robot_culinaire

We went to see "Loud and Rich" last night, AKA Loudon Wainright and Richard Thompson.

Wow.

Wainright took the stage first. He is an amazing performer; his ability to project himself in his singing, playing, movements, and facial expressions is not no one I have ever seen. I also don't know the last time that I laughed so hard. I did not expect to hear songs mentioning Ben Bernanke and John Maynard Keynes.

If Wainright was Joy, then Richard Thompson's performance was Beauty and Power. The other time that I saw him was around 1991 with a band on an outdoor stage, but this time it was just him and his acoustic guitar in a club. I don't know what to call his style of playing, a kind of picking mixing moving chords and lead lines (it is not unique, but it is not something heard much), but he absolutely filled the room with sound.

One of the highlights was when the two took the stage together. I couldn't have imagined that they would work so well together when their styles are so different.

Unfortunately, this was the penultimate show of their tour together.

Incidently, the club is the only one I know to feature prominently in a science fiction novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting.

Last week I stubbed my toe in the house.  I didn't think much of it, and then we went for a hike.  When we were done, I looked at my foot, and it looked like this:

I figured it was sprained.  A little research showed that toes are very hard to diagnose, and the only things you can do are get an X-ray or ignore it and hope for the best.  The X-ray showed this

Inside the red circle you can see the piece of bone that is no longer attached.  The doctor said that the chip stayed were it is supposed to be, so it is no big deal (if the chip had wandered, he would have to operate).  I just have to mostly stay off it for a few weeks, and wear shoes with inflexible soles, like hiking boots.  I am not really missing any fun because I am sweating to get ready for a conference right now.  It never even hurt after the first 30 seconds.

We just found a scorpion in the house! 

I know the stings of most scorpions found in the US are not too dangerous, but I am still shaking. 

This is the first one I have seen in the wild (if the back bedroom counts as wild). 

It was about two inches long with the tail extended. 

I am used to catching spiders in a jar to throw them out the door.  Drop the jar over them and slide a piece of paper under it and they calmly wait for whatever happens next.  Not the scorpion; he almost forced his way between the paper and the jar as I was picking him up. 

Will we be able to sleep tonight?

I found Nick Harkaway's 2008 novel The Gone Away World on the "new books" shelf at the library.  Newer than what, I don't know. My attention was grabbed by the cover (see the US cover here, at the bottom of the page); anyone who has the audacity to use lime green text on a neon pink background must be supremely confident in their work.  (Of course, the author usually has no say in the cover art, but whatever.)

For the first while, it's funny, it's odd, it's interesting, it's diverting.  Then, after about two hundred pages, something happens that forces you to reinterpret, rethink every single thing that has happened up until then.  It's enough to make you have to put the book down for a while just to process it.  Sometimes in a mystery story, nothing makes sense until a certain clue is revealed, and then suddenly it all falls into place.  This is the opposite; everything made sense when you read it, but now you find it doesn't make any sense at all.  This is a fantastic trick for someone to pull off in a first novel. 

Absolutely nothing in this book is what it first appears to be. 

Harkaway's web site comments thusly: "Very few serious books have ninjas. This is one of them."

So what does a science education at a big-name college get you?  Do you stand around all day at a blackboard drinking tea and debating the origins of the universe?

Well, I don't.  Instead, I get to do things like spend a day figuring out why this circuit doesn't work...

And then make it work.

Luckily, I have a circuit diagram (which is mostly right) which I reproduce in part here.


When I see that diagram, it reminds me of this:


Rule number one for working on complex electronics: If you disconnect something, you'll never figure out how to reconnect it in the same way. 

 

We opened up the geode (?) squash, expecting to roast it with some beets.  If the combination seems odd, you haven't seen how many beets we have.  The inside turned out to be soft and tasted mostly like cucumber, so we ate them chopped up raw.  I recommend them.  I also recommend eating things when you don't know what they are. 

Some kind of squash from the CSA today.  What is it?  They called it something like a "geode."  Am I supposed to crack the squash open with a hammer to reveal the shiny purple crystals  inside?

I guess I could cut it up and roast it.  Any ideas?

We were introduced to Ingenious by AMS and decided that it would be a perfect birthday gift for number one nephew. (9? 10? I forget. I admit it; I'm a lousy uncle.) This is what we received in reply via email:

Thank you for the game. I'm hoping to play it this week. Next year I want money.

I am looking forward to getting to play Ingenious with him. I never had an Uncle with such good taste in games. I got a few good books, though.

