perfidy

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while - and proof that the internet doesn't always make you stupid. This miraculous webthingyasks you to type in an artist or song, and then recommends other artists and songs that are like it. And then it plays them for you in an audio stream. Your own personal internet radio! No longer will you need to depend on Johno for music suggestions. This will provide them automatically.

For example, I typed in "Gillian Welch" - the last thing I heard in the car on the way to work. Then it played for me:

• "Miss Being Mrs." by Loretta Lynn
• "Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again" by Nora O'Connor
• "Wayside" by Gillian again
• "When You Left" by Melissa Ferrick
• "Relax You Paranoid" by Kathleen Mock and finally
• "Loom" by Ani DeFranco

It's not just picking stuff by genre. It's really effing cool. Check it out.

[wik] Thanks to Kathy, again, for the link.

Via our beloved blogmistress Kathy and the ever-watchful Winds of Change, we learn of the Blog Safer wiki produced by Spirit of America. This is a handy resource for how to blog in places with repressive governments and restrictions on free speech. So far, several countries have been targetted for the initial launch - Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Zimbabwe. Clearly, much of the information could be more broadly applicable.

And just think, given the recent law passed here by our own freedom-loving Congress, we might make use of some of this information ourselves to avoid the jack-booted internet annoyance police. Or, just to avoid psycho stalker-type people with an itchy litigation finger.

[wik] Why do they hate our freedom?

The Ministry has passed a sort of milestone - the Top Ten Suggestive Lines in Return of the Jedi post was our 3000th. It somehow seems appropriate.

[wik] Sometime ago, we also passed the 10,000 comment line. Of course, most of those comments are Johno and Buckethead saying, "hey, you're right!" to each other.

10. "Rise, my friend."

9. "Open the back door!"

8. "Hey, point that thing somewhere else!"

7. "It's just a dead animal..."

6. "Not bad for a little furball."

5. "How can they be jamming us if they don't know we're coming?"

4. "Come here, I won't hurt you. You want something to eat?"

3. "Keep on that one, I'll take these two"

2. "I want you to take her. I mean it, take her!"

1. "I don't think the Empire had wookies in mind when they designed her, Chewie."

If you feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer, its stomach will explode. The same thing will happen if you feed it dynamite.

It's not every day you read about a significant breakthrough in rocket propulsion -- in this case a fourfold improvement in the exit velocity of ions for an ion (electric) space drive. That's cool 'cause it's directly proportional -- a 4x increase in overall efficiency. This one's called the DS4G -- they have four "grids" that are used to accelerate the ions. I hereby patent the DS8G and the DS16G. You losers can have the other ones -- they're impossible (like 5 minute abs).

Check out the Aero-News Net story that I found on it; I suppose it'll show up elsewhere soon. But the fun doesn't end there!

Sometimes scientists take embarrassing pictures of themselves and put them on the web, and sometimes the universities pull those pages down before the public can see them. And then sometimes google caches them for us, and sometimes smirky tech dudes grab the page and save them to preserve the moments. Read the last week's test report from the DS4G team, and amuse yourself with images of science victories!

And seriously...congratulations to the technical team and the theory guys who make it all possible. Space is cool.

• 10. "And I thought they smelled bad...on the outside!"
• 9. "Possible he came in through the south entrance."
• 8. "I must've hit it pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh kid?"
• 7. "Hurry up, golden-rod..."
• 6. "That's okay, I'd like to keep it on manual control for a while."
• 5. "But now we must eat. Cum, good food, cummm..."
• 4. "Control, control! You must learn control!"
• 3. "There's an awful lot of moisture in here."
• 2. "Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?"
• 1. "I thought that hairy beast would be the end of me!"

Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music, but stop entirely when they hear R. Kelly.

10. "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

9. "Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!"

8. "Look at the size of that thing!"

7. "Sorry about the mess..."

6. "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought."

5. "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"

4. "You've got something jammed in here real good."

3. "Put that thing away before you get us all killed!"

2. "Luke, at that speed do you think you'll be able to pull out in time?"

1. "Get in there you big furry oaf, I don't care what you smell!"

Snakes enjoy treadmills, despite their total lack of feet.

Send a message to your future self. Go to FutureMe and send warnings, exhortations, admonitions, or flattery to the you of the future.

Because, "memories are less accurate than emails."

What they really need to develop is PastMe.org, so I can send email to the me of the past. Some timely stock tips, career advice, and warnings of the dangers of psycho hosebeasts from Hell would have come in very handy indeed over the years.

