Letters Remain

  • Kitchen Essentials

    The LA Times‘ food writers list what kitchen items really are necessary, and which you can safely skip.

    Essentials:

    • Pestle and mortar.
    • A quality cork screw.
    • Instant-read thermometer.
    • Quality dried pasta.
    • Heavy-duty roasting pan.
    • Dutch oven.
    • Whole vanilla beans (not extract).
    • Micro-plane.
    • Larousse Gastronomique.

    Unnecessary utensils:

    • Mini food processors.
    • Most non-stick pans.
    • An expansive selection of knives.
    • Crème brûlée torches.
    • Expensive red wine vinegar (keep and use dinner party dregs).
    • Fondue sets.
    • A toaster.

    via Lifehacker

    Update: Lifehacker points to a number of additional ‘kitchen essential’ lists, adding the following to the above list of must-haves:

    • Required knives: chef’s knife, paring knife, inexpensive serrated bread knife.
    • Quality coffee.
    • Silicon oven mitts (no risk of burns when reaching into hot liquids).
    • A plastic or wooden chopping board (the difference is purely aesthetic, although plastic can be put in a dishwasher).
    • Coffee/spice grinder.
    • The semi-obvious items: a U-shaped vegetable peeler, colander, can opener, slotted spoon, heat-resistance rubber spatula, wooden spoon and a whisk.

    And these unnecessaries:

    • Bread machine (a little practice and you can bake your own perfectly well without a machine).
    • Microwave.
    • Stand mixer (whisk or cheap hand mixer will suffice).
    • Wok.

    Food processors and immersive blenders are classed as nice-to-haves.

    Tags:
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Library of Economics and Liberty

    Approaching its tenth anniversary, the Library of Economics and Liberty still continues to be the première resource for economic reference and thought. Highlights of the site include:

    Worth a bookmark, if only to direct the curious towards Russ Roberts’ introduction to ten fundamental economic ideas.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Fast Whole Wheat No-Knead Bread

    At last! After trying to modify the original no-knead bread recipe into a wholemeal alternative, my lack of culinary skills proved fatal. Now Bittman has modified it himself, coming up with the definitive whole wheat no-knead bread recipe.

    Even though it was never an issue for me, it now only needs to be left to rest for 4 hours, not 14. You will need:

    • 2 cups whole wheat flour (approx. 270g)
    • 1/2 cup whole rye flour
    • 1/2 cup coarse cornmeal
    • 1 teaspoon instant yeast
    • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
    • Oil as needed.

    The recipe asks for a standard loaf pan, but in this MSNBC video Bittman alludes to the fact that it doesn’t really matter if you want to stick to your heavy-duty round pot.

    via Lifehacker

    Lloyd Morgan

  • World Challenge ’08

    Heads up: the finalists for World Challenge ’08 have been announced.

    Now in its fourth year, World Challenge 08 is a global competition aimed at finding projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level. [The Challenge] is about championing and rewarding projects and business which really make a difference. The winner will receive a grant of USD $20 000 to put back into their project/business, and two runners up will each receive USD $10 000. One representative from each of the three finalists will be flown to The Hague, The Netherlands to attend the award ceremony in December 2008.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

    Last week in Lab Notes we were told that we shouldn’t believe what we read in scientific journals and to take headline-grabbing articles with a grain of salt. Not because they’re intrinsically false, but because if they aren’t, it’s only a matter of time before they’re replicated and corroborated.

    Lesson: if a finding is important, it will be replicated. Until it is, don’t believe it. How long might you have to wait? “The delay between the reporting of an initial positive study and subsequent publication of concurrently performed but negative results is measured in years.”

    More wisdom from the comments:”Why are we surprised? When science bumps up against profits, guess which one reigns?” Sad but true.

    via Seed

    Update: Also via Seed, The Economist picks up on the research and uses the economic theory of the winner’s curse as an analogy.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Britain, LSD and Stephen Fry

    Following Nature‘s review of Albion Dreaming—a book on the history of LSD in Britain—Mind Hacks provides us with a wealth of interesting resources on the history of LSD in the UK, including this great quote from Stephen Fry:

    I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake that only makes sense when there is some LSD swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean.

    LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry ‘Wow!’ all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Cartoon Off: Randall Munroe (xkcd) vs Farley Katz (The New Yorker)

    Farley Katz challenges Randall Munroe to a cartoon off: as expected, hilarity ensues.

    The Rules—each contender is to draw:

    • The Internet, as envisioned by the elderly.
    • String Theory.
    • 1999.
    • Your favorite animal eating your favorite food.

    In the obligatory post-contest interview:

    Cartoon Lounge: Tell us a little bit about yourself and xkcd.

    Randall Munroe: Well, I draw xkcd, a webcomic about stick figures who do math, play with staple guns, mess around on the Internet, and have lots of sex. It’s about three-fourths autobiographical.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Biodiversity, Extinction, and the End of Evolution

    Three excellent articles from Seed Magazine:

    How We Evolve takes on the myth of  human evolution being at an end.

    Natural selection derives its power to transform from the survival of some and the demise of others, and from differential reproductive success. But we nurse our sick back to health, and mating is no longer a privilege that males beat each other senseless to secure. As a result, even the less fit get to pass on their genes. Promiscuity and sperm competition have given way to spiritual love; the fittest and the unfit are treated as equals, and equally flourish. With the advent of culture and our fine sensibilities, the assumption was, natural selection went by the board. [However,] researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

    The Trouble with Biodiversity discusses the confusion in the scientific community over why biodiversity is greatest in the tropics.

    The first response most ecologists give when asked about diversity gradients tends to emphasize the complexity of interacting pressures on diversity. But when pressed, many ecologists will admit they believe in one or at most two main causes of diversity gradients and that we are getting closer to a consensus as to what those are. The trouble is, there is no agreement among those who foresee consensus as to what the consensus will be.

    In Defense of Difference ponders what to save in this age of cultural and biological extinction.

    [The global epidemic of sameness] has no precise parameters, but wherever its shadow falls, it leaves the landscape monochromatic, monocultural, and homogeneous. Even before we’ve been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists — from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues — this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes. The fallout isn’t merely an assault to our aesthetic or even ethical values: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Are All Children Capable of Academic Success?

    Charles Murray, author of the controversial book The Bell Curve, tackles the question of whether all children are capable of academic success.

    Murray argues that IQ is the strongest influence on academic success and that some children simply aren’t equipped to excel at the highest levels, no matter how excellent the schooling they receive. The children of parents from the professional classes tend to do better academically, he proposes, because they inherit higher IQ from their parents, and because the households of professional couples are more conducive to learning.

    As the author clarifies in the comments:

    Central to [Murray’s] claims is the idea that academic achievement is largely influenced by IQ, which is largely inherited. Yet from my little knowledge in this area I find these claims appear to conflict with new psychology research, showing, for example, that self-discipline is actually more important than IQ when it comes to academic success. Other research has shown that working memory training can boost intelligence scores.

    The heritability of IQ is an interesting, if heated, topic of discussion. The Wikipedia entry is a great resource.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • On Child Prodigies and Late Bloomers

    David Galenson is famous for his theory of artistic creativity: classing artists as either Conceptualists or Experimentalists depending on whether or not their greatest achievements come at a young or old age.

    Malcolm Gladwell’s upcoming book, Outliers, is on the topic of high-achievement and in a recent New Yorker article discusses Galenson’s work on the differences between those who do their greatest work in their (relative) youth and the ‘late bloomers’.

    Prodigies […] rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research’” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.”

    But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental”.

    Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting”.

    As Kottke points out, he had a good overview of Galenson’s work which is also worth a read. Since I read that back in August, Old Masters and Young Geniuses has been on my reading list.

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan