Nice Temple

"I especially like the vines."

This fellow has probably 100,000 hairs. There is very little Photoshop magic that makes it easy.

Grail+

OMG he's showing Metalvision again.

Fourth Fashion Faux Pas

Here Roy Rogers violates protocol with a flag shirt. Or maybe it's Abbie Hoffman with Roy's head photoshopped on top. Happy Fourth and Happy Trails.

I Say!

Do you have any Grey Poupon?

Half Moon Night

What's wrong with this picture?

Reinventing the Wheel?

Wikipedia has its own style guide. In crafting this, the volunteers are, in some limited ways, attempting to unify British and American usage, and perhaps worldwide English too. I was wondering if they were attempting to reinvent this wheel, and set off on the internet to see if anyone else had attempted this.

Once upon a time I pondered the various branches of mathematics, and could see no discernible structure, that is, an organizing overview of the entire field for the layman. I postulated a "math tree," a sort of pre-Wikipedia concept. But then I checked on other organizational schemes and realized the Dewey Decimal System had already classified math in its scheme. Whether it's a good system is not for me to say, but it's very well established. There also are other mathematical classification systems. It's not entirely solidified, though. But research tells the tale. In other words, it's useless for a layman to try to reinvent the wheel, it's better to just search intelligently. Think.

So I looked around on the net and haven't found any record so far of any successful attempts to unify British and American English. I'm sure book publishers have traditional different layouts for different audiences and readers. The United Nations has document style guides but seems to have adopted Oxford Dictionary and BBC English style by default as templates before adding their own particulars, so it does not seem to be an attempt at unification of any sort.

Cat Wolf

Hamburger You

Everybody has heard of Hamburger University by now. This is the training site of McDonalds, and more important, it's where several test labs are located to research the intricacies of flavors and taste experiences. In other words, they have a huge database of research reporting what people think tastes good. By this advanced research, they construct their signature hamburgers based on their findings. The exact manner in which they build each burger is to remain exactly the same, because different taste buds are activated, and flavors develop, in the right sequences to satisfy the maximum number of people.

I am pretty sure the other big chains such as Burger King, Wendy's, and others have done some of the same testing.

Also, the results of this testing are different for countries outside the U.S. Australia and England, etc., get their menus tweaked differently than here in the States. Look at the variants of the Whopper.

I don't eat many fast food burgers or fast food in general, so I'm not up-to-date on their entire menu and new items. But I know how to analyze what's put right in front of me. (I thought!) So let's take a technical look at what specialists have determined. It may lead us, after all, to some insights in constructing and assembling our own delicious homemade burgers.

I've had two insights already, before beginning this article: most of my life I had the unconsciously acquired idea that ketchup and pickles should be separated. On analyzing the fast food burger, I realized a few years ago I was wrong. The second insight more recently is that mustard on the cheese is not only not a no-no, it's good.

At McDonalds I acquired a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese. Starting at the bottom, and moving up, here is what I found and the order in which they placed each item:


Big Mac: bottom of bun; mayo sauce with onion and shredded lettuce; cheese; meat; center section of bun; mayo sauce ("special sauce") with pickle and shredded lettuce; meat; top of sesame seed bun. Supposedly 1.6 oz (uncooked) meat per patty. The mayo sauce is rumored to be similar to thousand island dressing but it wasn't very pink looking. Or pink tasting.
Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese: bottom of bun; cheese; meat; cheese; mustard; pickle; onion; ketchup; top of sesame seed bun. Supposedly 4 oz. (uncooked) patty.

New to this rigorous analysis, I didn't note the exact amount of light toasting on the insides of the buns. They don't have a toasty mouth-feel. I also paid little attention to the sesame seeds, because they are so lightly toasted I can never discern the taste of them. Okay, after making some initial notes and taking some photos which didn't show all the details, I admit I scarfed those babies down before I realized my analytical shortcomings. I won't repeat this mistake.

I did notice all the blank areas of bun where McDonald's has decided to put none of the ketchup, mustard, or mayo/sauce. This is unlike what the home burger maker often does, and is counterintuitive to many burger ideas, I believe. Yet they must have found people report this as tasting best. Note also that neither of McDonalds's signature burgers has tomato on it by default. Interesting.