I didn't realize that this law had been passed (I admit I don't pay much attention to CA news) until we visited California Pizza Kitchen this week for the first time in years. CPK is years ahead of the requirements by putting calories on the menu already CPK menu with calories[PDF].

I can see the arguments against requiring the calorie counts, but we need this, or else everyone is going to get so fat that the US sinks through the Earth's crust. I could have guessed that the giant pasta dishes are over 1000 Cal, but who would imagine that the field greens salad is 1400 Cal? And a slab of tiramisu is only 500. So if I eat a salad for lunch and feel the need to cut down in calories, I should go with a half salad and a tiramisu.

There is no excuse for people not realizing that the pasta dishes are way more than a human should eat. But how many things, like the salad (or a half portion of salad), appear relatively healthy when they are in fact calorie-filled food bombs? People have at least a little excuse for not knowing.

I think the only way to be more healthy and lose weight is to cook and eat at home.

(Alerted by Marion Nestle's blog Food Politics.)

The colony of seals will be shooed away from the Children's Pool this week under court orders.

But they will probably be allowed back in six months.

The history of this is somewhat tangled. In 1930, Ellen Browning Scripps donated money to the city of San Diego to construct the breakwater that created the Children's Pool. Unfortunately, the city of San Diego had no right to build the breakwater on state land, which is what they did. In 1931, the state passed a law granting San Diego the right to have the breakwater and so on to maintain a swimming beach on the land.

But San Diego is no longer maintaining a swimming beach, because the city let it fill up with stinking, dirty seals with sharp teeth. Oh no no, saith the judge, permission to have the breakwater means you must keep a swimming beach there. So the seals must go.

Another state law was passed amending the previous grant to add "or keep some lovely seals, instead." But this doesn't go into effect until January. Between now and then, seals are verboten.

The city is expected to provide a massive police presence to protect the workers dispersing the seals from nasty activists. The workers will be playing tapes of barking dogs to annoy the seals into leaving. No word on what they will do to annoy the activists into leaving.

So we finally decided that it was time to replace the computer we are using as gateway/firewall/dhcp server etc. (Nowadays, most people have some of this functionality built into their wireless routers or something, but I like having finer control over the firewall settings and I like the computers to be on a real functional LAN. If you aren't used to working with headless servers where the computer running the code has nothing to do with the screen showing the interface, you probably wouldn't miss it.) The computer to be replaced was purchased with Windows 95 on it, which should give you a hint. It is currently running Red Hat Linux 9, which is the last Red Hat release to have a boot floppy. This computer is too old to boot from CD, so upgrading got too difficult to bother. The final straw was sitting, sitting, sitting waiting for it to pump bits out the 10baseT network port.

( So what did we get? Click here... )

A few weeks ago we visited the brand new Elephant Odyssey at the San
Diego Zoo. (Poor AMS missed the opening by about a week.)

The theme of the exhibit is the approximate living descendants of
animals that lived in southern California before the mass extinction
of megafauna. The actual purpose of the exhibit is to provide a
place to combine the African elephant herds from the zoo and Wild
Animal Park in a single modern facility.

There are multiple elephant yards, and it is impossible to see them
all at once. This one has a deep pool at one end. The structure in
the center provides shade, can spray water, and allows the keepers to
lower toys and food to the elephants by remote control. There is a
central building that has areas for the routine medical care for the
elephants as well as an elaborate series of gates that allows the
keepers to guide elephants from one yard to another, permitting
complexities like two elephants exchanging places without coming near
each other.

Elephants like to eat big chunks of wood. Tembo is breaking apart
this stump for a snack.

In keeping with the theme, there are walls with fake fossils embedded
in them, as well as a fake tar pit.

Possibly the favorite extinct North American animal, the giant ground
sloth. There are many such statues included. They all manage to seem
just slightly cartoon-like, though I am not sure just what gives that effect.

Capybaras! I have never wanted a pet rodent until I saw a capybara.
There were giant capybaras in California ten thousand years ago. The
capys are in a pen with the llama-like guanacos. For some reason, the
elephants took an immense dislike to the guanacos, charging at the
fence between them. Why in the world would they care? Is this some
kind of anti-ungulate bias?

You too can pretend to be a scientist! Who wants to be a "over-hunting theorist"? Where are the scientist action figures?

There can't be too many condor exhibits. The view of the birds is much better than the exhibit at the Wild Animal Park.

Their wingspan is just as immense as you would think it is. They kept jumping and flapping and flying about as if they were showing off for us.

