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Today's featured Wikipedia article, on race is pretty interesting. It starts out with the (to me) surprising and somewhat suspect statement that many social scientists find the notion of race among humans as a pure and perhaps fundamentally flawed social construct, and then goes on to explain this point of view with great background and lucidity.

This is an example of me feeling richer after encountering an alternative to the conventional wisdom via Wikipedia; a counterexample would be the discussion page of the 9/11 article, which seems largely involved with a months-long (maybe years-long?) argument on whether or not it was a terrorist attack. (Buh?! Well, those against using the t-word argue that if Al Qaeda's principal motivation was not scaring people but the destruction of the WTC and Pentagon in order to remove their national utility, then it's more of a surprise military strike, with the thousands of innocent dead classifiable as wartime collateral damage. Buh?! Yeah, I know.)

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Two other things I bought during my shopping nuttiness, I will now talk about.

The Microwave. I bought a microwave oven, finally. I think this may be the first microwave I ever bought, vs. a family hand-me-down, or one that actually belonged to housemates. I am doing a lot of first-time-ever appliance purchasing in this apartment, really; while I've been living on my own for a long time, it hasn't occurred to me until now that this is the first apartment that I've lived in alone and far away from my family at the same time.

I did a modicum of research on the topic beforehand, and found through an online Consumer Reports article (the online edition of the mag lets you read some featured articles for free, though you have to pony up the $$$ to see the big tables of product ratings) that a moisture sensor is a key feature that I didn't theretofore know that I wanted. For a ~$15-20 premium, an oven will include a nifty dingus that detects the steam output from your food, and decide when it's seen enough to stop the MW-bombardment. So, instead of setting a time and a power level and so on, you just tell the oven what general category the food falls into, and let the oven take it from there.

I ended up timing my visit to Best Buy just right and scoring the last of a clearance sale of some brand I can't even remember now (as I sit typing this in my office; I'll try to remember to update this entry after I get home) which had this magic sensor as well as a two-digit pricetag. It so far has aced the popcorn test and has done a reasonable job with frozen burritos, so I'm quite happy with it. I'm set to eat like a sophomore again for as long as I desire, whee!

The iSight. An semi-impulse purchase; I've had a low-level desire to own once since getting Stilton. (Which, had I waited six months, could have been a wahffer theen iMac at half the price. No tears from me.) Impressively, while I didn't know what I'd use it for at time of purchase, I actually did invent reasons afterwards, thus surprising myself by making my bogus rationalizations come true. Most notably, the ~$130 camera, when attached to a laptop with iMovie installed, transforms it into an unwieldy but serviceable DV camcorder, with built-in editing station. Interesting, interesting.