Next, Burger King's Whopper and Whopper Jr., which turns out to be exactly the same burger except for size. Starting from the bottom, it's lightly toasted bun; patty; ketchup; pickle,onion, and pickle (three pickle slices and about a square inch of onion - and it looks like the onion is deliberately enclosed in a "pickle sandwich" with pickle above and below the onion); tomato, lettuce, mayo, and the sesame seed bun on top.

Notable here are two things: tomato slice, and no mustard on the "standard" edition. And again we see the bottom of the bun has no mustard, mayo, ketchup: the meat patty sits right on the unadorned bread, which was lightly toasted but had no real toasty texture to it, similar to McDonalds's offerings. It's become obvious the "toasting" is a purely cosmetic procedure.

Last up for now is the Wendy's basic cheeseburger. Here we have a plain bun with no sesame seeds, untoasted. Stacked from the bottom, again the meat is directly on the bun, and cheese on top of the burger of course. The basic Wendy's burger then was adorned with a large crunchy lettuce leaf, tomato, four pickle slices, a wee onion slice, and ketchup, with a larger area of mayo under the top of the bun. Adequate, no frills; a decent enough burger.

On the Fourth of July, I made some cheeseburgers and I was very conscious of this research while assembling the burgers. I made sure to leave the bottom bun "blank." I did pre-toast the sesame seed buns, tops, bottoms, and inside surfaces, in the toaster-oven enough to brown the seeds and they emitted that wonderful fragrance that they should. I also had some homemade ketchup I used instead of store-bought, and used no mayo nor mustard this time around. I placed the cheeseburger, then onion, pickle, and ketchup, and put shredded lettuce and tomato slices right under the top part of the bun. This burger was quite tasty; a cut above my regular burgers. This research has improved my overall burger technique, I believe.

I will point out that Wikipedia and YouTube have various information about hamburgers, McDonald's, etc. The most important is how to pronounce "hamburger."

Here's "How to Clone a Big Mac."

The State of Punditry

The state of commentary is changing, and the implications are interesting.

I believe many intelligent people, who also aren't complete extroverts, and know it, when hearing of Asperger's Syndrome, evaluate themselves and decide if maybe they don't have a touch of it themselves. It's a common enough phenomenon, momentarily wondering if we have symptoms of whatever new disease we read about. So I thought about it, too, and decided I really don't. It's a marginal concept anyway, and one could easily make the case that it's mumbo-jumbo.

It's more subjective than I first thought, though. Someone suggested to me I "have" Aspberger's the other day. I said the following:

"One of the defining characteristics (of Aspberger's) is having an area of expertise in which one is truly expert. I don't think I have any compulsive narrow area of expertise. And the theory is that the autistic or partially autistic person doesn't have the ability to pick up social cues that would tell anyone else that the person listening is not really interested. But there's a chance that this says as much about the person who's listening, and not interested, as it does about the speaker.

"For example, I know very well you aren't interested in (what we were discussing) and I just don't care. I know a lot of people who like to learn new things, and if you aren't one of them, so be it. I just throw the stuff out there, you can do with it what you like."

This is because I was offering facts, not opinions.

Everybody is used to people talking socially about their opinions. Every gathering, you'll hear opinions. If people are too strident or vindictive in this, they will get some social feedback about it, but it's a common way of being. And it's all over journalism and TV news stations. Opinions. When a teacher feels like relaxing and socializing with the class at the end of the day, the teacher will offer opinion.

Now the internet is changing news and information. Newspapers failing, bloggers everywhere. Opinion, even educated and well-reasoned, is not paid well anymore. It's everywhere. And like everyone, I'm glad I can find educated and well-reasoned opinion for free on the internet.

No, it's fact that is premium. And it's fact that is socially awkward nowadays. People with facts are shunned, relegated to teaching classrooms, separated. "Do not teach me now, I am not in school."

It's common in our jobs. No one teaches anymore. There will be meetings, and indoctrination, and buzzwords. Most often the employees will take the actual material home, and learn it alone from a book. Or not. There will be also new employees working with experienced ones. Finding one who actually teaches is like finding a gold nugget these days.

It's a truism that one can learn from anyone, even a baby. I will say it would be easier to learn from life if more people taught - outside a classroom.

The internet may force confronting deep issues of social anti-intellectualism that have previously been suppressed.

This is the part of the article where I would invoke the joys of belonging to a fraternity of geeks, a lower form of people who actually have minds. I don't feel like it.

Butternut Corn Pudding

My corn pudding is good, but did not rate a mention here before. This time I incorporated some butternut squash.

