Pupusas

We discovered some time ago that the local pizza place, run (inevitably) by a family that couldn't be less Italian, occasionally offered Latin American dishes in addition to the standard pizza and pizza-related items.  Sometimes when we went in, there would be a handscrawled sign taped to the wall that simply said, "Tamales" and a price.  We finally tried them a while back, and they're fantastic.  Substantially sized, filled with braised pork, and the tamale dough itself is highly seasoned.  Sometimes we put a little salsa on top, but it really doesn't need it.

Anyway, as time passed, the tamales moved from the scribbled sign to a permanent place on the actual menu, and appearing alongside them was something called a "pupusa."  Well, we were curious, so we threw in an order the next time we got some pizza.  It turns out that pupusas are primarily an El Salvadoran dish (finally giving the last clue to the actual ethnicity of the proprietors).  They're somewhat like arepas, if you know what arepas are, but using the finer masa harina instead of just corn meal.  If you don't know what an arepa is, it's sort of like a thick, filled corn cake.  The equivalent Mexican/Tex Mex dish is the gordita.  Anyway, they're typically filled with the same pork, but also include some cheese and possibly beans (versions vary, naturally).  And they're also extremely good.  It's starting to get to the point where I'm going to make my own pizza, and just go there for the latin food...

And speaking of, the Food Lab recently put up instructions for cooking pizza in a cast iron pan instead of on a stone.  And it's AWESOME, especially in a home oven that doesn't get that hot.  Not exactly authentic, but really tasty.

And just because I'm throwing out random food bits-- the Pagoda Express Sesame Chicken frozen entree is terrible.  Really awful.  Do Not Buy Under Any Circumstances.

Fish Monday - Green curry

Still plugging through that cookbook, trying new things.  This time we had milk-poached halibut in green curry sauce with a side of bok choy.

Except that the store didn't have any halibut, even frozen, so we used mahi-mahi.  And they had neither kaffir lime leaves nor lemongrass (not that I really expected them to), so the curry sauce was a little on the weak/simple side.  And like most recipes in this book, the whole operation took me over 2 hours, what with the various bits and bobs that needed assembling.  The result was tasty, certainly, but I have to say that it just wasn't really worth the effort.  I probably won't make it again, although I might steal the curry sauce and use it on something else.  Actually, I made more than we needed, so I'm already going to have to think of some other use for it.

Exhausted

And a tired old pun to boot.

Yesterday, I learned that our kitchen fan (which has of late been making horrible grinding motor-burning-out kind of noises) is only a kitchen fan by location, not by design.  It was actually a bathroom model, designed to vent air laden with moisture, but not much else.  Quoth the electrician (lightly paraphrased), "So how long has this been in here?  Four, five years?"  "Oh, no," says I.  "At least 13."  "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" he exclaimed.  "I would have expected it to expire years gone by, from all of the aerosolized grease that it has had to move!"

Of course, we had to replace it with another similar model (since the alternative would have required a great deal more money, time, and the ripping up and excavating of the kitchen ceiling), but at least now we know that if it lasts at least 5 years we'll have gotten our money's worth.

Wintershin

This one goes out to lietya, for reasons.

The name "wintergreen" is applied to a variety of plants, because once upon a time it just meant "plants that stay green in winter."  These days, many of those plants are called "evergreen" instead.  One set of these plants, although sadly not the ones that produce the wintergreen flavor (methyl salicylate) are in the genus Pyrola, "commonly" called shinleaf.

Hot on the range

This is one of those ones that I always assumed I understood-- right up until I started thinking about it.  I suspect there's a lesson in there, somewhere.

On an old electric range (I specify old for a reason), there will be one or more heavy metal coils.  When you turn on a burner, electricity flows through the coil, electrical resistance makes it heat up, and it gets hot, glowing red and cooking your food.  Right?

Well, it suddenly occurred to me, if that were the case, then touching a live burner wouldn't just burn you, it would shock you.  And electricity being what it is, this would still be the case even right when you turned on the burner but it hadn't had time to heat up, and this just doesn't happen.  This is something that you could BUT ABSOLUTELY SHOULDN'T verify at home.  So there must be something else going on somewhere.

It turns out that these classic burners are actually slightly more complicated than that.  Not much-- the basics of that theory are still correct.  But those heavy metal coils are actually hollow tubes, containing a set of wires (usually an alloy of nickel and chrome) that complete the actual circuit, separated from the tube by a ceramic insulator.  The nichrome wires heat up from the electrical resistance, but the heat then moves through the insulator into the heavy coil tubes, while the electrical current stays safely inside.  Er, not that a hot burner is especially safe, but you get the idea.

