapper, big black letters. Loblaw's version "No Name", used a yellow background. But, there were no graphics, no branding, nothing but a description of the contents. "Lost" even parodied this with their Dharma brand food packaging.

The stark packaging did distinguish the original generic brand cans from everything else, but it also looked cheap, which made buying those products feel a little risky.

In other words, I'm probably older than the guy who draws xkcd.