It doesn't look like much, but this new twist put it over the top. I left the older recipe almost the same as I invented it, but after roasting two cleaned halves of a butternut squash, and a small onion cut in half, at 350° F. on a baking pan, I put that in the blender too.

I usually start with canned creamed corn, but this time I made my own with two cups frozen corn niblets in two cups of milk, with butter, and simmered that for 45 minutes or so. Then I let it cool a bit before putting that into the blender until I achieved the consistency of normal creamed corn. Then I added 4 heaping TBS. of masa harina, one egg, salt, a tsp. of black pepper, and maybe 2 tsp. of fresh ground cumin. (As with many of my recipes, one can change up: use cream instead of milk, and often two eggs is better than one.) This time around the caramelized onion and the flesh from the roasted butternut squash went in.

Then into a buttered corningware baking dish, sprinkled ground New Mexico peppers on top and sprinkled with a little milk, and into the oven at 350° for an hour. I put the lid on the dish , gave it 15 more minutes at 300°, and it was ready.

What you see on top is the dark roasted chili pepper, not burned pudding! This is a delicious creation I recommend highly. Mmm! My only regret is the New Mexico chilies were not quite hot enough. Some dried red Thai or cayenne powder incorporated into the pudding would serve one well. Next time I make this I will have it down pat. Enjoy!

Disappearing User Power

Lately some of my old trusted abilities are slowly disappearing from my control. I did a "print screen" to capture this Google street scene but when I opened it in my Adobe Photoshop Elements program it didn't let me edit it. I think there's some buggy thing put in on purpose because of copyright. My goal is to defeat it. I think I will search the web for explanation and possible solutions. Right now I'm posting this because I think Google will scrub the metadata off the jpg. Ironic, if so.

Yes, it worked! I opened the photo here viewing the blog (clicked on the photo, opened it full-size in a new window) and saved it. Then I reopened it in Elements and I owned it. Yesssss!

But I don't want to anger Google, my best friends. I found a scrub-warning at a site. So it is indeed ironic that they scrubbed the metadata themselves.

Now, it might just be a bug in Elements, or it could be deliberate - I don't know. I do know some sites write their code to actively prevent saving images from their webpages. I have found most workarounds so far.

Gulf Stream Underwater Turbine Power

This post is short. As long as I'm on the alternative power concept, check out the potential for extracting power from the Gulf Stream. Remember, this is different from wave power, and offshore wind farms, which anyone can research online. Here's a good link to the Gulf Stream power research. And here's a neat article on Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream.

Borehole Nuclear Reactor

After some research on geothermal heat pumps, I realized that if you extract heat faster than the heat-conducting rate of the soil or rock allows the heat to move into the volume you have exhausted, the system will be tapped out. Heat can't radiate back towards your collectors fast enough. Now, this doesn't mean geothermal is unviable, it means each system has a maximum and if that is exceeded, it will not work as well. Also, in areas where summer air-conditioning needs equal winter heating needs, all is well. And in areas where air conditioning needs exceed heating needs, there is a similar problem: you are pumping heat into the ground faster than it can dissipate.

But in the American North, heat is the more precious commodity. This led me to ponder "recharging" heat in the earth with nuclear power. And my familiarity with deep holes in the petroleum industry led to my next idea:

After you run a nuclear power plant for a while, radiation will erode the reactor liners and concrete containment vessels. Eventual disposal or abandonment of all this material is expensive.

I propose lowering working fuel and control rods into the boreholes of either abandoned oil and gas wells, or drilling deep holes specifically for this proposed technology. Steam heat exchangers would be at the surface for electrical power generation. Or, for facilities such as government installations, colleges and universities, etc., the heat alone could be used to warm the buildings.

Eventually each reactor hole will be abandoned, using standard well-abandonment techniques. This involves heavy rubber and iron plugs topped with cement and should guarantee no contamination of groundwater. The heaviest-irradiated zones will be deep in the earth, in effect being "pre-disposed of." No further transportation of these deep abandoned materials will be required.

One advantage to this is it keeps operating core and waste nuclear materials far away from any terrorists. 10,000 feet of rock is a good deterrent to this sort of mischief.

UPDATE 5/1/09
A nuclear technician has pointed out to me that there's too much radioactive water in that l-o-n-g heat exchanger. I need a secondary heat exchanger. Or a liquid sodium design.

