baz.com - Brett Thomas' Blog

2 Ripe Mangoes (or papayas)
2 Ripe Avocados
2 Ripe Tomatoes
2 Limes
7 Cloves of Garlic
1 Tsp of salt
2 Tbsp of Olive Oil

Mince (or press the garlic). Juice the limes. Dice everything else. Toss it all together. The lime juice will keep the avocado from turning brown if you cover it, so you can store it covered in the fridge at least a day. Maybe more; it's never lasted long enough for me to find out.

Goes great with grilled light-fleshed fish (we're particularly fond of Ono grilled over mesquite with this). Or probably great with anything else, and I know I started out making half this much, but whatever's left over I think gets eaten with a spoon.

If you're partial to cilantro, onions or jalepeños, any (or all) of these would be great in it. Every so often, someone opines there's a little too much garlic, but I ignore that advice under my general policy that there's "no such thing as too much garlic."

UPDATE: I tried to make this and noticed I'd forgotten the olive oil from the recipe, which is important. Fixed!

Our dinner conversations often track across history, or science, or engineering, or all kinds of other interesting topics. I'd been telling the kids about Liberty Ships, and giving a description of the engine room I'd received from a friend who is very much into naval history.

Dad: "They had this massive one-cylinder engine for the whole ship."

This is not actually correct - it was me misremembering my friend talking about how big just one of the pistons was. The engine was also steam-powered, thus rendering a lot of the following conversation irrelevant as to Liberty Ships.

Blake, 9: "Was it two-stroke?" Dad: "Could've been four-stroke."
Blake: "Maybe it had a flywheel."

I tried again to explain to him that they had been designed to be very simple, and that they probably wouldn't have built an engine that required a flywheel. His return implied that it must have, then, been two-stroke, and after switching from thinking about Liberty Ships to thinking about engines, I got his point.

Dad: "Oh! You're saying it couldn't be a four-stroke engine, since you'd need a second cylinder to run the non-firing part of the cycle."
Blake, patiently: "...Or, a second-cylinder analogue. Like a flywheel."

This, it turns out, is not strictly true - the Wright Brothers' first airplane had a four-stroke, one-cylinder engine (in fact, a lightweight, powerful engine was one of their key developments). I was so pleased with the phrase "a second-cylinder analogue" being casually tossed about, though, I had to write about it. In some sense, the engine itself could be considered a "flywheel analogue" in that design, in that it stores the momentum from the firing cycle and uses it to push the piston through the other three cycles.

Copyright (C) 2008 Julian Matz; Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License

While aimlessly pointing an infrared heat sensor gun (with helpful laser sight!) around a few months ago, I discovered that Buttercup will, just like a cat, chase a laser pointer. This cemented our relationship - I'll often sit in the kitchen, working on my laptop, and she's just behind me. I figured out about eighteen months ago that she could see me, and was aware of me. If I touched her tank, she'd initially retreat, then come investigate my finger. I've wondered if she were hunting the laser dot, or chasing it - cichilds are very territorial, which is why Betsy gave her a tank to herself.

I did a little touch-up exterior painting, today. Part of that included painting the part of the back door frame I'd replaced years ago and never gotten around to coloring. Deciding that the door sticking closed would be bad, I wedged it in a half-open position for most of the afternoon. In that interim, a very large housefly got in.

This evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, the fly was buzzing up along the kitchen ceiling, noticeably loud and annoying. About fifteen minutes later, I heard odd noises coming from Buttercup's tank. I looked over to see her lunging at bubbles on the surface. "Poor fish!" I thought. "She's so bored she's pretending there's food floating on the water!"

Almost as soon as I started paying attention, she swam back down, with a fly in her mouth practically as big as she was! Seems likely she's hunting the laser dot...

I believe I have fixed that, now, and this post is intended as proof of that.

Unless we place the "post-human" point so that its mile-marker is already distant in our rear view, it is one we have not yet passed. Many of the legs Aimee proudly displays (such as the beautiful hand-carved ash set) would certainly have been possible in an earlier time. Perhaps the society that would allow her to display them is a bit newer. The true "post-human" age, however, will not arise until people begin maiming themselves on purpose to have faster legs, or cameras in their eyes - and until such actions are seen as normal.

Mr. Spence's eye will have to not just record his vision, but send it to his brain, and more, before many will choose to replace their peepers. It seems likely, that some - filmmakers, like he, perhaps - will desire this sort of change before the rest of us. Even before the technology improves, that much. Speculation on this topic hit the mainstream when Oscar Pistorius was allowed to tryout for the Olympics in 2008. Should prosthetic-legged sprinters be allowed to compete with naturally-shanked ones, the former will begin to win, and a non-zero number of the victory-at-any-cost latter will become interested in trading up.