For those who are not like Ross, steeped in the ancient lore of electronic music, the byzantine relationships and convoluted structure of the movement are baffling. Here, then, is a map of electronic music:

To play with the interactive map, go here.

From Buckethead's secret stash of interweb goodness, this exciting home science project you can accomplish with only a minimal investment of time, skill, or kindness:

The moon is a planet just like Earth, only deader.

Although I'm a couple days late in posting it, just in time for Orthodox Christmas (which happens on the twelfth day of Christmas (this year December 6), which is widely held to be the day that the Three Wise Guys found the manger with the baby Jebus) comes the 73rd Carnival of the Recipes. It's fashioned in an Orthodox Christmas theme, and if you too are a lapsed Methodist with no experience with our Eastern bretheren, the linked carnival will be both appetizing and educational.

Piroshi!

Loyal Reader EDog will be hearing from the Perfidian Coalition of Really Unpleasant and Evil Lawyers (P-CRUEL). He emails me with word that last week, President Bush signed into law a bill making it a felony to annoy anyone via the internets or e-mail. The nugget in question merely extends an older law against harassing telephone calls, but it was attached by my friend and yours Arlen Specter to the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act," which hadda pass because, you know, it'd be terrible to vote against a bill that will stop all violence against women forever. And what Senator hates justice? (All of them, it turns out, as long as you frame the question appropriately.)

I'd love to see this enforced. I'm incensed on a regular basis by Powerline, Atrios, spammers, Instapundit, Emperor Misha, Kos, RedState, the New York Times, The Washington Times, mimes, and our own Buckethead, and they all must be stopped using the full weight of the long arm of the law. Which in this case looks more like a big swingin' wang.

So, thanks to Edog, whose email caught me at the low ebb of my blood sugar and was therefore, in fact, deeply annoying. Start stuffing cartons of Marlboros up your fundament, Edog. Them's currency where you're going.

[wik] I have to admit. I wrote this post for two reasons only: to rag on Edog a little, and for an excuse to use the word "wang," which I find inexplicably hilarious.

The truth of the matter is, naturally, far more modest than the linked column above will have you understand. The redoubtable (which means formidable, not "twice doubtable") Orin Kerr makes a strong case that the act in question doesn't do much we need to care about - "speech" is only restricted when it would contravene the First Amendment anyway. It seems like this was merely (merely, ha!) a move to make existing telephone harassment laws apply to the internet and especially to VoIP. The wild west is becoming more like a theme park by the day.

The Ministry cordially extends its congratulations to Perfidious crony "NDR" of Rhine River, who has won an actual award for his weblog! In meatspace! From real people he met!

At the AHA meetings this year, a special panel on history-blogging named his series, "The Geographical Turn" the Best Series of Posts of 2005.

"The judges thought that, of the nominations, this was the best example of historical scholarship. It was a well-written, thoughtful and accessible essay about an important historiographical movement that may be unfamiliar to many non-specialist readers, while for academic historians it discussed a less familiar aspect of a well-known subject. As such, it represented an excellent example of the uses historians can make of blogs both to explore their ideas and to increase understanding of the past and of the discipline of history."

Damn straight. It's true that NDR is a stone badass (a self-deprecating, disarmingly modest and amicable stone-cold badass), and it is good to see him get a modicum of recognition for this.

Moreover, NDR and his lovely wife are expecting their first child. 2006 is looking like one fantastic year. Mazel tov and best wishes!

Christian Fundies remain entirely confident in their assertions that the world has only been around a few thousand years, that it was "intelligently designed" recently, and that the end of the whole darn thing is just around the next corner anyway. One of the unemployed corners of my mind started looking for an explanation that could just bring us all together, let us all get along.

God seems to have gone to an awful lot of trouble to convince us that the world is billions of years old. There's all that "evidence" around, like rocks that are zillions of years old, sharks, monkeys that play checkers (but can't read bibles), and space junk like stars and whatever. But what if there are two universes? The first one has been around forever, like science and mathematics and logic tell us. The second one, this one, is a photocopy Of the first one, made just a couple of thousand years ago. Presto! No confusing lack of unity. It's not intelligent design. It's intelligent photocopying.

Just praise God that He wasn't a little drunk on that day, wearing stretchy pants, and in the mood for a little juvenile hijinks. Oh wait. Maybe that does explain the moon. Huh.

It is not commonly known that owls have mouse breath.

Brew #6

Hey, Porter! Porter

I loved the porter I made the last time, but it could be improved upon. For that one, I used Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops (the same as used in Sam Adams lager) and kept the profile very dry. That was really nice, but the hop nose actually only emerged after three months in the bottle after I had drunk all but two bottles.

So for this one I set out with the intention of making a slightly sweeter porter with a warmer hop profile. Then.

2 cans (6.6 lbs) John Bull pale liquid malt extract
3/4 lb 40L crystal malt
1/4 lb 60L crystal malt
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
1 smack pack Wyeast 1028, British Ale yeast
1 oz Perle hops (6.7% AAU), bittering
1 oz Fuggles hops (4.2%), aroma

Made my starter wort for the smack pack on Wednesday, using a small jar of sterilized wort from EasyYeast. It was completely done fermenting and fully settled out in 18 hours flat, which was bad because I wasn't brewing until Saturday. So, we'll see from the start if this works.

Steeped grains for 1 hour at 160 degrees in 3/4 gallons water. Boiled 2.75 gallons water and sparged specialty grain bag in the larger volume of water. Added malt syurp. Added bittering hops.

At 50 minutes, added aroma hops.

Cooled the wort in ice bath plus a frozen soda bottle right in the wort. Took 15 minutes from 212 to 85 degrees. Sweet!

Pitched yeast at 67 degrees. The starter wort was a little warmer than that, since the room was so warm. They say ("they" say) that starter worts can sit for 1 or 2 days after fermentation. I'm pushing it on two fronts. Again, I hope I didn't shock or kill my yeast. If I did, I don't have a backup except for a pack of Windsor, which is really not appropriate for this beer. So, fingers crossed. I hope this will be a little maltier, just a tad heavier, and with the 1028 yeast and Fuggles, a little more warmth in the flavor and aroma. If it works; nummies.

[wik] Hey! It lives! I had to leave my fermenting bucket in the warm apartment overnight, but this afternoon it began bubbling. So that's nice. Looks like I'll be sharing the dining room with five gallons of nascent beer for the next week or so. I'll get the air mattress.

[alsø wik] ....aaand we're delicious! As of March 10, I've got a very nice and complex porter with a faint roasted edge, plenty of body and moderate sweetness, and the complicated spiciness of just enough Fuggles. I really like the Perle hops on the back end, too. They are sort of light and spicy, not at all cloying. Nice! Next time I could probably stand to add even more caramel malt, maybe something in the 90-120L range, and a pound of dry extract in order to make a bigger beer. What would be totally boss would be to use a few ounces of biscuit or Victory malt, if I can get away with steeping them. The bready flavor seems to be in vogue, and I do dig it. I love the London Ale Yeast with this one too. Adding more stuff to this beer will also differentiate this porter from my other one, which is drier, lighter, and uses Hallertau Mittelfreuh for flavor and aroma.

[alsø alsø wik] One thing that has emerged over time (now after about 4 months in the bottle) is a slightly too-strong burned flavor. If I back off next time on the black malt, back to 2 ounces, I think I could keep everything else pretty much the same and hit the mark perfectly. That's the ticket.

One of the awful tragedies of history is that it's always in the past. I'm not being glib. Once it's gone, it's gone.

The Library of Congress has a remarkable exhibition now of color photographs taken in the World War II era of life in the United States. Go look. Here's the main page. It is a time we usually see in black and white, and no matter how good it looks, it is still black and white and therefore just a little too alien for us to perfectly connect with. I guarantee you that at least one of these images will change that.

I fear death and I loathe the perpetual lostness of the past. Sometimes it is a small miracle to through some means - a diary, a photo, a painting - to connect with another person, another time, that is perfectly comprehensible for being human, but enticingly alien as well.

Like the atom, the flyswatter can be a force for great good or great evil.

Have a hankering to know the level of freedom in your neck of the woods? Just look at this nifty web map thingy from Freedom House and divine the answer instantly.

It occurred to me and a coworker that it would be an amusing tshirt exercise to combine the slogan of the great state of New Hampshire with the languages of the bottom ranks of Freedom House's annual survey. Arabic accounts for a full third of the nations, though Chinese wins on numbers. Korean, of course, wins on pure mean. You could put a nice big American flag on the back.

I think I shall have to exercise my mad photoshop skills. Any readers willing to translate the phrase "Live Free or Die!" into Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, Burmese, Lao, Vietnamese, Uzbek and Turkman, please contact me.

Juxtaposed headlines from the Drudge Report:

PAT ROBERTSON: STROKE MAY BE GOD'S PUNISHMENT...

IRAN PRESIDENT HOPES FOR SHARON'S DEATH

I didn't have the heart to read either article. It is a cruel fate indeed that strikes down every peacemaker that Israel makes Prime Minister, while loathsome criminals survive for decades living off the fear, credulity and hatred they inculcate in their nations.

Of the President of Iran, I expected no more - for someone who has both denied and praised the holocaust, wishing for the death of a single Jew (however prominent) ranks almost as loving kindness.

But I dearly wish to travel to wherever Pat Robertson is lurking, and beat the ever-loving crap out of his sorry, putrid carcass. Either everything is God's punishment - everything - or else it is the ineffable work of a loving God who wishes nothing but our salvation through means that we will by no means comprehend fully. Robertson is either hopelessly banal or tragically wrong.

Or knowing him and his works, he has managed to be both.

I supposed it's not such a fine line between going out in grand epic style and bleeding to death because you comically screwed up your own suicide, but a Belmont, NH man achieved just that nonetheless.

From the Mancheste rUnion-Leader:

With common items such as concrete blocks, a saw blade, bare wires and gasoline, a despondent David Moore devised systems that would first kill him and then turn his home into a funeral pyre.

Neither worked as planned.

On Monday, Belmont police discovered Moore dead in his bedroom, some 20 feet away from a homemade guillotine he had built in his living room. He had gone as far as bolting tracks of metal piping to a ceiling beam to guide the blade, authorities said.

Flawless it was not.

Upon entering Moore’s home, police found dried blood throughout the living room. Moore’s body had a deep gash to the back of the neck, said New Hampshire State Police Sgt. Andrew Parsons, the commander of the state police bomb squad.

The badly wounded Moore had crawled or staggered from his guillotine to his bedroom to die, Parsons said.

Police also discovered hard-wired Molotov cocktails that had never detonated at the 10 Silkwood Ave. home.

Belmont police called in the bomb squad when they found eight to 10 plastic water bottles stuffed into holes punched into the living room wall. All held a couple ounces of gasoline. All were wired to two electrical timers and a power strip.

But the strip’s switch was in the off position.

All kidding aside, imagine for a moment not dying in a flash but instead groaning in agony as you drag yourself bleeding through your house, having managed to cut your own head halfway off. What a sad way to go.

Via J-walk. I had to go be alone for a few minutes to settle down after this one.

Most States fit so closely together that almost no space is wasted.

One of those American Voices bits, where they recycle the same six pictures giving opinions on different subjects. The topic: A planet-killer asteroid may hit the earth in 2036. What do you think?

The best response, well, possibly ever: "This sounds like something that would have to be co-managed by NASA and FEMA. God help us all."

You know who should totally run for President?

Oprah freaking Winfrey.

Think about it.

Speaking of hardened little cans of sad, faded powders languishing in the backs of spice cabinets, you know what's fun? I have a little collection of community cookbooks from various places I've lived and where I grew up, and they are a hoot. Entire books have been written about these tomes, charting the rise and fall of rise of canned mushroom soup, Cheez-whiz, Velveeta, pesto, and enough ground beef to kill an army. But what really gets me going is the spices.

Almost all these books contain a recipe much like this:

Chili Con Carne With Hamburger

2 lbs ground beef, browned and drained
1/2 a small onion, diced
1/2 a small bell pepper, diced (optional)
1 can kidney beans
1 can diced stewed tomatoes
1 tsp salt
pinch black pepper
1/4 tsp chili powder

Combine all ingredients in a pot and simmer for one hour. Serves 4-6.

Although I'm paraphrasing from memory, I'm not kidding. 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder - or as much as a whole teaspoon for the incurably bold - in a "chili" meant for six people. Let us take a moment to laugh at the rubeness of our past! Haw! Older cookbooks treat spices as practically nuclear, calling for a "pinch" of cayenne or a 1/2 teaspoon of curry powder in a giant pot of "Curry Surprise," and that never ceases to charm me.

Today, it's fats, with perfectly good recipes practically ruined by replacing fat - any fat! all fat!! - willy nilly with water. Water, not being a fat, is incapable of dissolving fat-soluble flavors, thereby making eating these recipes an exercise in self-abnegation rather than absorption. They may taste perfectly okay, but I guaran-damn-tee you that adding a nice half teaspoon of fat per serving (one half of one teaspoon!) it would taste a damn sight better.

