According to the Chronicle of Higher Education anyway (abstract). (a short-term link will potentially be available for up to 5 days here)

The article basically talks about how we’re assimilating with the white folks.

The shame of it is I will no longer be able to scream, “WHERE THE WHITE WOMEN AT!?” and have it be remotely funny. Soon I will only be left with a lingering guilt and helplessness about the betterment of my fellow humans (i.e. mud people).

For those of us who are sarcasm impaired, I’m just being silly and sarcastic (yes, and offensive).

I think I must have posted this in my defunct and deleted LiveJournal posts, so I shall repost this recipe here. This is from a writeup I wrote for bearsir 3 years ago.

It’s good for chicken (my family prefers dark meat - thighs especially) or for chicken organs (we prefer hearts or gizzards) and I think probably also good for duck and assorted bits and bobs of duck. It would probably work for pork as well (though fowl is ideal) but I’d definitely want to tweak it or use another sauce entirely for beef, lamb or buffalo. I bet it’d be good with ostrich too, though I’ve never tried it.

Also, it might be pretty good with frozen and pressed tofu.

Tonight we are cooking up chicken gizzards and hearts from last weekend’s farmer’s market.

Five Spice Chicken

For each pound of meat, mix in a bowl large enough to hold all the meat:

• 1 teaspoon Five Spice powder
• 1 clove of garlic, minced/crushed
• 1 inch of fresh ginger, grated
• 1 teaspoon of sesame oil
• 2 Tablespoons of dry sherry (if you use cooking sherry, it’ll be salty, so you may wish to cut down the amount of soy sauce to compensate)
• 2 Tablespoons of soy sauce
• (optional) drizzle of hot (sesame or other) oil, to taste
• (optional) 1 Tablespoon of minced green onion/chives (these do taste differently, so experiment)

Procedure:

1. Mix all Five Spice marinade together in the bowl. Dump in meat. Toss thoroughly (I use my hands, but if that’s too squicky, that’s okay).
2. Marinate (refrigerated) the meat for at least 20 minutes. Overnight is okay, but the marination may in fact taste pretty strongly if you do marinate overnight. I’d experiment to find out what I liked.
3. To cook: Dump contents of entire marination bowl into a large coverable frying pan, or, if too large, cook in batches. The point is to cook meat in a proportional amount of marination sauce.
4. Cover and heat (medium to high). This is very fuzzy, but the aim is to steam the mixture in its own juices for a while, then take the cover off and simmer until the juices reduce. If the juices reduce too far, add water. You don’t want to cook the stuff dry, but always cook in some liquid. Cook the meat this way until it’s done. If it’s hearts, just stir it around. If it’s chicken thighs or larger pieces like pork chops, be sure to turn them every few minutes.
5. My dad and I traditionally slice off a piece or take a piece of the cooking meats out of the mixture to slice it up, taste it and otherwise fuss it to determine doneness, but a meat thermometer should work for most things, although I’m pretty sure hearts are too small.

1. Do not ask me for a resume without establishing a relationship with me. In this respect a cold e-mail, no matter how long and detailed it is, does not qualify as a relationship.
2. Do not become impolite if I politely refuse and ask for a more detailed job description.
3. Do not say or imply that the job might be “too senior for [me]” because I refused your initial request for a resume.

I made my first ever non-dairy “ice cream” in my ice cream maker by synthesizing a couple of recipes while also using my ice cream chemistry spreadsheet to get the proportions right.

It’s important to note that the main thickener in this recipe was the tapioca starch that’s part of the Silk Creamer product, and additional corn starch added to the recipe to get the milks to thicken. Normally this part would be played by egg yolks and done in a more conventional light custard approach, but this was to be vegan, so no eggs!

See behind the cut for my recipe (which I’m honestly publishing so I’ll remember it).

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I am beavering away today, not just with housework, but at making the tables in my favorite Ice Cream how to book (that H got me for a birthday a few birthdays ago).

There are many wonderful aspects to recommend the book, not the least of which is Chapter 9, “Chemistry of Ices”. In my quest to get off my ass and make good non-dairy ices with my ice cream maker (and older version of this one), I have, this weekend, encoded a lot of the tables into a Google Docs spreadsheet, which anyone can view.

I will happily package something like this up as an excel spreadsheet for like-curious folks, and folks interested in poking around with the spreadsheet to model how to mess about with ice creams and frozens.

Let me know if you’re interested.

I will probably add things to it as I go. I want to, as I said before, get a hydrometer/saccharometer also, which will help me with making sorbets too.

Some free advertising for CrushPad in SF. I happened to be surveying the market for quality hydrometers/saccharometers. Not for winemaking or beermaking (though aside from biochem suppliers, that’s where you have to look for them these days) but for ice cream and sorbet making. Turns out knowing the density of your mixture, especially in terms of sugar syrups, is important for making your own recipes and getting the right mouthfeel.

But I found CrushPad, which is an ultrapremium winemaking club, essentailly. You pay for your grapes (from ultrapremium vineyards), their transport, you rent space, equipment, barrels, and can monitor your fermentation remotely after the initial harvest, processing and prep. The FAQ says that the barrels go for around $6k to around $10k per barrel, which translates to about $20 - $35 per bottle.

I honestly had no idea, but having it be in SF totally makes sense.

To be clear, the concept, to me, is interesting. I don’t think I would do it, because I actually don’t like wine, but for those who do, I can totally see this being a very interesting vacation. And apparently the harvest is going on right now. Also, H says, and I think she’s right, that it would be a great thing for an IT executive type to do both from the point of view of a working-on-something-else vacation as well as from being able to have a hand in a really good corporate giftgiving type product.

Just so you know, when I’m not playing my new copy of Spore (thanks to H for giving it to me as a birthday present!), I watch these videos I recently found on YouTube videos about the Periodic Table of the Elements (by the University of Nottingham).

These videos are extremely geeky and so are the participants in the videos. They’re geek gold.

The intro video.

The entire collection.

And let me start you out with Hydrogen.

Yes, in case you’re wondering, these are the sorts of geeks I hung out with for most of my post-high school education.

Like the previous gourmand’s meme I already did.

Link to this new one’s original post.

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(via Metafilter)

The BBC is running a series of articles on statistics and on how to spot flaws in media (and other) reports of statistical findings.

I’ve read lesson 1, but not the others, but it looks hopeful. I hope they apply these to their site’s editorial standards.

I am using it now. I’ll let you know if there are any serious issues I hear about/know about.

Rendering is not what I’m used to in Firefox, but I’m not surprised nor really bothered by it.

We’ll see how it goes. For work I have to keep using IE 6 anyway, so that’s not going anywhere for a while.

But I’m not so secretly very pleased to see this development. Seems to work OK with SharePoint 2003. We’ll see how it goes.

It only works for Vista and XP right now. But the rendering engine is the same as or similar to Safari’s.

Download link.

Explanatory comic by Scott McCloud and the Google Chrome team (38 pages). (NOTE: I strongly recommend that geeks and interested protogeeks actually read this comic. It tells you a lot about how Chrome works under the hood, which is a good thing. It’s good to know how your browser actually works.)

Scott McCloud’s site, including a few issues of Zot! Online.