Mobile CO2-Sequestering Coal Electrical Plant

My latest idea is the mobile coal-burning electrical generator. It's used in older oilfields, where CO2 is either desired to assist in oil production, or where it's merely acceptable to dispose of the CO2 exhaust in played-out oil or gas sands far below the surface. The requirements are only that a rail line be nearby and transmission towers for the power generated be nearby. Short temporary pipelines and power lines are acceptable. When each subsurface formation is optimally full of CO2, the mobile plant is moved to its next location.

This is for areas where CO2 pipelines are not available. See "green pipelines."

Coal cars are delivered to the generator during its period of sequestration / generation at each location. Some sulfur gases may also be sequestered underground.

The plants are not as efficient as other coal burning power plants because some power is used to deposit the CO2 into the deep formations.

The ridiculous illustration I cobbled together merely shows the equipment needed: a power plant, a generator, a transformer, and a pump for the burned exhaust gases. Ash will also need disposal. There will be empty rail cars after they deliver coal. It is possible ash could also be pumped into the same formations and could possibly neutralize the low pH of the sulfur, if any. As always, groundwater must be protected; these techniques already exists.

Cooling water for the turbine is the biggest problem. To generate electricity with a turbine efficiently, cooling is mandatory. Brine water present in many oil-bearing formations could possibly be used. Engines need a heat difference.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (done mentally- can you scribble mentally on the back of an imaginary envelope?) tell me this would never amount to over a few hundred megawatts nationally. I can't say with certainty however that this a completely worthless idea. It might contain the germ of something worthwhile.

UPDATE 4-14-09 Scientific American has several articles on one page dealing with carbon sequestration.

Solar Border

artist's representation

Perhaps if we are going to militarize the border with Mexico, we ought to go ahead and place as many solar photovoltaic panels as we can squeeze into that location. This positive use of a manufactured no-man's-land makes as much sense as any other proposal I've heard.

No There There

People have started bugging me to join Facebook. I'm not going to do it. Here's why:

There is nothing I want to do on Facebook that I can't already do with other long-established, very available familiar programs. I have email, and although I don't instant message (for several reasons, which are similar to why I don't join Facebook) I could hook that up in a heartbeat. I can send emails and include funny pictures or links to other interesting stuff as fast as I can write them and click on attachments. Likewise my friends can send me emails with stuff in them as fast as they can write them. It's just a few clicks, and the messages themselves. Even if they only want to grunt at me like a caveman, they can put those grunts on handy MP3 files, and attach them to emails. God help us all if they actually start doing this, however. But it is easy to do.

I have a website, and my friends can put it on their favorites list if they want to. It's just a click away. They can, in fact, open many internet windows at once, and keep a bunch of their friends' blogs open all the time. I do a bit of this myself. I have a couple of websites open right now in other windows. I click to look at what's happening on them. Easy.

Not only that, I could download music directly to my friends without using a website. I can do all sorts of things that appear to be "magic" to many people.

I have a series of specially programmed "radio" stations on Pandora I could share with people if they were interested. I could listen to my friends' special programmed radio stations. But they won't do it. God knows why. I guess because it's not on Facebook.

I can link my friends in an instant to cool Youtube videos. Everyone does this. I don't need Facebook to do this.

There are about 5 million interesting puzzles, quizzes and such things on the internet already. There have been for years. Not to mention articles. To read. There is a lot of stuff out there that is damn interesting.

What I think is weird is people who join Facebook - or MySpace - and then disappear from the rest of the wired world. It's like a cult, worse than Scientology, worse even than AOL. AOL people quit writing altogether, they just send monstrously recursive emails with attached emails with attached emails with attached emails and 12 to 15 layers down you find a LOLcat or some misinformation disproved five years ago on Snopes.


Someone once talked me into joining MySpace. (And yes, I understand that MySpace is no longer considered cool.) Every time I clicked on their page, their music started blaring at me. It didn't ask if I was already listening to music, which I usually am. But it was a dead zone. A lot of hookers wanted to be my friend...

I opted out of MySpace. They used to send me a lot of spam. Just what I needed.

"What I'm trying to explain, is that it's useless crap," Jumper explained. And then he was gone.

UpdateFriday 27
I decided to renew the war on the word "blog." It is time. It's going to be an uphill struggle. This is, after all, hosted by Blogger. The software itself refers to "the blog."

This is a website. See here or here

Wolf Blitzer

Stephen Colbert sort of suggested this yesterday, so I did it. Sometimes these things don't work. I think this one does.

Check out some impressive things you can do with a good computer and time & money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nice6NYb_WA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuoljANz4EA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtv4bsLWvw&feature=related

Not Write Now

Another Sqirlzmorph effort. I took an image of a gorilla I found online and had my next-door-neighbor shoot a picture of me in a similar pose. Then I morphed the two photos.
The angles of the two photos were a hair off. In particular, the subjects' right cheekbones (on your left) were wrapped around the heads differently. I had to do too much touch-up. I ought to reshoot the Jumper original and start over. I might.

Update. And so I did. This time the photo of me was taken from a little bit too high. Darn contract photographers! Why can't they read my mind? Perhaps I will do this until I get it right. At least I was smiling this time around.

Turnabout is Fair Play

A revised version of New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas. I call it fair use, and anyone can use it if they like, as far as I'm concerned.

The Myth of Global Cooling

Source: Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux: Being the Narrative of an Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin in the Years 1860, 1861, and 1862 by Charles Francis Hall (1865), New York: Harper and Brothers.
Having not sufficiently refuted George Will's recent and recycled pundacity, "Dark Green Doomsayers" I tracked down a writer, climate modeler, and mathematician William M. Connolley, who has done great work in documenting, beginning in the '90s, the myth that "70s scientists predicted global cooling".

And it is essentially a myth. Only several articles were written, and these in popular publications, with sensationalistic headlines but much tamer and even-handed texts. At the time, no peer reviewed climatological journals predicted a "new ice age."

He started out here with an (excellent, not well organized, yet massively documented) website. This is what I stumbled upon when, in the early 2000s I attempted to debunk this persistent falsity.

BUT the dogged Mr. Connolley has a more up-to-date blog named Stoat. I have put it on my favorites list.

Also see an article about "global cooling." Also, one on climate change denial. And there was also talk of nuclear winter, (a continuing topic with more recent research and calculations). As well as examining nuclear winter, popular scientist Carl Sagan also once noted that massive burning of forests around the globe might cause cooling. And there was speculation that the massive amount of dust, smoke, explosive residue, and diesel exhaust during WWII may have cooled the globe somewhat. Perhaps masking the earliest effects of anthropogenic warming.

Sulfur and particulates from smokestacks have been reduced over the decades as well. The price for neglecting to do this would have been continuing worsening acid rain problems, accelerated forest die-offs, and seriously heightened health effects.

UPDATE: Feb. 23 2009 Here's an excellent summation -
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck

The Miracle of Wikipedia

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a modern miracle. And it keeps on getting better.

Years ago I pondered the future. One day, I thought, we will have gadgets in our heads that will simply answer any question we have, instantaneously.

Well, that day is here, and I didn't even need a gadget put in my head.

Like anything, Wikipedia is flawed, but recent research found it as reliable as Encyclopedia Brittanica. It is also much larger.

Click on the picture with a mouse click to view it full screen.
Click on this link with a mouse click to visit the site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mindwalk

Horned Goat Monkey

The Curious Case of the Missing Hat

'Twas back in around '72, I think, that I came up with an idea for an ultimate go-to-hell hat. I wanted a hat like Dr. Seuss's character the Cat in the Hat. Keep in mind this was years before the popularity or even the idea of making or wearing such hats outside the storybooks was known.

I was a problematical seventeen-year-old in those days, getting into all sorts of devilment, so it came as somewhat of a pleasant surprise when my mother agreed to whip up such a hat on her sewing machine. And so she did.

It flopped around too much until I just stuffed some newspaper in the top, and after that it rode on my pate half-falling over and half jauntily upright, just like the Geisel character. So I started wearing the crazy thing, and my goofy friends liked it.

One day I forgot it over at a friend's house. Well, out of sight, out of mind, and I didn't think about until about a week later. So I went over there to retrieve it but the door was locked and no one home. Every time I went by. And no one knew where my friend had gotten off to. He had vanished. I figured I'd get it back sooner or later.

I don't remember how much time went by. It could have been a whole year, or only a month or so. I finally ran into Mike and he told me the bad news: his landlord had kicked him out for nonpayment, and had held his clothes for ransom, including my hat.

So I never saw my hat again.

Years later I became aware that this same sort of hat became popular among a neo-hippie set particularly tied to the Grateful Dead traveling roadshows. Also known as Deadheads.