Similarly, sugar is now evil, evil, evil. And while, yes, unrefined sugar in immoderate amounts such as may Americans eat is really very much not good for you, let's be real. Sugar is also food, and it tastes good. And if you're supposed to cut back, cut back! Why go halfway with such disappointing half-measures as those little blue and pink packets of lowered expectations they give you at restaurants? I prefer Diet Coke to the real thing because I don't really care for incredibly sweet things, but I'm not fooling myself into thinking that Diet Coke tastes like anything but a miracle of modern chemistry. On the same note, I recently had the misfortune to try cookies made with Splenda, a noncaloric sugar substitute made by swapping out one hydrocarbon on sucrose for three chlorine atoms, making it undigestible and noncaloric. Splenda behaves like sugar chemically in every way in recipes and on the tongue, except that it is perfectly indigestible. At least that's the claim. Well, let me tell you, Splenda might be made from sugar, it might behave like sugar, but no sugar I've ever had tasted faintly bitter and made the center of my tongue go numb. A cookie made with Splenda is like a handjob from a hot chick with hands of fine-grit sandpaper.

There is no content or structure to this rant except to lament once again that some folks just don't know what good food is.

End transmission.

Brad DeLong writes:

A Theory About Cinnamon and Recipes

It strikes me that most of the standard recipes come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the relative price of cinnamon was much higher than it is today. Thus it seems likely that most such inherited recipes economize on cinnamon to what is now an undue degree.

Proposal: triple the cinnamon in everything I cook for the next three months.

I will report back.

DeLong is an economist, and his theory makes sense only as long as you accept his givens as true. In this case, DeLong takes it as a given that the strength and quality of cinnamon has remained constant as its price has fluctuated. In truth, cinammon of a hundred years ago is completely different from cinnamon today.

True cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka and environs, and has been a popular cooking spice since antiquity. It features heavily in the cuisines of the Middle East and India, and all the cookbooks I have from along the silk road contain at least a few classic recipes requiring the spice. Indeed, one of my favorite cookbooks, Lynn Rosetto Kaspar's The Splendid Table includes many stunning savory Medieval dishes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, many of which feature stunning quantities of cinnamon as well at nutmeg, a cooking tradition adapted from Arab traditions. Cinnamon was (of course) a mark of wealth, and the amounts called for reveal these recipes as feast dishes for the upper class, not regular home cooking for paisanos.

But here's the rub. The cinnamon we use today is far more likely to be cassia, the bark of a tree that tastes similar to cinnamon but comes from Mexico, among other places. Two things to note: cassia's flavor is far less intense than true cinnamon's and lacks the other's warmth and depth; and cassia is far, far cheaper than the real thing. Hence, DeLong is mistaking what's at work here. In reality, he is seeing the transition from cinnamon to cassia as the dominant player in American cooking, with the concomitant drop in price and rise in volume required to flavor our food.

If you can find some true Vietnamese cinnamon (I order it special from a spice distributor), do the following: bake two batches of sugar cookies,one batch containing Vietnamese cinnamon and the other an equal amount of supermarket-brand "cinnamon." Unless your supermarket is really going for the gold, the "true" cinnamon cookies will have much more cinnamon flavor than the others. Also, as with other ground spices, you should only keep on hand what you plan to use in the next six months or so. Like coffee, ground spices oxidize over time and lose their flavor. If you, like I, have a parent or in-law with a cabinet full of curry powder and giant plastic containers of cinnamon purchased in the early 1980s, do them a favor the next time you're home and throw them out on the sly.

(By the way, the cinnamon sticks available in the USA are all cassia, and should not be ground for use as ground cinnamon. This is the only instance in which grinding your own spices fresh is not recommeneded. The bark of the cassia tree contains varying amounts of flavor depending on where it comes from, and by definintion cinnamon sticks are losers for two reasons: they are most likely to contain fewer essential oils overall; and the flavor will vary depending on which of the bark's layers are ground - with sticks you're getting a lot of just plain sawdust. Not that they don't have their uses, mind, but only as stirrers for your cider drink.)

For the interested, here is a wikipedia entry on cinnamon.

For the really interested, buy On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, a fascinating and comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia of food, chemistry, and techniques. His discussion of the chemical compounds characteristic of various herbs and spices (e.g. cinammon's flavor deriving in part from cinnamaldehyde and also from small amounts of linalool (lily fragrance) and eugenol (clove), among others) makes creative mixing of flavors easy - just find spices containing complementary compounds and go to town! If you're a geek, that is.

Either way, good luck to Brad DeLong. Although his premises may be wrong, bumping up the "cinnamon" in his recipes will make them more as the writers intended. However, caution is warranted. Too much cinnamon can be unpalatably bitter and harsh tasting, and can have emetic properties besides. I know the former is true for cassia as well, and I really don't care to hear about experiments with the latter.