Medical ethics - still saddled with "First, do no harm" - is unlikely to adapt to these desires, quickly. The first brave pioneers of these technologies may actually have to injure themselves in order to get surgeons to repair (and improve) them. Putting one's eye out is an unpleasant business, though possible enough to do "accidentally" - and without further accident. Self-double amputation will be more ill-starred.

These ethical concerns will obviously not stop the truly motivated (or insane) from improving their bodies, as technology eventually begins to beat evolution in feature-set. Some people already feel that truly nothing would be better than the limbs they have, now. Applying Moore's Law to the human body (and mind) will be a long-term good. The ethical tangle between here and there will be nearly as impressive as the technology we'll create. More impressive still is how quickly we'll be caught in it.

When we went up to Bear Valley a few weeks ago, I decided to do some cooking other than what I usually do. Most of my cooking is limited to stir frying (though I like to think I have a fair range on that) and grilling. I dabble in things like Mac & Cheese - once a year at Christmas - and spaghetti sauce, but mostly if I cook it, it's in the wok or on the grill.

I took one cookbook - The New Best Recipe, which Betsy refers to - not without justification - as The New Most Complicated Recipe. One of the things I was interested in trying was making my own pizza, dough and sauce included. I was a little worried by my lack of a pizza stone (a heavy, generally ceramic "stone" used to hold heat and cook a pizza, quickly), and the fact that pizza dough is a yeast-risen recipe, and I was making it at 7,000 feet for the first time.

Making the dough - the first time I've ever made any yeast-leavened dough - was very simple. The recipe provided didn't have any sugar, just flour, yeast, salt, water and olive oil. Completely winging it, I took a pizza pan and decided to pre-bake the crust a bit before I put the toppings on it, so the oven heat would have time to cook the crust first. I then pulled out the crust after six minutes (the cookbook recommended 6-12 to cook the whole pizza with a stone), topped it, and put it back in the oven. I was a bit nervous when the cheese melted and started to bubble, but the crust was still flour-white after six minutes. However, finally, after another six or so, for a total cooking time of about 18 minutes, the crust browned a little, and I pulled it out. The result was crispy and chewy, and very popular.

When we got back, I started researching how the whole "pizza stone" thing worked. You need a stone (obviously), and a pizza peel. The stones are generally available for tens of dollars at cooking supply stores, and the pizza peels have similar prices. My first thought was that the peel was simply wood - and I had a shop full of that, so I resolved to make my own. I then further read that it is possible to purchase an unglazed paving stone at Home Depot for $.99 (I found one for $.97, on sale).

Saturday, I cleaned out the shop and made the pizza peel. I made it with the last birch scraps from Blake's table - my first woodworking project. As soon as I cut into it, the smell of the sawdust really took me back. I also used as a template for the curve on the leading edge the template I used for Derek's bed. The peel itself was pretty straightforward to make, and I chose a handle length I liked (longish) to make getting it out of the oven easier.

Sunday was pizza night, and all the work finally came to fruition. I heated the stone (getting to 550 took a little more than an hour) and stretched out the dough. Cornmeal scattered on the pizza peel, I topped it with sauce, cheese, and pepperoni:

...and, onto the stone it went:

I was astonished at how quickly it cooked compared to my experience in Bear Valley. Six minutes later, the crust was brown and the toppings done:

Using the pizza peel to take the pizza off the stone took a little learning - you need to get the peel about half under the pizza, pick it up, bring it out, and slide the pizza onto the peel.

I was very happy with the result. If you're not making your own peel every time, the dough and sauce are easy to make. Pizza is a mature technology - I'm sure any recipe you find for sauce and dough are a reasonable jumping-off point.

In an otherwise unremarkable review of three mysteries, Ron Rosenbaum notes that, while he loved David Foster Wallace's "cruise ship tour de force," [sic, I note, self-righteously] he was "infinitely" dissappointed in Infinite Jest.

We share in common a great love of Wallace's nonfiction. Everything and More was an excellent book, marrying great literature, math, and history into a unique work. I read it on a foggy weekend-away vacation while the inlaws watched the kids and my wife and I hung out in a hotel in Half Moon Bay, and I remember both the vacation and book as being extremely pleasant.