I specified old ranges, because more and more often these days you see the flat glass-topped stoves, and those often have alternate heat sources underneath the glass surface, such as powerful infrared lamps.  Then there are the induction burners, but those are complicated and generally only professional chefs and really wealthy amateurs have those.

CPR

According to some studies of the outcomes of patients in need of resuscitation who have had CPR performed on them (as opposed to a defibrillator or whatever), approximately 3 percent had what I would call a "favorable" outcome, living at least another month.  Another 3 percent also lived, but in what is commonly referred to as a vegetative state, and a couple percent further had an outcome somewhere in between, not quite as bad as the second group but not really in good shape.  The other 92 percent just died.  Other studies are slightly more optimistic, but only slightly.

This is in sharp contrast to the way that CPR is promoted, and even more so compared to the way that it is portrayed in the media, where it has a roughly 75% chance of completely saving a person's life with no major ill effects.

On the plus side, some of the things they're doing with automated defibrillators (the ones that you see in public buildings) are pretty amazing.  So hopefully, CPR will slowly become a less and less necessary skill.

Primary source: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/jan/15/bitter-end/Secondary sources:  http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199606133342406    for study on media protrayalshttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2751179?dopt=Abstract   for one study on survivability

Importing files to a PS3

Here's how you import a Theme into your Playstation 3 from a flash drive-- first, you download the files for the theme (archived together as a big file with a .p3t extension).  That file has to be in a folder called "Themes" stored as a subdirectory of a folder called "PS3", and if so, the PS3 will be able to see it and import it correctly.

If you want to import a picture or music file, on the other hand, it just has to be somewhere on the flash drive, and you have to figure out how to tell the PS3 how to open the directories and look around (not at all obvious).  Easy, once you figure it out, but a conceptually completely different process, which has been messing me up all kinds of ways for ages since I was expecting it to be consistent.  Grr.

Adventures in Baking

So the other night, I was having some cravings for a confection that our local bakery calls "grasshopper brownies."  They're a dense fudgy brownie with a layer of mint buttercream (with some sort of candy mixed in, either mint or white chocolate), and topped with a layer of ganache.  They're very good.  But, of course, the bakery wasn't open at 6:30 on a Saturday night.  So I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "I know how to make brownies.  And I'm pretty sure I can make buttercream, or at least I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong with the last batch I tried to make*.  And ganache is dead easy.  I should try to make my own!  How Hard Can It Be?"

Well, there were some stumbles.  For one thing, I always forget that when you're baking you have to allow time for things to cool once they're out of the oven.  If you don't, you either burn yourself trying to eat it, or in this case the layers will melt and collapse.  So the whole operation took about 4-5 hours, which was rather more than I had expected, but at least kept me out of trouble for an evening.  Also, I set the oven to the wrong temperature, so the brownies took extra time.  And we didn't have any mint extract, so I used crème de menthe.  Which actually did work, although the mint flavor was pretty mild.  Also, the box that I had thought was a second box of confectioner's sugar turned out to be superfine instead, so I ended up having to MAKE MY OWN confectioner's sugar† to get enough to work with so that the buttercream wouldn't be hopelessly grainy.

And after all that?  They actually turned out pretty damned good.

The color's pretty washed out in that photo, but the buttercream actually is green-- I found some old food coloring in the back of the pantry, and three drops was just about right.

*I did know-- the butter had been too cold.  I let it warm up enough this time, and it worked much better.

†put 1 cup of sugar and 1 tsp cornstarch into a spice grinder or blender and process it for at least a minute, possibly two or more.

Golden Mean Fallacy

This is something that I was vaguely aware of, but didn't realize had an actual name.

Generally speaking, when I'm faced with a situation and someone maintains that its cause/explanation can be one of two very different things, my instinctual response is that the truth most likely lies somewhere in between the extremes.  After all, the extremes are the outliers, and simple statistics combined with a dash of Occam's Razor suggests that answers are usually in the vast middle compromise, the Golden Mean.

This in and of itself isn't such a big deal.  After all, most things are somewhere in the middle.  However, it is possible to fall into a trap where you start to think that every question is automatically solved by applying the Golden Mean, and this trap is called (naturally enough) the Golden Mean Fallacy, or slightly more formally an Argument to Moderation (from the Latin argumentum ad temperantiam).  As long as you remember that it is just a tool for reasoning and not a universal law, though, you're probably safe. 

The examples that Wikipedia lists are somewhat facetious, in my opinion, but definitely illustrative. "Bob says we should buy a computer. Sue says we shouldn't. Therefore, the best solution is to compromise and buy half a computer."  Sort of a cross between argumentum ad temperantiam and reductio ad absurdum, I guess. Or at least something in between the two...

Whistler

When I was first watching the new Muppets movie, I got to this segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrkIxTYymyE (embedding was disabled).

and I thought to myself, "That's fairly impressive.  I wonder if it's just a synthesizer, or if someone's playing a flute or something."

Apparently, not so much.  That virtuoso whistling was instead the legitimate work of one Andrew Bird.

It was probably cleaned up a bit, studio performance and all, but still.  That's freaking amazing.

How many Hitlers are there in the German Phone Book?

The answer may surprise you!  It certainly surprised me.  I figured that there were two options, to wit:

First, that all the surviving relatives and anyone else with the same last name wanted to distance themselves from Adolf strongly enough to change their names, or else subsequently found that it was hard to get a date when you had to introduce yourself as, "Hi, I'm Hitlernowaitcomeback...damn."  Either of which (or a combination of the two) would inevitably lead to a phone book completely devoid of Hitlers.

Or, second, that there were a bunch of Germans of no real relation that said to themselves, "Why should we change our name what has been in our family for lo these many generations and is an important part of our identity?"  Which would frankly be perfectly defensible, and kudos to those hypothetical people, who would subsequently fill the German phone directories with a statistically likely sampling of Hitlers.

However, it seems there's a third option.  If we go to Das Telefonbuch, we find... one guy.  I'm not going to put his name here, because he's either some poor random schmuck who doesn't need the headache, or he's some sort of weirdo who changed his name deliberately, in which case he doesn't need the attention.  But it really wasn't what I was expecting, at all.

Some further research shows that the second option really wasn't very likely-- apparently, there were never very many Hitlers.  Adolf's father was probably illegitimate, and his (eventual) adopted father's name was Hiedler.  When Adolf's father was legitimized at the age of 39 (as part of a career move), he took the name for himself, but somewhere along the line the bureaucracy recorded the name as "Hitler" instead.  So the name only went back one generation, and the small number of siblings/cousins appear to have mostly changed their names, left the country, died childless, or some combination of the above.

Turbo Lag

A turbocharger works (traditionally) by using engine exhaust to spin up a turbine, which in turn compresses intake air, resulting in more thorough combustion and more power.  But this means that at low speeds, there isn't enough exhaust speed to power the turbo.  So when you punch the accelerator, there's a delay before the turbo spins up and the extra compression begins to kick in.  Modern turbochargers are looking to minimize this delay by making the turbines lighter and more responsive, and by using electronically controlled timing to make the process more efficient.  In the meantime, there's turbo lag, which makes Jeremy Clarkson grumpy (not that it takes much, really).

Blood types

While my blood type (AB negative) is neither the most useful to blood banks (O is the best) nor the least (AB positive blood can basically only be given to other AB positive recipients), I can take some small bizarre pride in knowing that it is the rarest-- only about 1% of Caucasians have AB- blood, compared to the 37% who have O+.  Of course, there are other classification systems that use other characteristics of the blood, so that's not a full picture of what's going on in my veins, but it's still interesting.

Snooker Rules

First Monday of the New Year, and we're back!  Let's see how long I can keep it up this time.


After watching the Snooker Guys on That Mitchell and Webb Look one more time, I finally got fed up and went and looked up exactly how snooker differs from what we in America simply call "pool."  The 2012 Welsh Snooker Championship on YouTube was helpful.

Snooker is played on the same basic table as pool-- a big felted rectangle with six pockets.  The main difference is the balls.  Instead of 15 sequentially numbered balls, snooker has 15 identical solid red balls and 6 "colored" balls (in yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black).  The red balls are set up more or less like the 15 of pool, but the six colored balls are added to the table in a kind of loose T shape, basically spread out to get in the way of the red balls.

Play begins similarly, with one player shooting a cue ball into the mass of reds.  But from then out, on your turn, instead of hitting "your half" of the balls (as in billiards) or the lowest numerical ball on the table (as in 9-ball), you can hit any of the reds.  If you sink a red, you earn one point, but before you can aim for another, you have to hit and sink one of the "colored" balls.  These are assigned values between 2 and 7 depending mostly (as far as I can tell) on how much in the way of the reds they tend to be.  The ones right down in amongst the red end are the 6-7 pointers, and the three back on the other side of the table are 2, 3, and 4.  So anyway, in a perfect game, a player would alternate shooting reds and colors (with the colors being replaced on the table in their original places every time they're sunk) until all of the reds are gone, at which point they would run out the colors in ascending point value order.  Of course, if at any point you hit the wrong type of ball or fail to sink a shot, your opponent takes over and begins shooting at a red.

So instead of being a race to sink the 8- (or 9-)ball, snooker is a points game, with the frame going to whoever has the most points when the last ball is sunk.  Based on my limited viewing, it looks like 80 points is a commonly accepted end point, slightly more than half of the maximum of 147 points (it is possible in some rules sets to get a few more points off of fouls, so the "actual" maximum is slightly higher).