An actual brass rat. I don't believe there are extinct 6-foot long
California rats. There was a lizard pen that said they were soon
going to have fence lizards, alligator lizards, and side spotted
lizards. If they don't have them yet, my question is how are they
keeping them out, since I see these all summer long on my
porch.

I treated myself to a hardback recently and grabbed China Mieville's
The City & The City when it came out.

It was not what I expected. If you have heard anything about it, you
know it is a murder mystery that involves a pair of cities with an
amazingly peculiar connection. It occurs on a piece of fictional
terrain shoehorned into eastern Europe somewhere, but there is no
reason that the setting couldn't exist, it just doesn't. I wouldn't
put this in a fantasy or speculative fiction genre any more than
Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union.

The background and remarkable parameters are established in the first
30 pages or so. This being China Mieville, I was waiting for the
waves of bizarreness to build and crash, but they never did. The
novel unfolded as a conventional mystery in an interesting setting.
It is wonderfully written; I would swear Mieville was writing about
places he had lived for years, if not for the fact that they don't
exist.

Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun
are like fireworks—they constantly astound the reader with
explosions of brilliant creativity. The City & The City is
honed and polished. Themes that thread Mieville's work, like the internal
divisions in society, are explored more powerfully in the The City
& The City because the fireworks are turned down to a rumble.

I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

It is springtime, when a CSA's mind turns to strawberries...

The CSA has been ramping up the amount of strawberries they distribute. Last week, it was up to eight pints! For two people for a week, this was excessive. We had been eating them with ice cream, whipped cream, yogurt, pound cake, and nothing but a sprinkle of sugar. But with four quarts to deal with, we had to bring out the big guns. We made jam.

We followed the instructions from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.  Acidic foods like most fruits can be canned in a water bath; they don't need a pressure canner.  For water bath canner, read spaghetti pot.  We used Pomona's Universal Pectin rather than regular pectin, because it doesn't require sugar to set.  You can put in whatever amount of sugar you want.  We did 1:4 sugar to strawberries rather than the 1:1 more typical with regular pectin.  About 2-1/2 quarts of strawberries gave us a little over a quart of jam (in four one-cup canning jars).

The rest of the strawberries went into a strawberry cobbler, for which I accidentally doubled the sugar, thus partially canceling out the sugar saved by using the Pomona pectin. 

We ordered a real water bath canner.  I remember having giant bowls of peaches all over the place last summer, and I have plans...  The spaghetti pot was not really big enough for one-cup jars, and certainly too small for one-pint jars. 

If we get more strawberries, we  will try freezing them (dry pack method). 

We went for a hike on Sunday up Stonewall Peak in Rancho Cuyamaca  State Park.  Ever since I saw it from the ridge across the road, I wanted to do the short hike to the top.  All that granite!



The trail up turned out to be a little more groomed than I prefer.  It was mostly over five feet wide, gently sloping with many switchbacks, and fairly crowded.  And when we got to the bare rock on the top, there were concrete steps and steel railings.  I was hoping for something a little more challenging. 

We headed down a different trail, on the trail north side, which much less used and less maintained.  I found it significantly more pleasant. 

The area burned a couple of years ago.  After that, it was apparently pretty bad, with the bare ground eroding away and the trails washing out.  By now, there is a considerable amount of growth and some flowers, but not yet the level of shade described in Jerry Schad's book.



The combination of undergrowth and dead trees made for good bird watching --  shrubby plants are generally a better environment for animals than mature forests, and the birds can be easily seen from far away perched in the burned trees.  In particular we saw many woodpeckers (the one I got a good look at was an acorn woodpecker).  Stonewall Peak is known for swallows; we saw tree swallows, which have a distinctive green back.  We also saw a pair of western bluebirds. 

Last night, we once again mounted our chargers, had pages bring forth the sharpened lances, and headed for the windmills.

Oops, I meant to say we tried to make pizza again.

The sauce is perfect --- some onions and garlic and calcium-free tomatoes cooked for a long time (or pesto from home-grown basil).

Cheese, ditto (Polly-O).

But the crust, on the other hand...

We tried Rose Levy-Beranbaum's version. Tastes excellent, but not really pizza to us.

Some things we found on the web were too scary to try, like the guy who disconnects the safety interlocks so he can cook with his oven set to "self clean."

The time we tried Jim Lahey's no knead pizza dough.  It did not work out so well.  The dough seemed right; I could pick it up and stretch it out into a circle.  But it developed holes as I stretched it and ended up very thin.  And the first one never cooked under the sauce, even after ten minutes at 550 degrees.  Precooking the crust before adding the sauce on the second pizza helped a lot.