Infinite Jest was the first item of his I read, and it was a great joy to me to go back and read his nonfiction, after, and see him develop his voice. Perhaps, also, I have a personal connection with the novel - my late step brother was a near-tennis pro who got so involved in drugs and alcohol that they ended his life. It was hard not to see family and friends (and myself) in many of the characters, and the unfolding of the story was masterful. Wallace had as throw-away side plots devices that most authors would base a whole novel on, and Infinite Jest has to rank for me as one of the most satisfying, frustrating, funniest and unpredictable books I've ever read.

His essays, in general, I found to be slightly less than his final (I presume) novel. While they were enjoyable, I think they had a certain easy elitism to them. "Ticket to the Fair," in which he attends the Illinois State Fair, is funny, but has many cheap laughs at the expense of uncultured flyover-state denizens.

Far and away the worst example of these, though, is "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," the aforementioned tour de force about taking a cruise. In this, a boorish Wallace takes a cruise on the Zenith. He decides beforehand to take no companions, eschews shore leave, and packs a tuxedo t-shirt for formal night. Surprisingly, he finds cruises to boring.

I am of course, obligated to note that I'm not much for cruises themselves, either. My wife and I took one to Alaska some years ago, and we had a lot of fun - but mostly by avoiding the cruise ship itself as much as possible, and spending the time we were aboard reading and watching Alaskan scenery pass by our cabin's balcony. Making fun of cruise ships as being uncultured is like...well, making fun of state fairs. Anyone can do it. I suppose I can understand complaining that Infinite Jest is full of "derivative, post-Pynchon, oh-so-tiring tricks." I just can't understand the same pen celebrating an essay that rechristens the Zenith the sophomorically obvious Nadir.

As I was getting ready for bed, tonight, I thought to stick my head outside and see if it was clear. To my surprise, it was! I knew Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3) was naked-eye visible, if you lived in a dark place, and near Saturn, so easy to find.

I looked up its location, and discovered it was practically in conjunction with Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, the lion. Combined with the close proximity to Saturn, it was very easy to find the place to look, so I grabbed my binoculars. Even in my light-polluted skies, it was easy to see the smudge.

I then decided to break out the 100 mm refracting telescope, which, between various minor physical ailments and the cloudy Bay Area winter skies, I hadn't done in a long time. I decided at first to simply run it manually, but it was very difficult to get a good fix on it - the way the 'scope wanted to point, it was hard to lock it and look at the target at the same time.

I broke down and pulled out the battery for the telescope, got it roughly polar-aligned, and skewed it over to the location. Finally! I was able to get a very good view of the coma through a 12.5 mm eyepiece. I now understand very clearly why Messier felt compelled to make his list of "comet-like" objects so he'd not keep mistaking them for what he was hunting.

I was just vacillating between trying to take some pictures of it, and getting Derek out of bed. I know he's always wanted to see a comet. But, the perfectly clear skies suddenly filled with clouds from the west - in five minutes, it went from clear to unviewable.

Hopefully, we'll have some clear skies tomorrow, early, before too far after Derek's bedtime. It's a tough balance - every night, the comet rises in the sky, but gets further from the sun (and becomes dimmer).

I (rather randomly) began rereading The Complete Sherlock Holmes for the first time since I was about 14. I'd say the thing that surprises me most is that someone who was so elegantly able to describe the scientific method was such a nitwit when it came to actual science. Obviously, I'd known the latter, but I'd forgotten the former.

Megan McArdle pithily sums up what so many seem to be avoiding thinking about:

[T]he actual empirical evidence that massive government spending can shock an economy the size of ours into a permanently higher level of output is . . . well, it's sort of hard to find a wittily apt description of something that doesn't really exist.

There's a lot of solid Keynesian theory that says it will be so. But not that long ago we had a lot of pretty good theories from very smart economists about how this sort of financial crisis couldn't really happen again in the first place.

It's like using a geocentric theory to predict the solar orbit of a newly discovered planet. Before you can get me to pay any attention to how good your theory is at predicting this orbit, you need to explain to me why your theory was wrong about the existence of the object in the first place.

I mentally "turn off" any economist I hear talking that does not begin with something along the lines of "clearly all our theories were wrong, so we're having a lot of trouble coming up with an explanation for the current crisis that isn't just a guess." Anyone who thinks they know what caused this crisis (much less how to fix it) is simply deluding themselves. We might have an idea in twenty years - but I think there's a growing feeling (at least among the libertariany economists I tend to read) that we were wrong about thinking we understood the Great Depression, too.

I know "do nothing right now because we might make it worse" isn't going to be a popular message for politicians (or economists!) to deliver. I understand, in fact, that no one of any note is going to deliver that message. Sadly, I think it's the the best course we can chart now with the data (and theories) we have.