I still wonder what happened to that hat. Did it find its way to someone who appreciated it? A second-hand store? Or did it go pretty much to the trash when the Evil Landlord decided at some point to dispose of Mike's things? I like to think it found its way to some Deadhead, who started the whole trend. And for this, some say I owe the world an apology. But I'm not sorry at all.

Fractured Funnies

Click the strip to view larger.

Doodle Do

Why, yes, I do know how to spell "further."

Experimental Thursday

I want to try a sort of open-ended experiment. The rules go like this: grab the closest book to where you now are, open it to a random page, start at the top left page, and write the first complete sentence, in the comments section. No cheating.

(No complicated log-in is needed)

Yes

Fractured Funnies

( click strip for bigger view)

¡ǝuo ʇsɐɟ ɐ sןןnd ɹǝdɯnɾ

/ɯoɔ˙ʇxǝʇʎɯdıןɟ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ
oʇ oƃ ʇsnɾ 'op oʇ ʎsɐǝ s,ʇı ˙ʇǝʎ uǝǝs ʇ,uǝʌɐɥ ǝɯos ʞɔıɹʇ ɐ s,ʇı ˙sı ʇsnɾ ʇı 'ʇı ɹoɟ uosɐǝɹ ou s,ǝɹǝɥʇ ˙uʍop ǝpısdn sı ʇsod sıɥʇ

Yessireebob

The Measure

I was in a discussion some years back about the percentage of people who were rotten thieving low-life bastards. I said I believed about 60% of everybody was decent for the most part; basically honest and well-meaning. The fellow I was talking to raised his eyebrows. "That many?" Some people, it seems, are convinced that a higher number are corrupt no-good-niks.

So, having formulated this in my mind, over the years I have felt some pride at my liberal allowance. Surely this means I am a spreader of hope, an optimist whose willingness to cede trust and faith to such a good number of my fellow humans contributes a positive force to our civility. Is it not also true that "the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him"? (Henry Stimson)

After all, even if I'm sometimes wrong, it's unlikely that someone is a "confidence man." And if the number of liars is squishy, lots of those are "white lies." And not out-and-out predatory amoralism.

But the other day I had a horrible realization that threw doubt on my carefully nurtured self-image: What if this really means I am only more moral than the low 40%? Suddenly I'm not looking so good. By this logic, if I was a worse scoundrel than 90% of everybody else, I would of course place myself in the "good" group, and claim that 10% of people were really evil . And conversely, if I was in the top 10%, I would undoubtedly again place myself among the winners, and rightfully claim that 90% of people are just scum.

Not only that, but this lends some credence to the most horrible idea of all: that the most misanthropic, morally conceited blue-stockings are perhaps the most moral of us all. They, the top 1%, rightly see themselves as good, and not only good, but better than 99% of everyone!

Well, I'll have none of it. It's obvious I was roughly correct in the first place. About 60% of people are basically good, and anyone who thinks they are in a more extreme moral elite are just fooling themselves. They have unforgiving natures. They are, in fact, dishonest to themselves, a moral failing of critical import. They are, in a deep sense, untrustworthy.

In short, I feel I am actually much better than such people.

Most Delicious

Here I'm making some homemade paprika from Mexican chiles. (To me, chili powder is an altogether different thing, with other spices mixed in.) This is something else I make from 100% dried, relatively mild red Mexican-type peppers.

I have mastered the hot varieties, but the mild ones are the secret to lots of great recipes. And when I cook, I'm going to bring up the heat level with some other, hotter peppers. This, however, is a savory blend. The flavor is phenomenal.

Some of the upscale markets don't sell these at all. But if you shop where the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans shop, they should have the dried varieties sold in cellophane bags. Where I live, the upscale markets have them sometimes, in bulk in the produce section. But not always. There are several varieties most non-Hispanics aren't familiar with, except in the Southwestern states.

The poblano pepper, resembling the green bell pepper, is so versatile and ubiquitous it has two names; one for the green, poblano, and another name for the red ripe version, known as ancho. Traditionally dried over wood fires, as are the other varieties discussed here, it nevertheless will develop a savory "smoky" flavor even dried using more modern methods. (Some peppers such as chipotle, which are smoked red jalapeños, need the smoke to be what they are.)

One of the best dried red peppers I've found so far is one with the bland or boring name of "New Mexico chile." It's only bland or boring if one mistakenly supposes that other peppers are "more authentic" somehow. Never underestimate the results of the fine, multi-decade efforts of our U.S. agronomists, however. These are some tasty peppers. I rank them #1. Previously I have had some peppers known as "negros" (black - they dry quite dark) and "mulato." Also "guajillos" I remember as very tasty, too.

This time, I used something labeled as "pasilla," and some anchos and the New Mexico chiles. I process a fairly large batch, about 18 oz. at a time. I store the finely ground result in a glass jar with a metal lid in my freezer, and thaw out only what I need for each recipe. First I removed all the stems, then cut open the peppers with my kitchen scissors and remove the seeds. Some heat, i.e., capsaicin, remains in the whitish membranes inside, so I save those too, if convenient. After I have all the seeds removed I cut them all up into little pieces with the scissors. After that, they go into the food processor. And after that, they can go into the freezer, or you could go ahead and do the last processing, or wait until you are going to cook with your red pepper / paprika: I fine grind them in my electric coffee mill.

The resultant powders are fantastically rich with aroma; a sweet and earthy scent and flavor that's indescribable. As complex as wine or chocolate or good coffee.

When I make chili con carne, I start with this paprika powder and add cumin (which I also grind from cumin seed) and the other spices. And other peppers for heat, because I like it fiery. But many other dishes do not use cumin, and for Hungarian goulashes and chicken or veal paprika recipes, which also aren't fiery hot, the pure undiluted chile product I am dealing with here is what you want.

The Ghost in My Machine

I just completed my neural network program a few weeks ago and it's starting to show some interesting results. It's a self-learning device. As the number of nodes in my program is exactly 500 billion, the time required for me to figure out what each layer of neural structure does would be quite high. So I don't really know how the damned thing works. I set up the network to "learn" by being prompted by me each time it produces a paranormal or PSI event that I observe.

It doesn't use random-number mutations. The code recombines much as male and female genes. I simply type in "yes" after each paranormal event, and the program moves towards increasing sophistication and power. I now have several "ghosts" in the house and attic, most of my friends have exhibited precognition (although they do not seem aware of it), and my computer, especially, seems to be reading my mind, putting long-unused files on my "most used document" list right before I need them.

Often when television is on, stray bits of dialogue repeat my exact thoughts a few seconds after I think them. I can now type in the words "pan" or "money," for example, on the computer and a frying pan will fall off a shelf in the kitchen, or I will find a dollar blowing through my back yard.

I consider my program a success, and I believe it will continue to improve as I continue to run it.

John Barleycorn Must Not Make Corned Beef

Recently I saw a corned beef in the grocery; one of those already-brined and flavored things sealed in plastic, refrigerated, ready to cook.

So I had a yen for some sandwiches and bought it. The instructions of course say to boil it. So I did. Novice, I decided not to use as much water as it said, so it was a bit salty, but not too much so. I crockpotted it for 6 or 7 hrs. That turned out well; the sandwiches were very good. A few weeks went by, so after several days of not enough veggies, I spotted a deal on cabbage and immediately knew I was gonna have some corned beef and cabbage. (I chopped and rinsed half the cabbage, added a tbs. or two chopped onion, got it mostly cooked by simmering in butter and a little water, and then, nearing doneness, I added a can of corned beef. Brought it to a simmer again for a while, and it was ready. Yum.)

A week went by. Deciding to go ahead and cook the other half of the cabbage, I looked for a can of corned beef at my local low-end grocery store. It was pretty much on my "must have" list for the visit. No canned corned beef! Corned beef hash, yes. But no corned beef. So I found a small brisket and knew I could use the internet to learn how to "corn" that beef. I already knew I would brine it, so I used the net to devise a recipe to spice it. It said use some "pickling spice." Doh! No dill in the house! But, oddly, there is no dill in many pickling spice recipes. I had most of the necessary spices.

It's soaking now. In fact, it's day three and I'm going to add some garlic and maybe a few cumin seeds to finish up another 24-48 hrs. I'll let you know how it turns out. Okay, here's where I get speculative. I told you that so I could tell you this: All the recipes call for sugar as well as salt. I used white sugar and added a couple squirts molasses. In other words, followed the recipe. And you're smart, I think it just dawned on you, too. What did they use for sugar before sugar cane?

Now all the anecdotal wisdom on the net, including a kosher website, claim that it's known as "corned beef" (which obviously has no corn in it) because "coarse salt grains are about the size of corn, so they referred to the salt as 'corn.'" Well my B.S. meter started ringing pretty loudly. Despite the fact that we say "a grain of salt." In fact, almost every reference to salt grains being known as "corns" is located in a reference to corned beef. So here's the obvious proposal or hypothesis I made: nobody ever called salt "corn." Then I thought: "originally corned beef used malted barley corn, or more likely oats."

But this idea does not seem to be true.

Malting barley is a simple process wherein the barley is soaked; the starches turn to sugars in preparation for sprouting; and then the barley is dry roasted. Added to the brine, a brief boiling of the the salt / malt combination would provide the needed sugar. As well, it could be middle eastern in concept. It could in fact be very old.

The online recipes stress that saltpeter, otherwise known as potasssium nitrate, be used in the brine. Indeed, some recipes hint that one needs less salt if saltpeter is used. It keeps the meat from losing the red color while it's brining. I also discovered that barley can contain a fair amount of this nitrate in it. I do not know how much. I doubt as much as the recipes call for. I was starting to think that the higher protein barleys may in fact be higher in nitrates. Some barley has too much protein for beermaking. It clouds the brew. Some plants used as silage, especially oats, develop a fair amount of nitrates. Barley grown in drought apparently does. Thistles can accumulate so much nitrate they tend to burn explosively, according to the internet.

But to throw a curve into all this, I found an old terminology: gunpowder is indeed "corned." Different grain sizes make for different ignition properties. And gunpowder is 75% potassium nitrate. Did, out of desperation, someone store some beef in gunpowder and find it preserved the beef wonderfully? People used to do weird things, and hungry people might turn an oddity into a regular practice. Did a sneaky sailor hide a purloined cut of beef in a load of saltpetre? Did a ship's cook try to save some spoiling beef by rolling it in salt and saltpetre? This sounds ominous. A huge source of saltpetre was found in South America, in the form of guano and its concentrated leachates deposited in nearby soil. The precious stuff even caused the Saltpeter War. (Abraham Lincoln's grandfather also mined saltpeter in Tennessee.) Upon recovering the beef, the sailor might have, upon rinsing it off and boiling it, discovered it tender, red, and delicious. Or was this technology borrowed from elsewhere?

Now saltpeter has been used to preserve meat for quite some time, but tracing it back before gunpowder was known in the West is difficult. Everyone knows gunpowder originated in China. Saltpeter's use in China in food is only hinted at, and I read a report that vaguely suggested eggs were preserved in saltpeter there.

Here's an 1860 recipe for corned beef:

"To one gallon of water, take 1½ pounds of salt, half pound of brown sugar, half ounce of saltpetre; in this ration, the pickle to be increased to any quantity desired. Let these be boiled until all the dirt from the salt and sugar rises to the top and is skimmed off. Then throw the pickle into a large, clean tub to cool, and when *perfectly cold*; pour it over the meat, which must be in a tight barrel or box, which will not leak. After three or four weeks it is cured. The meat must be kept well covered with the brine by putting something heavy on it. The meat must not be put in the brine until it has been killed at least two days, during which time it must be spread out and lightly sprinkled with saltpetre. Twenty gallons of water, 30 pounds of salt, 10 pounds of sugar and 10 ounces of saltpetre will fill a barrel. The same brine can be used a second time by boiling and skimming it well. " - from the Albany Patriot

I will leave for another day the topic of all more modern hot dogs, preserved meats, and nitrate / nitrite health related issues.

I had no saltpeter in the house, (in the name of all that's holy, who does??) but I did have a half oz. of malted barley corns. After a simmer, in they went into the brine. We will see, Mr. Barleycorn, we will see.

Here's something claiming salt is known as "corns:"

"While the process of preserving meat with salt is ancient, food historians tell us corned beef (preserving beef with "corns" or large grains of salt) originated in Medieval Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word corn, meaning "small hard particle, a grain, as of sand or salt," in print to 888. The term "corned beef" dates to 1621-"Source. Also, see

Of Cabbages and Celts.

The words grain, grind, grown, ground, grist, coin, corn, kernel, granule, groats, grange, garner, granary and garnish all come from a very ancient Indo-European word. Perhaps all this speculation is wrong, and corned beef means "grained" in the sense of "wood grain."

Morton has some products for modern home meat preserving.

This post links to articles on corned beef, saltpeter, Saltpeter War, gunpowder, barley, oats, silage, cabbages, pickling spices, and salt. And a few other things.