His quantities seem weird.  He has 3 cups of flour for 4 12 inch pizzas.  Most recipes use that much flour for 2 pizzas that size.  Next time, smaller pizzas, and let the dough rest more when it stops wanting to stretch. 

Bread flour seemed good.  Using huge amounts of flour on the pan and the surface of the dough also seemed good.  The recipe was quite easy to make, too.

We took the rest of the dough and precooked little pizza crusts and tossed them in the freezer for snacks or lunch another day. 

                     

A few weeks ago I hit a used-book sale at the library.  The price for books was $3 per bag, so as long as the bag isn't full, the incremental cost of an additional book is zero.  This leads to a tendency to overindulge.  As I was wandering around the boxes, I saw a copy of the book above, The House with a Clock in its Walls, which I vaguely remembered having read about 30 years ago.  When I saw that it had illustrations by Edward Gorey, I had to keep it.

It was weird and full of wizards and ghosts and chocolate chip cookies.    What really struck me was that this seems to me to have been a perfectly normal book for children ten years old or so to read.  I think the books we would consider mainstream for such children are often full of magic spells and talking animals and so on.  But at at a certain age, somewhere around 13, most children stop reading these books.  Fantasy books become a niche, a genre, which most "normal" children don't read. 

I mentioned this to some elementary school teachers, who were stunned that they had never thought about something which appeared so obvious when it was pointed out.

So, why does this happen?  I think it has to do with what the lives of children are like.  For the most part they have little power and little control.  They have limited ability to take part in important actions.  Fantasy and magic allow the children to play a significant role.  A ten year old is just as able to resurrect a dead spirit as an adult.  Talking animals also help bridge the gap; they can have child-like attitudes and traits, but they are inherently fantastical and constrained only by the whims of the author, so they can play a adult-like roles. 

So why do so many children stop reading fantasy at a certain age?

I came across a site that allows one to locate local non-chain bookstores and found that there is a science fiction bookstore I never knew about only a few miles from my house. I was amazed at the number of books I found that I know have not shown up in the local library or on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.

I restricted myself to four books on my first trip and bought paperbacks from John Scalzi, Brenda Cooper, Charlie Stross, and Alastair Reynolds. I noticed afterward that all four others have blogs that I have looked at (Scalzi, Stross, Cooper, Reynolds). Perhaps blogging-as-advertisement is working on me better than I thought it was.

Of course blogs by authors give us a different glimpse of their personalities than is provided by their more formally published work. But I am not sure I want that. I don't want to know the authors as people. This is because it makes me feel guilty.

I feel bad that I buy their books in paperback (or, heaven forfend, used), thus depriving their families of the means of survival. Can I read about the charming antics of an author's lovely children, who are supported by revenue from the author's writing, and then skip buying the hardback of the latest book?  I also find that I am more inclined to buy a particular author's books because I learned from his blog that he has the same birthday I do. 

Even worse, after reading an author's blog I feel bad if I don't like something I read by them. I read on one author's LJ page (not regularly updated) about her fear of rejection and the struggle she had writing her latest series while taking care of an infant and so on. And then when I read the books (from the library, doing nothing to support said author and infant) I found I didn't like them at all. I am trying to convince myself that it is because I am not into that style of fantasy novel blah blah blah, but secretly I suspect that they may not be very good. And now I feel bad thinking that. So much that I won't write the author's name here.

And all this feels very strange.

i recently had crabcakes from a hospital cafeteria in Maryland that are probably better than any crabcakes available anywhere outside of Maryland.

What other foods are regionally better, rather than just regionally popular?  Almost any two-bit pizza shop in New York serves better pizza than you can get in most states, so that's one.  I have had excellent fried oysters in New Orleans, but there are fried oysters just as good in Baltimore.  Philly cheese steak subs are a legendary local preference, but I haven't heard the claim that they are tastier than those elsewhere.  I can't compare the flavor of Lancaster county scrapple to what is available in other areas, because I never heard of anyone else willing to eat it. 

Produce doesn't count.   I don't consider the lack of Minnesota oranges or New Mexican cranberries significant. 

Reading Alastair Reynolds's Century Rain. The nanotech-enhanced post-humans are called "Slashers." At one point we get an explanation for the name:



I'm sorry, but the future technological branch of the human race is going to descend from the Fr1st P0st!!!-ers living in their parents' basements and posting Linux fanboi drool on Slashdot?

Other than that, it is quite good so far...